Faithfulness, Prayer, and Fasting

In the gospel this morning, a demoniac was brought to the Lord. The demon that the Lord drove out by His word had withstood the efforts of His disciples to cast him out. The Lord shows His exasperation with the faithless and perverse generation, and the unbelief of His own disciples. “If you have faith as a mustard seed, [which presumably they didn’t]  you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you. However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.” The usual takeaways from this passage are that we should have faith, pray, and fast. But we tend to take these things on a very superficial level. 

If you believe that God can do something, He will do it, right? You don’t even have to believe much, just a tiny bit, and God will take care of things. And yet, for the most part, we aren’t moving mountains, or even our hearts which have been hardened to stone. Faith is more than just belief, it is faithfulness, it is being in a living and dynamic relationship with the Creator and Author of all things. This relationship is not some ethereal connection to some spiritual sense that we have of some supernatural being. It is loving God, keeping His commandments, loving our neighbor, loving our enemy, It is humbling ourselves, serving others, seeking to know God and to worship Him and allowing ourselves to be transformed by these things. 

This necessarily requires prayer. But prayer is not just speaking to God, telling Him how great He is, telling Him how little we are, telling Him what we need as though He’s not already aware, or telling Him with an unfortunate level of boldness what we want. Prayer is raising the heart and mind to God, and desiring to remain in this place over all others. This necessarily requires us to leave certain things behind, and to seek to recall ourselves back when we wander away. 

Faithfulness also requires fasting. We cannot unite ourselves to God as long as we are enslaved to the things of this world. It is by means of fasting that we learn to sever the chains that bind us and hold us captive. Fasting is not just abstaining from food. If we look at the first fast given to man in the Scriptures, Adam is told “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” By fasting we learn to accept our limitations, to acknowledge and give thanks to God for His  providence and abundance. As such, whether we feast or fast we do it in faithfulness to God. 

The Christian life is a movement from slavery to freedom. We are like the Hebrews living in Egypt and cruelly enslaved. God desires to free us from this state, but in order to be free, we must be faithful. Part of this faithfulness is believing that God loves us, to see His marvelous works and know that He has the power to free us from slavery. But part of this faithfulness is about what we do. For the Hebrews in Egypt, it meant borrowing from their neighbors as part of God’s providence for the journey ahead, it meant marking the lintel and doorposts of their homes with the blood of the passover lamb, and it meant eating the passover. These things were not difficult requests to comply with, but they showed faithfulness to God Who had commanded these things. But they also had to be obedient in larger and more difficult things. They had to journey to the sea while Egypt pursued them, they had to pass through on dry ground, and they had to follow God where He led them. 

Having passed through the Sea, they were called to prayer. In particular, Moses was called to prayer. He was commanded to ascend the mountain where He would find himself in the presence of God who spoke to him face to face as a man speaks to his friend. This was more than just a conversation as evidenced by the preparation that was required or the limits put on the rest of the people who were not ready to come into God’s presence, and it changed Moses who would have to veil his face afterward because of the uncreated light of divinity that shone through him. 

And the people had to fast. They remembered the foods that they had eaten while in Egypt, foods very often tied to pagan sacrifices no less, and they preferred those things to the bread which God sent down from heaven. They wanted water, they wanted meat; and these God provided for them, but in a way that taught them Who God was, what He had done for them, and reminded them to be grateful for what they had been given instead of complaining about what they did not have. 

This passage in the gospel today is tied to the events of the passover by the end of the reading where Jesus predicts His death and resurrection. His passover from death to life -- His pascha. Our active faithfulness, our genuine prayer from the heart, and our grateful fasting are the means by which God will free us from slavery to the enemy. In truth, for those who have been baptized into Christ, that victory over the enemy has already been accomplished, but we must continue to free ourselves from the ties that still bind us. The Hebrews continued to lament the loss of things from their old life, but we must cling to God instead of the death which once held us, and we must purify ourselves, and bring ourselves into the presence of God through prayer and fasting. 

The reason that we who are so often a faithless and perverse generation cannot drive away the demonic forces set against us is because we want to do it ourselves. The same disciples that couldn’t drive out the demon in this gospel reading had been given power to cast out demons seven chapters earlier. Christ easily casts out the demon because He is God. The disciples were still too full of themselves to be full of the grace of God. And so the prescription is simple, be transformed, put on Christ, become by grace what God is by nature. This requires faithfulness to God, not just believing in Him, but trusting Him, following Him, and obeying Him in all things. It requires prayer that goes beyond mere words, entering into the fiery furnace of God’s presence and becoming like iron in the fire, partaking of the attributes of the fire itself. It requires fasting which recognizes that all we have is given to us by God, but not all of it will benefit us if we do not receive it with the humility to listen to and obey God, and to express our gratitude. These are not rules to be followed, they are the means of our communion with God in which we find the freedom to live as God desires for us to live.