[Fasting] pleases Him up to a point, as long as it is directed to an end beyond itself, namely, to prompt us to abstinence, to subject the lasciviousness of the flesh, to incense us to a desire for prayer, to testify to our repentance, whenever we are moved by the judgment of God.5
But instrumental fasting is all but impossible to find in the pages of the Bible and is rarely reflected in ancient Judaism or the rabbis.6 Instead of an instrumental approach, the genius of the Bible is its focus on the whole-body response of a human being to grievous, severe conditions. Fasting means a human being refrains from food or water, or both, for a limited period of time in response to some sacred, grievous moment. Such sacred or grievous moments include death, the threat of war, sin, our neediness, or our fear of God’s judgment. These kinds of events expose God as judge, God as the giver and taker of life, and God as the one before whom we live.
John Wesley, who himself fasted rigorously and about whom criticisms were made for his rigor, said it this way: the “natural incentive for fasting … [is for those] who are under deep affliction, overwhelmed with sorrow for sin, and filled with a strong anxiety about the wrath of God.”7 To say this once again, the focus of the Bible on fasting is not on what we get from fasting or on motivating people to fast in order to acquire something, but instead lands squarely on responding to sacred moments in life.8 Fasting enters into how God interprets, experiences, understands, and explains significant events. Fasting, in fact, enters into God’s pathos, or into what God thinks and feels about death, sin, war, violence, and injustice.
If we listen to the Bible’s Story and pay attention to the emergence of fasting, we discover three major ideas: fasting is connected to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as the Israelite prepared for confession, atonement, and forgiveness (Lev 16:29–31; 23:26–32). Fasting also includes a spontaneous response to a grievous event, as when David interceded and prayed for the healing of his enemies (Ps 35:11–16). In Isaiah 58 the prophet connects the true fast to doing justice, caring for the poor, and providing food for the hungry.
Our passage in the Sermon on the Mount draws from the custom of fasting at a specific time as well as from the spontaneous, voluntary response to a grievous moment (like David). Overall, then, fasting is how Israel responded when God’s glory was dishonored, when God’s will was thwarted, when God’s people suffered defeat, or when one of God’s people experienced sickness, tragedy, or death. God’s people, in effect then, took up the posture of God toward grievous events when they fasted.
By the time of Jesus, fasting had become a biweekly act of piety for many observant Jews. Nowhere in the Old Testament are Israelites told to fast twice a week, but by the time of Jesus fasting every Monday and Thursday was common piety:9
The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.” (Luke 18:11–12, italics added)
This biweekly fasting discipline was so ingrained that Jesus was called into question because his followers did not fast as, or when, the Pharisees did (Mark 2:18–22). In response, Jesus indicated that his disciples, though they might not be fasting while he was present, would fast in the future.10 An early Christian text (Did. 8.1) indicates that some of Jesus’ followers fasted twice a week, though they did so on Wednesday and Friday to distinguish themselves from the Jews, who fasted on Monday and Thursday. This custom of regularly scheduled, or stationary, fasting became not only a fixed feature of the church’s spiritual disciplines but the dominant mode of fasting. Examination of the history of fasting in the postapostolic church, however, reveals that the earliest impulses for stationary fasting were grieving responses to sin and human unworthiness before the Eucharist.
EXPLAIN the Story
Jesus sketches before the eyes (through graphic verbal images) and ears what following him entails and so provides an “ethic of the kingdom,” what we are calling an Ethic from Beyond. He expects his disciples to practice what he teaches, and he warns those who don’t want to practice what he teaches about God’s judgment (Matt 7:13–27). At the heart of the Sermon is a section on spiritual disciplines because Jesus expects his disciples to practice charity, praying, and fasting. Jesus, however, doesn’t command almsgiving, prayer, or fasting but assumes them. The central issue that provokes Jesus is an act done to be noticed as pious and to gain a reputation. Disciplines are done with eye, heart, mind, and soul focused on God. Fasting had been abused at least since the days of Isaiah 58. Zechariah, too, asked, “When you fasted … was it really for me [God] that you fasted?” (Zech 7:5).11
Matthew 6:16–18 continues with the structural outline given in 6:1, and in our new paragraph he plugs fasting into the structure we observed at 6:1–4:
The observance (6:16a):
“When you fast …”
Prohibition (6:16b):
“do not look somber as the hypocrites do…”
Intent (6:16c):
“for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting.”
Amen … reward (6:16d):
“Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.”
Alternative observance (6:17–18a):
“But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen …”
Father’s reward (6:18b):
“and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
The Observance (6:16a)
“When”—or perhaps even more accurately “whenever”—the disciples fast, they are to avoid looking somber and instead anoint the head with oil (6:17). But what is involved when someone in Jesus’ day fasted? A good example is found in the later Mishnah, Taʿanit 1:3–7, where fasting is a response to a drought and the text clarifies what the people are permitted to do on those days: “They eat and drink once it gets dark. And they are permitted to work, bathe, anoint, put on a sandal, and have sexual relations.” The common fast in Judaism was from the evening meal to the next evening meal—skipping food at breakfast and midday. It wasn’t heroic but demanded enough for discomfort.
The Prohibition (6:16b)
Jesus tells his followers not to “look somber” like the hypocrites, and he partly explains what this means when he adds that the hypocrites “disfigure their faces.” Jesus describes some kind of gloomy disposition, as is apparent in the faces of the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:17). Their gloominess is intentional because the term “disfigure”12 evokes the intentional masking or contorting of a face in some manner—perhaps the way small children put on a face when they are informed of something they don’t want to happen. One could think of using dust or ashes on the top of one’s head as a sign of grief, or it is also possible that “disfigure” is a metaphor. Perhaps Jesus is thinking of even more, like donning sackcloth or even rending one’s garments to show one’s grief.13
Intent (6:16c)
The element of intention is central to Jesus’ point. Grief is fine; sullenness is fine; gloom is fine—but to display them intentionally is wrong. The hypocrites disfigure themselves in order “to show others they are fasting.” As Calvin put it, they were “playing to the gallery.”14 They convert the act of fasting into performance. Instead of participating in God’s perspective on something over which one ought to be sorrowful and instead of entering into the grief of a sacred moment, the hypocrites (see comment on 6:1) turn a sacred occasion into theatrical performance to draw attention to their own piety. This passage provides us with a sharp understanding of “hypocrisy” as the intentional manipulation of a sacred moment into a moment of self-adulation.15 Fasting is designed to show grief about someone or something else but here morphs tragically into a public display of the ego.
Amen … Reward (6:16d)
Jesus’ terse evaluation is damning: “Truly I tell you, they have their rewa
rd” (6:16). Clearly cutting humans into two categories here, as he does elsewhere in this Sermon (cf. 5:3–12, 13–16; 7:13–27), Jesus informs his followers (or would-be followers) that hypocritical behavior is how “they” (the hypocrites) behave, but with his followers behaviors are to be different. Furthermore, the public praise the hypocrites gain from their pious behaviors is as far as it will go: God is not in that adulation and stands as a judge over against that behavior. Jesus’ words “they have received their reward in full” is a powerful understatement, and one finds a similar understatement in the word “least” in 5:19. Those who convert piety into performance are the least; those who fast properly are the “great” (5:19).
Alternative Observance (6:17–18a)
Instead of transforming a spiritual act into an opportunity to be congratulated, Jesus summons them to bury what they do and to sink their pious deeds so deeply into the heart and soul that they become unaware of what others think or see. Jesus may well be turning the act of fasting inside out in a comic act of exaggeration: the quintessential act of grief in the Jewish world (fasting) becomes an act of celebration. How so? He tells them to “put oil on your head and wash your face” (6:17). As we find in Psalms 23:5 and 104:15, oil on the head or face is a sign of gladness and joy, and this might mean Jesus encourages them to dress up for a party.
But perhaps this view overstates the evidence. It is just as likely that Jesus is urging his followers to do what is common for everyday hygiene: application of oil to the hair and a face or body wash in a bath or mikveh or even a stream or lake, which would be customary for the followers of Jesus near the Sea of Galilee, are normal daily behaviors (see 2 Sam 12:20; 14:2). One might argue that Jesus urges his followers to deceive their observers into thinking the disciples are not in fact fasting when they are. Such a nettle does not appear in the path or need to be navigated if one prefers, as many have, to see “put oil on your head and wash your face” as only an effective figure of speech. That is, Jesus means nothing more than avoid making your fasting public, whatever that might involve. This is the emphasis of Jesus in verse 18: “so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting.”
Father’s Reward (6:18b)
Jesus turns his disciples away from the way of the hypocrite and toward God alone. He doesn’t provide a trick or a technique for how that might be accomplished. Instead, he narrows his scope, as he often does, to the orientation of the heart. We live in a world of evaluations, assessments, and measurements, but Jesus turns his gaze deeper because he knows that what is measurable can be faked. His focus is that his followers are to focus their deeds on the God who rewards direct engagement.
Moderns, as we said in the previous passage, balk at Jesus’ overt emphasis on rewards, but for those who care to think about this more deeply, Jesus escapes modern sensibilities and fussiness about the superiority of abstract altruism. For Jesus God matters (Ethic from Above, Messianic Ethic), and doing things for God’s final approval (Ethic from Beyond) is all that matters. Religious deeds are not done according to Jesus because of their abstract quality of goodness but because God, who alone is good, summons his people to share in his goodness by extending it to others.
Jesus can urge followers to love their neighbor as themselves (22:39) just as he can teach the Golden Rule that we should use our own desires as the measure of how we treat others (7:12). One might construe such moral instructions to be selfish, but this too is a mistake. As Allison observes, the Sermon “does not overestimate human nature but confronts it in its self-centered reality with fear and hope.”16 For Jesus, doing something with an eye toward God’s approval transcends both altruism and selfishness.
LIVE the Story
Fasting has been abused in the history of the church just as it was abused by the hypocrites and before them by Isaiah’s audience—as people used it to enhance their reputations. Thus, Christians have added to that temptation by extending it into a manipulative device by which the fasting person believes he or she can pressure God into doing what he or she wants. There is much to learn from Jesus’ teaching about fasting in its Jewish context,17 and there is much to learn from the temptations to abuse and manipulate fasting. Perhaps we need to reinvigorate fasting as a Christian response to life’s sacred moments and to probe when, why, and how fasting has for so many become a negligible dimension of Christian praxis.
Bonhoeffer follows a long line of Christians who have an instrumental theory of fasting and who think rigor and austerity are fundamental to genuine discipleship, but he warns: “The only purpose of such practices [as fasting] is to make disciples more willing and more joyous in following the designated path and doing the works required of them.” His words come today as a reminder of how easy we have made it: “Satiated flesh is unwilling to pray and is unfit for self-sacrificing service.”18 But Bonhoeffer reminds us again of a fuller sense of what all this means as a Christian: the daily death of the old self can only come through faith in a King Jesus who lived, died, was buried, and was raised to be exalted to the right hand of God. Yet, the church’s tradition aside, fasting is largely irrelevant to most Protestants today, though it remains a fixed part of the calendar and ideal spiritual practice in church traditions.
There is more to what Jesus says about fasting than what is found here. One passage that deserves attention is Mark 2:18–22, where fasting is a response to kingdom hope. Jesus declares that his disciples will fast as a way of yearning for God’s glory, for God’s kingdom, for God’s justice, and for God’s peace.19
The Christian is the person who has absorbed the Story of God in Jesus Christ, and that gospel Story teaches us that God’s grace comes to us in a way that redounds to the glory of Jesus Christ—not to ourselves. One might even say that Jesus’ own fasting (4:1–11) perfects any fasting we might do, and our task is simply to participate in his fasting the way we participate in his life, death, and resurrection. Because our life participates in his, any attempt to draw attention to our own piety dishonors Christ. So what can we learn from what Jesus says about fasting?
First, we need to bury our disciplines deeply into the heart to do them for the right reason: to engage with God for the good of others. Motive is what matters to Jesus. Different individuals will approach this differently: some will refuse to tell others they are fasting, some will have to mask their own pain (fasting can be a challenge physically), while yet others will be able to discuss it openly without the temptation to congratulate themselves. But probably each of us needs to be conscious of our desire for a good reputation.
The colorful language of Martin Luther can hardly be improved. Fasting, he observed, had become “a device for having people look at them, talk about them, admire them, and say in astonishment: ‘Oh, what wonderful saints these people are! They do not live like the other, ordinary people. They go around in gray coats, with their heads hanging down and a sour, pale expression on their faces. If such people do not get to heaven, what will become of the rest of us?’ ”20 John Chrysostom knew of Christians who, though not fasting themselves, wore the garments of those who were fasting in order to exonerate themselves.21 Every time we fast we need to check ourselves.
Second, the lack of emphasis on the promises that come to the one fasting—Jesus only promises “reward”—means we need to avoid motivating people to fast by what they might gain. The obsession some have with marketing fasting because of its many blessings can be called “benefititis,” the inflammation of material and spiritual blessings that come to the one who fasts. There are no guarantees because fasting is not a mechanical device we ply in order to get something. Fasting responds to sacred and grievous moments, and sometimes we get what we hoped for, but it is not because we fasted—and showed to God how serious we were—but because God, in his grace, showered us with blessings.
Third, fasting is not the same thing as abstinence. To abstain is to select one item, say chocolate, the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, the movies, or a vacation in the heat during the
winter, and to cut it out of one’s life as a spiritual act of discipline. Fasting is the voluntary choice not to eat at all (or not eat or drink) for a specific period in response to something. One isn’t “fasting” when one chooses to abstain from the Internet. (I know, people call this fasting, but it cheapens the meaning of fasting as it also cheapens the significance of sacred, grievous moments in life.)
Fourth, because my wife, Kris, is a psychologist and because we have had friends’ children with severe cases of anorexia nervosa (and I have taught a few college students with that condition), I urge anyone who teaches about fasting to minimize its significance for teenagers, young adults, and anyone who struggles with eating disorders and body image. This is precisely what Jesus is talking about: he urged his followers to fast for the right reasons and not to fast if they had the wrong motives, and young adults who fast in order to lose weight are not genuinely fasting—they are starving themselves.22 It is unwise for pastors, parents, and youth pastors to excite youth into fasting, then, for both spiritual and developmental reasons.
Fifth, it is noticeable that Jesus does not evoke fasting heroes—like Moses or Elijah (or even himself), who fasted for long periods. It is too noticeable that we do. One such fasting hero is the Roman Catholic monk Adalbert de Vogüé, whose book To Love Fasting tells the story of his romantic lifetime of fasting—and it’s a good book and a good story—but few of us are monks and few of us need to begin fasting every day for the rest of our lives. The emphasis in the Bible is that fasting is a response to sacred moments, like death, or the realization of sinfulness, or the fear of death, danger, or disaster, or the new medical report of a potentially fatal disease.
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