Posted on 02/24/2023 8:19:19 AM PST by MurphsLaw
Friday after Ash Wednesday
Matthew 9:14–15
Friends, in today’s Gospel, people ask Jesus why his disciples do not fast.
He says that as wedding guests they will not fast while he, the Bridegroom, is with them.
But “the days will come,” he says, “when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
and then they will fast.”
Why do we fast?
Because we have a hunger for God, which is the deepest hunger.
We’re meant to get access to that hunger.
We’re meant to feel it so that it can direct us toward God.
Every spiritual master recognizes the danger that if we allow the superficial hunger of our lives to dominate,
we never reach the deepest hunger.
Thomas Merton once observed that our desires for food and drink are something like little children
in their persistence and tendency to dominate.
Unless and until they are disciplined,
they will skew the functions of the soul according to their purposes.
And fasting is a way of disciplining the hunger for food and drink.
It is a way of quieting those desires by not responding to them immediately,
so that the deepest desires emerge.
Unless you fast you might never realize how hungry you are for God.
Thus says the Lord GOD:
Cry out full-throated and unsparingly,
lift up your voice like a trumpet blast;
Tell my people their wickedness,
and the house of Jacob their sins.
They seek me day after day,
and desire to know my ways,
Like a nation that has done what is just
and not abandoned the law of their God;
They ask me to declare what is due them,
pleased to gain access to God.
""Why do we fast, and you do not see it?
afflict ourselves, and you take no note of it?""
+++The disciples of John approached Jesus and said,
"Why do we and the Pharisees fast much,
but your disciples do not fast?"
Jesus answered them, "Can the wedding guests mourn
as long as the bridegroom is with them?
The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
and then they will fast."+++
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