On Ash Wednesday the annual Christian fasting season, known as Lent, begins. Most world religions have an annual fasting season. The Christian one lasts for forty days and significantly coincides with spring. There are many reasons why it is good for Christians to have the fasting season of Lent. Here are a few.
Lent offers us an opportunity to start again, to make a new beginning. Failing and falling are part of the human condition. In the Christian view of life, failing and falling should never be a cause for despondency or despair. The God of Jesus is a God of abundant mercy and radical forgiveness, a God who wipes out past failures and invites us to make a fresh start. We should never be reluctant to begin again. Indeed, our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail. New beginnings are a necessary part of the Christian journey. They are always life-giving.
Lent is also an ideal time to restore the balance in our lives. Virtue is the happy medium, the golden mean. But the golden mean is hard to achieve. There is a tendency in human nature to over indulge, to develop addictions, to abuse our bodies, to become overly preoccupied with work, to neglect important relationships, to put too much emphasis on our material needs and not enough on our emotional and spiritual needs. Lent provides us with an opportunity to get back to a healthy diet – a healthy diet of food, of exercise, of relaxation, of prayer. Restoring the balance in our lives helps us to sort out our priorities, to decide what is good for us and what is not good for us.
Lent is the Christian fasting season which means that it should be focused on Jesus who is the Christ. There is really only one yardstick with which to measure the success of our Lenten fasting: Does it help us to become more like Jesus? The heart of Christianity is not a rule of law or a code of behaviour. It is a Person whose love we receive and whose life we seek to imitate. Ultimately, Lent is about Jesus. It is about Jesus’ vision of life, his values and the building of his Kingdom in the world. Therefore, the best type of fasting we can do in Lent is the fasting that helps us pay greater attention to Jesus and move closer to him. To use the language of St Paul, the goal of Lent is to get rid of the ‘old man’ who is the selfish me and to put on the ‘New Man’ who is the loving Jesus.