Feasts and Fasts
A couple of centuries before the period of the New Testament the ruler of Syria, within whose kingdom Judea was then included, inaugurated a policy of forcing Jews to assimilate to the prevailing Greek culture. King Antiochus Epiphanes forbade circumcision, the dietary laws, and compelled the eating of pork. The penalty for disobedience to this policy of assimilation was death, and despite this the Jews revolted. Two thousand years later Jews discovered that even agreeing to assimilation to prevailing culture would not save them. The Nazis considered that even Jews who were so thoroughly German they had fought for Germany in World War One, were atheists, or converted Christians, were nevertheless Jews. So they sent both assimilated and non-assimilated European Jews to the Nazi death camps until they had systematically exterminated some 6,000,000.
Over the two thousand years of Jewish life between one persecutor and the other Jews had to live in societies and cultures that were non-Jewish and to varying degrees hostile, particularly if they were Christian ones. Consequently, Jews learned to practice and pass in their faith in the God of Israel in ways that did not depend entirely on public worship, which could be shut down by the authorities. Particularly, this meant practising Judaism as a way of daily, weekly, and annual life, often centred in the local Jewish community and the home. Alongside the worship and teaching of the synagogue and its school, this domestic-centred, community-centred religion has kept Judaism alive today when both Antiochus Epiphanes and the Nazis are both history (thank God).
Fast forward to our day when, for the first time in western countries since the conversion of the emperor Constantine and the conversion of the barbarian kingdoms of northern Europe, we Christians are living in a non-Christian society. There are, thankfully, no signs of outright persecution in Australia. However, there are indications of increasing hostility towards Christianity and the Church among some progressive sections of society. Some of this the Church has brought on itself, due to paedophile priests and other abuses. In other instances, organised opposition to tax relief for Christian charities, or to traditional views of abortion, marriage, or suicide probably indicates a rockier road for Christianity in the future. Hostility doesn’t haven’t to be outright persecution to be real or restricting.
If there is anything I have learned from Jewish history it is that assimilation, the strategy of survival by trying to fit in, to become as much like wider society as possible, doesn’t work. So I ask myself, are we Anglican Christians, as equipped as Jewish believers in the one and only God to endure, survive, and to continue as a community of faith in a wider non-believing or even hostile community? I don’t think we are. Western Christianity has largely withered in many historical Churches like our own to something we only do on Sundays, at mass or public worship for an hour. We need soon, I believe, to revive our Christian faith as a way of life. Our Christian faith needs to be practised in our homes and among Christians as something more constant and distinctive than merely Sunday worship. One of the ways of doing this is through the ancient Christian practice of observing feasts and fasts.
All Anglicans know about feasts and fasts because we are a liturgical Church. We talk about ‘the feast of St . . . ‘; ‘the feast of Easter/Christmas’; ‘the Lenten fast’. But they are now almost completely churchy things, merely ways of distinguishing particular days or seasons of the Church’s year that relate to Sunday mass. But they used to be more than that, as I discovered when, as a young priest in New Zealand I befriended the two monks of a nearby Serbian Orthodox monastery. I was surprised to find that many Eastern Orthodox families kept Lent as a strict six-week fast, going without meat or oils in all meals. However, in contrast, for them Easter Day was a true feast, with special Easter food eaten all day from the end of Divine Liturgy that night. It was my first encounter with Christianity as something that directed the way you live. It was like stepping back into time, as even in western Protestant countries like England such feasts and fasts in the home were still the norm for that predominantly Christian society up to the eighteenth century.
I am not proposing that we go back to the rigours of fasting to that extent but I do want to urge that there are a number of ways in which we might make feasts and fasts part of patterning our Christian way of life today.
We should observe each Friday in some meaningful way as a day of recalling the sacrifice of our Lord on Calvary. Friday is the oldest Christian fast. Why not return to the old custom of making this a day without meat and eating fish instead? Why not also observe a ‘fast’ from consuming for one day a week - say a Sunday without shopping and instead on this day feasting on this weekly observance of the day of Resurrection by cooking Sunday lunch together with the family or with Christian friends? During Lent, six whole weeks of serious fasting might be a bridge too far for modern Anglicans; but what about Holy Week only as a week without alcohol or without meat, or both? What about returning to receiving Holy Communion fasting (it was still common when I was an altar server as a fourteen-year old boy) - our 9.00am mass doesn’t make that too difficult for most I would have thought? Having been through the genuine fast of Holy Week with our fellow Christians in the parish - that is, not treating Easter as a holiday but as the most sacred time of the Christian year - what about making Easter Day a real feast? Jill and I always did this, together cooking our most extravagant meal around the main course of (paschal) lamb, with champagne and fine wines. It was a feast for our Christian friends and thus different from the family Swedish Christmas Eve feast Jill brought to us from her time in that country.
If our Anglican Christian faith is to move towards shaping our way of living, then one of the most fundamental aspect of human life, eating and drinking, must surely be brought under the direction of our faith. It was, after all a human experience that our Lord himself highly regarded - so much so he made sure he spent a last supper with his closest companions on the night before he was executed.
October 2020