The tradition of making sacrifices to God or inflicting deliberate hardship on ourselves in order to glorify God; this is a very ancient tradition.
It is also a very widespread phenomenon. Far and away the biggest fast in the modern world is, of course, the Ramadan fast observed by Muslims. I once asked a Muslim friend, how it felt to fast during the month of Ramadan. He answered, ‘I feel close to God. My hunger reminds me of God all through the day.’
That seems to me to be the point of fasting or making sacrifices. People do it so that the hunger they feel, the loss they feel, brings their recognition of God into their daily lives, invading those moments of our lives that we ordinarily shut God out of. It seems to me, therefore, to be a worthwhile spiritual discipline.
One of the ways of understanding Jesus is that God became man to show us how to live, to be a godly example to us.
This is why the Gospel seeks to record the way in which Jesus responded to all the situations we have to respond to. And this includes fasting in the wilderness, making himself deliberately vulnerable to be more aware of God’s presence, to bring God closer into the centre of his life.
But having made himself vulnerable, the story of Jesus in the wilderness turns into something else: a story of temptation and the battle with evil.
Evil makes three offers to Jesus, all of which are phoney.
Evil offers to fill Jesus’ belly, although man does not live by bread alone. Evil offers to share its power with Jesus if Jesus will exercise it in the name of evil. This power-sharing arrangement is a fraud. Evil suggests that Jesus demand proof of God’s goodwill but God offers us a relationship based on faith.
To follow the path of Jesus Christ during Lent is more than a life of abstinence and self-inflicted hardship.
It is also a path of consciously rejecting the temptations of evil, rejecting and purging from our lives all the fraudulent offers of short-term material gain or power to which we have succumbed. It is the path of renewing our faith in a loving God and remembering that he has faith in us. Amen.