GOSPEL REFLECTION, FRIDAY, 22ND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME, 4 SEPTEMBER 2026

Luke 5:33-39.  In today’s gospel we have yet another interrogation of Jesus by the Scribes and Pharisees.  It concerns fasting, a long-established Jewish spiritual practice, along with prayer, and almsgiving.  They are connected, just as they are in the Christian tradition since ancient times.  The Scribes and Pharisees were trying to establish whether Jesus adhered to Jewish practice or not, because he did not seem to practice and teach fasting with his disciples.  Rather, with his disciples he ‘feasted.’  So … was he a faithful Jew or not?  All Ch. 4 of Luke’s gospel deals with various controversies, disagreements (are they yet outward conflicts as would come later?)  Jesus calls himself the Bridegroom (a messianic title), with whom the disciples have cause to rejoice and feast with him (an image of the Messianic Banquet, an image of the fullness of the Kingdom).  He tells the authorities that the disciples will have cause to fast, but not yet, an allusion to his death.

I Jewish and Catholic tradition there are two sorts of fasting: public, liturgical fasting by the whole community, as in Lent, and personal (sometimes called ‘secret’) fasting.  The latter is fasting undertaken by us as individuals or families as an integral part of our spiritual lives.  Jesus is talking about both of these, with an emphasis on personal fasting.  Since the earliest days of the Church, personal fasting in connection with prayer and almsgiving was one of the ‘Three Works of Holiness,’ of personal sanctification with God’s grace.  Since earliest times, too, fasting was about fasting from food as an act of discipline, but not just about food.  Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, tells his followers, “When you fast, do not look dismal like the hypocrites ….”  WHEN not IF.  In other words, he considered it an essential practice which we have come to treat as optional, if we feel like it.  Since early times, fasting  was considered to be an integral spiritual practice with broad implications.  If we have a problem with giving in to sins of the flesh, fasting is an antidote: fasting was a remedy to for ‘the lusts of the flesh’ (see 1 John 2:16).  Or listen to the words of St Basil the Great, “if fasting were to preside over our life … it would have taught all people not only to control themselves with regard to food, but also to completely avoid and be utterly estranged from avarice, greed, and every kind of vice.”  If we can not control our cravings for food and drink, how do we control our craving for gossip, anger, obscenity, rudeness, and insult?  To do this we cannot simply try to patch up old practices piecemeal but begin anew – in other words by conversion of the way we live (see today’s gospel vv. 37-39).