Fasts That Moved God

And so by now we have moved on to examples, so that by showing what this duty actually accomplishes we may unfold the powers of a thing that reconciles God to man even when God is angry. [a]

Israel had sinned before Samuel gathered them at Mizpah for the drawing of the water. But they washed the sin away by a fast so promptly that the danger of battle was scattered at the same moment, poured out along with the water on the ground. Samuel was in the very act of offering the whole burnt offering — and nothing we are told of won God’s kindness more than the people’s going without food — and the foreigners were coming on to the attack, when then and there “the Lord thundered with a mighty voice upon the foreigners, and they were thrown into confusion and fell in a heap in the sight of Israel; and the men of Israel went out of Mizpah and pursued the foreigners and struck them as far as Bethor” — the unfed chasing the fed, the unarmed the armed. That is the strength of people who “fast to God.” Heaven fights for men like that. Here is a condition on which God’s protection is granted, and it is needed even in wars of the spirit.

In the same way, when Sennacherib king of the Assyrians had already taken several cities and was firing off blasphemies and threats against Israel through the Rabshakeh, nothing but fasting turned him aside from what he intended and sent him off into Ethiopia. And afterward, what swept a hundred and eighty-four thousand men out of his army by the hand of the angel, if not the humbling of King Hezekiah? For that is what he did: when he heard the report of how harsh the enemy was, he tore his clothes, put on sackcloth, and told the senior priests to dress the same way and go to God through Isaiah — with fasting, of course, walking beside their prayers as their escort. Danger has no time for food, and sackcloth takes no interest in the refinements of a full stomach. Hunger always attends mourning, just as cheerfulness goes along with a full table.

By that attendant of mourning, by that hunger, even a place as sinful as Nineveh was set free from the ruin that had been announced. Repentance for their sins had recommended the fast well enough: they kept it up for three days and starved out even the cattle, with whom God was not angry. Sodom and Gomorrah too would have got away if they had fasted. Even Ahab acknowledges this remedy. After his lawbreaking and his idol worship and the killing of Naboth — whom Jezebel put to death over his vineyard — Elijah rebuked him: “How is it that you have killed and taken possession of the inheritance? In the place where dogs licked up Naboth’s blood, they will lick up yours as well.” And Ahab let himself go: he put sackcloth on his body, fasted, and slept in the sackcloth. And then the word of the Lord came to Elijah: “You have seen how Ahab has shrunk back in awe from my face. Because he has shrunk back in awe, I will not bring the harm on him in his own days; but in his son’s days I will bring it on him.” His son, that is, who was not going to fast. So a fast made toward God is a work of awe. And by the same means Hannah, the wife of Elkanah, barren as she had been until then, made her request and easily got from God what she asked: her belly, empty of food, filled with a son — and a prophet at that.

And it is not only a change of nature, or the turning aside of dangers, or the wiping out of sins. Fasts will earn from God the recognition of mysteries as well. Look at Daniel’s case. All the wise men are at a loss over the dream of the king of Babylon; they insist that without help from outside no human skill can find it out. Daniel alone trusts God, and, knowing what would earn God’s favor, asks for three days, fasts with his brothers, and — his prayers recommended in that way — is instructed from beginning to end in the order and the meaning of the dream. The tyrant’s wise men are spared; God is glorified; Daniel is honored. And he was to receive a favor from God no smaller later on, in the first year of King Darius, when after careful and repeated thought about the times Jeremiah had foretold he set his face toward God in fasting and sackcloth and ashes. For the angel sent to him said outright that this was the reason God approved of him: “I have come to show you, since you are pitiable.” Pitiable by fasting, that is. And if to God he was pitiable, to the lions in the den he was formidable, where after six days of fasting an angel brought him breakfast.

We bring forward the rest of our evidence too, hurrying on now to more recent proofs. Right at the threshold of the Gospel stands Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, “who both recognized the infant Lord and said many things about him to those who were waiting for the redemption of Israel.” On top of the great distinction of a long widowhood with only one husband behind it, she is given the further credit of “fastings” as well. She points out what the duties are that ought to mark those who attend on the church, and she points out too that nobody understands Christ better than a person married once and fasting often. [j]

Then the Lord himself consecrated his own baptism by fasting — and in his own, everyone’s. He had it in his power to make “loaves out of stones,” or, say, to make the Jordan run with wine, if he had really been the “glutton and drinker” they called him. On the contrary: by the strength of holding food in contempt he was initiating the new man into a hard handling of the old, so as to show the devil — who came back to tempt him by way of food — that the new man was more than a match for everything hunger can do.

After that he laid down a law for fasts: they are to be kept “without sadness.” Why should a thing that does you good be sad? He taught as well that fasts are the weapons for fighting the worse sort of demons. And what is surprising in that? Why should the same act not serve as the way out for the wicked spirit and the way in for the Holy Spirit? Finally, granted that the honorable gift of the Holy Spirit, and the gift of prophecy with it, came down in a hurry on Cornelius the centurion even before his baptism, we can see that his fasts had been heard. And I think the apostle too, in the second letter to the Corinthians, lists “fasts, many of them,” among his labors and dangers and hardships, right after “hunger and thirst.”

This chief kind of restraint in eating may already settle the case in advance for the lesser workings of abstinence as well: they too, each in its own measure, are useful or necessary. For leaving certain kinds of food out of use is a partial fast. So let us look into the question of whether dry-food fasts are a novelty or a waste of effort, and see whether here too we do not find at work a religion as ancient as it is effective. I go back to Daniel and his brothers, who preferred a diet of vegetables and a drink of water to the royal dishes and decanters, and who were found better-looking for it — nobody, then, need be anxious about his poor body — and were cultivated in spirit into the bargain. For God gave the young men knowledge and understanding in every kind of literature, and gave Daniel understanding in every word, and in dreams, and in every kind of wisdom: a wisdom that was to make him wise in this very thing as well, namely by what means the recognition of mysteries is to be had from God. [o]

And so, in the third year of Cyrus king of the Persians, when he had fallen into careful and repeated thought over a vision, he provided himself with another form of humbling. “In those days I, Daniel, was mourning for three weeks. I ate no pleasant bread; meat and wine did not come into my mouth; I did not anoint myself with oil, until the three weeks were finished.” And when they had gone by, an angel was sent out to him and addressed him in this way: “Daniel, you are a man to be pitied. Do not be afraid. From the first day you gave your soul over to thinking things through and to humbling yourself before God, your word has been heard, and I have come in answer to your word.” So the pitiable sight and the humbling that goes with dry-food fasts drive out fear, catch God’s ears, and make men masters of secrets.

I go back to Elijah as well. The ravens used to satisfy him with “bread and meat.” Why then, later on, at Beersheba in Judea, did that particular angel wake him from sleep and offer him — beyond question — bread only, and water? Were there no ravens left to feed him more generously? Or would it have been hard for the angel to carry off some servant with his well-loaded tray from a larder of the king’s dining room and set him down in front of Elijah, the way the reapers’ breakfast was carried into the lions’ den and set before Daniel when he was hungry? No: an example had to be set, teaching us that in a time of pressure and persecution, and in whatever difficulty, we are to live on dry food. It was on food like that that David made his own open confession, “eating ashes for bread” — that is, bread dry and foul as ashes — and “mixing his drink with weeping,” instead of wine, of course.

Abstinence from wine, in fact, has honorable badges of its own. It was abstinence that dedicated Samuel and consecrated Aaron to God. Of Samuel his mother said, “And wine and anything intoxicating he shall not drink,” which was her own condition too while she was praying to God. And the Lord said to Aaron, “Wine and strong drink you shall not drink, you and your son after you, whenever you go into the tabernacle or go up to the altar of sacrifice; and you shall not die.” So it is true that people who have served in the church and are not sober will “die.” And in more recent times he reproaches Israel in the same way: “And you used to give my holy ones wine to drink.” This limit on drinking, moreover, belongs to the dry-food fast. In any case, wherever abstinence from wine is either required by God or vowed by a man, a restriction on food is to be understood along with it, setting the pattern in advance for the drink; for the drink matches the eating in kind. It is not likely that a man sacrifices half his appetite to God — temperate in what he drinks and intemperate in what he eats.

As for whether the apostle knew anything of dry-food fasts — the man who had gone through harder things again and again, “hunger and thirst, and fasts, many of them,” and who had forbidden “drunkenness and carousing” — we have evidence enough in the case of his disciple Timothy. He advises Timothy, “for the sake of his stomach and his constant weaknesses,” to use “a little wine.” Timothy was abstaining from it not because a rule required it but out of devotion; otherwise the habit would rather have been doing his stomach good. And by that very fact he has recommended abstinence from wine as worthy of God, at the same time as he has talked a man out of it on a ground of necessity.

They find fault with our Stations in the same way, on the count of novelty, because they are laid on us as a rule; and some find fault with them for habitually being drawn out too late in the day, saying that this duty too ought to be kept by free choice and not carried on past the ninth hour — taking the rule, of course, from their own practice. Very well. As to the question of its being commanded, I will give one answer, once for all, that will do for every such case. But turning to the point that belongs to this particular case — the limit of time, I mean — I must first demand of them where they get this prescription for ending Stations at the ninth hour. If it comes from our reading that Peter and the man with him went into the temple “at the ninth hour, the hour of prayer,” who will prove to me that they had been keeping a Station that day, so that the ninth hour can be read as the hour for winding a Station up and being discharged from it? In fact you would more easily find that Peter, at the sixth hour, went up on the roof first to pray before taking food — which would make the sixth hour of the day the limit of this duty instead, since in his case the duty was apparently finished after the prayer. [w]

Furthermore, in Luke’s own record the third hour is shown to be an hour of prayer: it was about that hour that the men who had just received the first gift of the Holy Spirit were taken for drunks. And the sixth, at which Peter went up on the roof. And the ninth, at which they went into the temple. Why then should we not understand it this way — that, we must pray with no distinction at all — always, everywhere, at every time, and that these three hours, being the more marked ones in human affairs, the hours that divide the day, that separate one piece of business from another, that ring out in the public ear, have also always had a special solemnity in prayers to God? It is a conviction backed up by the further fact of Daniel praying three times a day: setting apart certain fixed hours, of course, and none other than the more marked ones, which afterward became the apostles’ — the third, the sixth, the ninth. And so I will go on to say that Peter too had been led to keep the ninth hour by ancient custom rather than anything else, praying at the third of those set intervals, the one for the last prayer of the day.

I have put these arguments for the sake of people who think they are acting on Peter’s model when they do not know what that model was. Not that we make light of the ninth hour: on the fourth and the sixth days of the week we honor it above all. But in matters kept on the ground of tradition we are bound to bring forward all the better a reason, precisely because they lack the authority of Scripture, until by some unmistakable gift from heaven they are either confirmed or corrected. “And if,” the apostle says, “there are matters you do not know about, the Lord will reveal them to you.” So, leaving out of the question the one who confirms all such things, the Paraclete, the guide into all truth, ask yourself whether a worthier reason for keeping the ninth hour is not put forward among us — a reason that would then have to be credited to Peter as well, if he was keeping a Station at that time. It comes from the death of the Lord. That death ought to be kept in mind always, with no difference between one hour and another; but at that hour we are more forcibly commended to the remembering of it, in keeping with what the very name Station means. Even soldiers, who never forget their military oath, pay more deference when they are on station. And so the strain is to be kept up to the hour at which the sun’s disc — wrapped from the sixth hour in a general darkness — performed a mourner’s duty for its dead Lord; so that we too may go back to enjoying ourselves at the moment when the universe got its sunlight back. And if this smells more of the spirit of Christian religion, and does more for the glory of Christ, I am just as able, out of the same run of events, to fix the terms for drawing a Station out late: namely, that we are to fast till a late hour, waiting for the time of the Lord’s burial, when Joseph took down and entombed the body he had asked for. From which it follows that it is actually irreligious for the flesh of the servants to take refreshment before their Lord did.

But it is enough to have joined battle this far on the argumentative challenge, meeting guesses with guesses — and, as I think, with guesses more worthy of a believer. Let us see whether some principle drawn from ancient times takes us under its protection.

In Exodus, was that stand of Moses’ — fighting Amalek with prayers, and holding on doggedly all the way to “sunset” — not a late Station? Do we suppose Joshua son of Nun had eaten breakfast on the day when, while beating down the Amorites, he ordered the very elements to keep a Station? The sun “stood” at Gibeon and the moon at Ajalon; the sun and the moon “stood at their station until the People had taken vengeance on its enemies, and the sun stood in the middle of heaven.” And when the sun did draw toward his setting and the end of that one day, there had been no such day before and none in the latest times — none so long, that is — “that God,” the writer says, “should listen to a man”: a man who was the sun’s equal, seeing how long he stuck to his duty. A Station longer even than late.

Saul himself, at any rate, plainly imposed this duty in the middle of a battle: “Cursed be the man who eats bread until evening, until I have taken vengeance on my enemy.” And his whole people tasted nothing — while the whole earth was eating breakfast! God backed the order that imposed that Station with so solemn a sanction that Jonathan, Saul’s son, was convicted of sin at once by lot and only just exempted from punishment through the people’s prayer, although it was in ignorance that a fast had been appointed till a late hour that he had allowed himself a taste of honey. He had been convicted of gluttony, simple as the gluttony was. And Daniel again, in the first year of King Darius, when he was fasting in sackcloth and ashes and making his open confession to God, says: “And while I was still speaking in prayer, there was the man I had seen in dreams at the beginning, flying swiftly, coming up to me about the hour of the evening sacrifice.” That will be a “late” Station — the one that fasts until evening and sacrifices a fatter prayer to God.