An Instruction for the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent: The Joining of Fasting With Mercy and Prayer

“Good”, said the Archangel Raphael to Tobit, “is prayer with fasting, almsgiving, and righteousness” (Tob 12:8). Great is the good of such fasting! It is good for sinners as the sole door for their emergence from the carnal state, for entry into the saving pasture of repentance and for abiding unceasing in this saving pasture. It is great good—not for sinners alone: it is great good for the righteous, a great weapon in their hands. Throughout the entire time of their earthly pilgrimage they do not abandon it; by it they maintain themselves in purity and holiness. Their fasting they ground in mercy; they lay their fasting as the foundation of prayer; by faith’s prayer (Jas 5:15) they receive all that they ask for (Mk 11:24).

Our flesh, as the Venerable Mark reflects, was taken from the earth and in its nature is like the earth: it necessarily requires cultivation. As seeds sown in a field not worked by the farmer’s tools come to nothing, bearing no fruit, so prayer remains barren if the flesh is not prepared for it, if the heart is not made ready by fasting. Distraction and heaviness of thoughts, coldness, hardness of heart, vain and sinful dreams constantly arising in the imagination, destroy the prayer of one who is satiated. Conversely, as in a field carefully worked by the farmer’s tools but not sown with good seeds, weeds grow with special force, so in the heart of one who fasts, if he is satisfied with bodily struggle alone and does not guard his mind with spiritual struggle—that is, with prayer—there grow thick and strong the weeds of self-conceit and pride. In the foolish and harsh faster, pride and self-conceit are always joined with contempt and judgment of his neighbor, with a special susceptibility to scandal, and finally with self-deception, arrogance, and ruin. Fasting, this powerful tool—when it is left to itself, when it has been transformed from a tool into as it were a goal of life, into a goal of vainglory—becomes for the ascetic an instrument of self-destruction. It was thus that the Pharisees fasted, and fasted much, fasted to their harm (Mt 9:14). “Such is not the fast I chose”, says the Lord, “nor if you bend your neck like a reed and spread sackcloth and ashes, will you call that an acceptable fast. Such is not the fast I choose, says the Lord: but loose every bond of injustice, undo the cords of unjust violence, let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke of bondage. Share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, clothe them, and do not hide yourself from your own kin. Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your righteousness shall go before you, and the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am” (Is 58:5–9). The prophet requires that fasting be preceded and accompanied by mercy; he gives the promise that the prayer of the ascetic who joins fasting with mercy will be heard at once, that such an ascetic shall be deemed worthy of gracious visitation by God.

And everywhere the Holy Spirit decrees the union of fasting with prayer. “Turn to Me with all your heart”, cries the Lord to sinners through another prophet, exhorting and encouraging them to repentance, “with fasting and weeping and mourning; rend your hearts and not your garments, and turn to the Lord your God… Blow the trumpet in Zion; consecrate a fast, proclaim a solemn assembly” (Joel 2:12–15). The repentant Ninevites showed the power of fasting and prayer by their experience. God’s judgment on them had already been pronounced, already it was proclaimed to them by the prophet Jonah; already the prophet, having withdrawn beyond the city, watched the city closely and hourly awaited the fulfillment of the fearful prophecy. But the Ninevites resorted to repentance, proving the genuineness of their repentance by abandoning their wicked deeds, by intense fasting, by intense prayer—“and God relented concerning the evil that he said he would do to them” (Jonah 3:10). In the New Testament the Lord announced that fasting would become the common struggle of all His disciples, “when the” heavenly “bridegroom”—the Lord—is taken from them by His ascension into heaven (Lk 5:35). And how shall the disciples of the Lord Jesus not fast on earth, how shall they not weep, how shall they not be clothed in the garment of sorrow, when their Treasure, their only Treasure, is far from them, when the way to Him is full of difficulties—beset by terrible robbers both in number and in malice!

All the saints of God spent their earthly life in fasting and prayer. Thus, according to the testimony of the Gospel, the holy Anna, the prophetess, daughter of Phanuel, did not depart from the temple, serving God with fasting and prayers night and day (Lk 2:37). Of the great Judith, Holy Scripture recounts that she “fasted all the days of her widowhood”, possessed experiential understanding of prayer, knew its power, by prayer attained living faith in God, and by faith accomplished a wonderful deed (Judith 8:6). “I covered my soul with fasting” (Ps 68:11), says the divinely inspired David—so powerful is this struggle; “I humbled my soul with fasting”—so much does this struggle oppose self-satisfaction and arrogance, which arise from satiety! By means of fasting “my prayer returns to my bosom” (Ps 34:13); without it—it is a sorrowful sacrifice of mental distraction, inseparable from satiety. The holy Apostle Paul, enumerating the marks of true servants of God, among these marks mentions endurance in fasting (2 Cor 5:5) and prayer (Rom 12:12; Col 4:2). Of himself he testifies that he spent his earthly life in constant struggles, privations, and sorrows; he mentions the hunger and thirst to which he was subjected by circumstances, and the voluntary, unceasing fasting by which he tamed and enslaved his body (2 Cor 11:27; 1 Cor 9:27). The Evangelist Luke, describing in the Acts the common dwelling in Jerusalem of the holy apostles, after the ascension into heaven of our Lord Jesus Christ, together with the Most Holy Theotokos and other women who had followed the Lord during His earthly pilgrimage, says: “They devoted themselves with one accord to prayer and supplication” (Acts 1:14). From these words it is clear that their prayers were very prolonged, unceasing, which without the help of fasting cannot be accomplished. Such was the life of the apostles! Such was the life of the martyrs! Such was the life of the ascetics! It was and is the union of unceasing prayer with constant fasting. Their mercy and love for their brethren, for those who loved them and those who hated them, was divine, as exceeding human nature, as drawn from the very heart of the Lord Himself. They not only had compassion for all those in need of spiritual and bodily sustenance, not only forgave all injuries and grievous wrongs; they joyfully laid down their lives for the salvation of their neighbors and the salvation of their enemies.

In important circumstances and difficulties of life, at the beginning of great deeds, when great sorrows approach, the saints of God intensified their fasting and prayers. Our Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, gave us Himself the example of both. Before going forth to preach and to save mankind, the Lord withdrew into the wilderness, where He remained fasting forty days and forty nights. “He fasted wishing to show us that fasting is a great weapon both against temptations and against demons. As the increase of food serves as the beginning of every sin, so abstinence serves as the beginning of every virtue”. The guide to the struggle of fasting and the struggle against the devil is the Holy Spirit. Before choosing the twelve apostles, to whom was entrusted the catching of the whole universe in faith and salvation, the Lord went up to a solitary mountain and remained the whole night in prayer (Lk 6:12); before the resurrection of Lazarus, the Lord turned to thanksgiving to the Father for the hearing of His prayer. “I knew that you always hear me”, because the will of the Father and the Son is one divine will, “but I said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, that they may believe that you sent me” (Jn 11:42). So also before the choosing of the apostles, the Lord had no need of prayer, but turned to prayer and remained in it the whole night, showing, according to the understanding of the holy Fathers, by His actions a pattern for our actions, showing us that God receives even our brief prayer, but that before important occasions and undertakings prolonged and especially fervent prayer is profitable, necessary, and essential for us. Before the sufferings and cross-bearing death to which the Lord willed to submit for the redemption of mankind, He came to the garden of Gethsemane, the place where the betrayal was to happen, manifesting in Himself a voluntary sacrifice offered by the one indivisible will of the Father and the Son. By this He showed us that we ought to accept every trial sent to us from on high as an inseparable part of ourselves, to accept it with self-denial, with submission to the will of God, with faith in almighty God, Who watches over us unceasingly, by Whom all the hairs of our head are numbered, from Whom “my frame was not hidden from you”, as the prophet said, “when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth” (Ps 138:15). The Lord showed us the means by which we can and must strengthen the weakness of human nature when trials come upon us. He turned to intensified prayer. To the disciples, overcome by sleep, He commanded: “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation” (Mt 26:41). So that a trial that comes may not seize a man, may not overtake him, may not swallow him up, prayer is necessary. Necessary at the time of trial for overcoming it is that spiritual power, that divine unshakeable peace, which prayer brings. To overcome Satan, striving through thoughts of sorrow, hopelessness, and despair to shake and destroy a man subjected to trial by God’s decree, so that our faith may not fail during the trial, prayer is necessary. It is necessary for us so that amid the very sorrow we might feel, according to the apostle’s exhortation, “all joy”, which he commanded us to have, “when” we fall into “various trials” (Jas 1:2). Gracious consolation from prayer can be received only by one purified beforehand by fasting, and can be preserved only by one who maintains his purity through fasting.

The true servants of the Lord followed and will follow the example of the Lord. Even in the Old Testament, led by the Spirit of Christ, the holy David in especially difficult circumstances of life intensified his fasting and prayers (2 Sam 12:16; Ps 34:13). Like him, the holy prophet Daniel, understanding from the book of the prophet Jeremiah that the time appointed by God for the captivity of the Jews in Babylon had been fulfilled, that the time for their return to Jerusalem had come, turned with intense prayer to God for the deliverance of the Jews, strengthening his prayer with fasting: “I turned”, he says, “to the Lord God to seek an answer by prayer and petition in fasting, sackcloth, and ashes. I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession” (Dan 9:3–4). The state into which fasting and prayer bring a man is especially capable of receiving God’s blessings and divine revelations. Thus the almsgiving, prayers, and fasting of Cornelius the centurion came before God and brought him the greatest good: the knowledge of Christ. “I was fasting and praying in my house at the ninth hour”, the centurion told the Apostle Peter, “when a man in bright clothing stood before me”. It was an angel (Acts 10:30). So to the praying and hungry Apostle Peter appeared a great sheet descending from heaven, in which was the pagan world, accepted by God into faith in Christ and for salvation in Christ (Acts 10:11). So “serving” the apostles “the Lord and fasting” (Acts 13:2), the Holy Spirit revealed that He had chosen Paul and Barnabas for the preaching of Christianity to the Gentiles, commanded them to be set apart and sent for this ministry. The apostles, having heard during prayer and fasting the command of the Holy Spirit, before carrying out this command, again resort to fasting and prayer, so that the command received with the help of fasting and prayer might be fulfilled with their help. “Then after fasting and praying and laying their hands on them, they sent them off” (Acts 13:3), says the writer of the apostolic Acts. To all it is known with what success was crowned the ministry of Paul and Barnabas! It was crowned with the planting of Christianity throughout the then-known universe. Innumerable are the proofs and examples that all who please God are deemed worthy of divine revelations precisely when they have abstained themselves by fasting from matter, and with pure prayer, with naked minds not clouded by any fantasy, not distracted by any foreign thought, stand in deep reverence and peace before the invisible and unknowable God.

Beloved brethren! Having come to know the meaning and power of spiritual weapons—mercy, fasting, and prayer—let us make haste to gird ourselves with these weapons. Let us acquire mercy, let us be clothed in kindness, according to the instruction and persuasion of the apostle (Col 3:12). Let mercy be the distinctive trait of our character, the constant distinctive trait of our conduct. Let us not seek righteousness apart from mercy.

Mercy flowing from corrupted human nature is contrary to righteousness; mercy flowing from the commandments of the Gospel, notwithstanding its abundance, stands in an unbreakable union with God’s righteousness and serves as its expression (Ps 84:11–14, 88:15). Not only during the holy fasts appointed by the holy Church shall we humble our bodies by moderate use of food of a certain kind, but also at other times let us use food wisely, proportionate to essential need, for the maintenance of bodily strength and bodily health. Having enslaved the body to the spirit through fasting, having made our spirit angellike in goodness, let us give it wings by prayer: let our spirit acquire the blessed habit of quickly and often turning to God and imploring God’s blessing on our undertakings, God’s help to our actions. We shall not delay in seeing God as our helper, the ruler of our activity. This is not enough! Rising often in thought to God, we shall gradually purify our moral path from every iniquity, not only gross but also subtle, committed in thoughts and feelings. Who, calling upon God for help, would dare call upon Him for help in a disreputable deed? Who, presenting his request to the view of the King of kings, would not take care beforehand that the request be worthy of the royal and divine gaze, which penetrates the secrets of the heart and sees with equal clarity all that is visible and invisible? “If we ask anything according to his will”, only then does He “hear us” (1 Jn 5:14), said the apostle. Who, constantly turning to God hour by hour, does not acquire the conviction and feeling that he dwells under the eyes of God, that every deed of his, every movement of his soul is seen by the all-seeing and omnipresent God? The necessary consequence of such conviction and feeling is: the spiritual progress of a Christian. May the merciful Lord grant us this progress to the glory of His name and for our salvation. Amen.

Homily 7. On Fasting and Humility

Commentary on Mt. 4

Commentary of the blessed Theophylact on Lk 4

Commentary of the blessed Theophylact

Saint Isaac the Syrian. Homily 1

Saint Isaac the Syrian. Homily 56

This soul-saving counsel belongs to the Venerable Barsanuphius the Great. Reply 261