Lent is a 40-day season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends at sundown on Holy Thursday.
March 19, 2025
Has Lent trivialised asceticism?
Dear Editor,
The observance of Lent is apparently to recapture the circumstances of self-denial leading up to the horrendous miscarriage of justice and execution of Jesus.
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After his baptism by John, Jesus was led into the mountain, perhaps not a literal mountain, where he fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. (Matthew 4: 1-4) Obviously, this long absence from physical food must have exacerbated Jesus’s hunger to possibly the severest ever recorded.
It has been documented that periodic fasting carries with it several health benefits. But if feasting carries certain positive by-products, fasting, as done by Jesus, was about self-denial and nothing related to personal gain, which, in itself, would be a contradiction.
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Jesus apparently fasted so that nothing that is as comforting as food would detract from or blunt the edges of his spiritual mission. His reply to Peter at Mark 8:33 may illustrate this when he said, “Get behind me, Satan!” Obviously, the preference is to suffer self-denial than to be kind to self and thereby compromise the will of God.
Also, it cannot be that fasting in itself is good, for there were certain men in the Bible who once bound themselves with an oath and a curse not to eat any kind of food until they kill the apostle Paul. (Acts 23:12)
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To replay a period of asceticism can easily focus on the display of the symptoms without the cause. Clearly, self-denial will rightly accompany many pressing and severe decisions and deliberations which may cause a man or woman to forget to even eat food. However, certain scheduled periods of abstinence, such as Lent, could become a way of valuing the fruits while discarding the roots.
Homer Sylvester
h2sylvester@gmail.com
