The Season of Lent is here. But what is Lent and how would Jesus have liked us to observe it?

We associate Lent with not eating what tempts us most. Jesus would have pointed to something different. His way of celebrating Lent was, “Eat!” So, he broke and distributed his body in order that they may eat….

The primary issue is not that we eat. It is that we do not eat what we need to eat. We are undernourished.

Understood in its spirit, Lent is, primarily, not about not eating. It is about knowing what to eat. That involves knowing what we are meant to be. The seed of Lent goes back to the first Temptation of Jesus (Mt. 4:1-4). We are to live not by bread alone, but by the fullness of the Word. The Word is the mind of Christ (Phil. 2:5). So, we do not ‘honour’ the Lent merely by abstaining from certain items of food. It is to imbibe the Word of God.

All my life I have struggled with this one issue: how do I become an instrument even remotely capable of receiving the Word of God? I am still far, far away from a final answer to this all-important question. But there is something that I am somewhat certain about.

A certain discipline – something prefigured in John the Baptist – is essential, if we are to establish a growing and faithful relationship with the Word. The primary issue in Lent is if we are growing in the Lord, and not if we are swelling or shrinking in our girth. To grow in the Lord is to grow in the Word. Through the Word, as St Paul will say, we grow into the ‘mind of Christ.’

Abstinence, as an end in itself, has very little spiritual value. It has, as Jesus said, only publicity value. Abstinence has value a means to an end. We have to abstain from many a thing, if we are to live ‘also’ by every word that comes from God. But giving up this or that, without any intention or willingness to be nourished and fortified by the Word, does not amount, I’m afraid, to a spiritually meaningful observance of Lent.

Now ask: to what extent was Judas part of the Last Supper, the Ultimate Fellowship Meal, which was also Lent? He was part of the “last,” but alien to the ‘fellowship’ of it. The shocking thing is that through the very same gift – sharing the consecrated body – he walked out and away into the darkness of the soul, where partnership with Satan lay in wait for him.

So, it is eating or not eating that matters; but whether or not we are in partnership with Jesus or the devil.

That is why Jesus felt sad about the spiritually unenlightened way the Jews were observing fasting. They contradicted the spirit of fasting by their manner of fasting. That they did, because they knew fasting only as giving up, which is only its negative part.

Jesus has given us a positive idea of fasting: fasting as also an ingesting. “Take, eat…” But to eat this sacred, life-transforming Body, we need to have our minds transformed by the Word. But, if the Word is to exercise its power in a transforming way in our life, we need to have self-control, or freedom from subservience to sensual pleasures. Jesus, not the titillations of the body, should reign over us. We cannot have several masters.

When Jesus is Lord over us, we shall know what to eat and what not to. And why?  Till then, we shall go on with our worldly idea of Lent. But Jesus would say, “I know not what you are doing…” (Mt. 7:21-23).

Only, let us ask ourselves this one question: Why is it that, despite the yearly observance of Lent, we remain as we are? As though there is no Lent in our life?

Don’t you think something is gone amiss somewhere?