Have you started to think about you might give up for Lent? You may need to think again after hearing our reading from Isaiah; he does not mince his words on the question of fasting (which seems, it is fair to say, have involved rather more than giving up chocolate). Isaiah is forthright; the conventional piety of fasting achieves nothing. “Why have we fasted and thou seest not?” the pious ask God “ why have we humbled ourselves and thou takest no knowledge of it?”
Initially the problem is hypocrisy. Accusations of hypocrisy are easily made. Perhaps there were good grounds for it, as there may be today. It is always easy to seem to be abstemious, and eat chocolate in private. But unattractive as it is, hypocrisy is a superficial and forgivable fault. Isaiah’s accusation here is more serious; those fasting have not genuinely humbled themselves as they wish to appear and their devotion is compromised.
This hypocrisy matters because you cannot genuinely humble yourself before God while continuing to lord it over your fellow men. This will lead us to the deeper significance of the passage, but meanwhile we can’t help thinking that the obvious message is the simple one; don’t give something up for Lent; take something up instead. And that the direction for such new activity should be social welfare. But this is I think, preaching to the converted; most of us want to link such asceticism as we can achieve- not much in my case- with some charitable activity; we give to Oxfam the money we save on our simpler lunch. We are right to do this. But I think Isaiah is saying something deeper.
Taking a wider view of fasting and expanding it to include other forms of devotional activity, such as meditation and mysticism, which tend to be associated with asceticism, Isaiah’s criticism becomes more challenging; he is not just saying that fasting, meditation, and other such activity is useless, if not genuine. He is saying that it is pointless compared to, or unless accompanied by, social action- feeding the hungry, housing the homeless and clothing the naked.
It is only fair to observe at this point that pure asceticism is a rare phenomenon; the typical hermit was well grounded in the material world and the most famous were sought out for advice on practical questions. Monasticism has always been concerned with education, hospitals and social work. Those who remove themselves from the temptations and distractions of the world, actually spend much of their time alleviating the ignorance, poverty and illness which they have apparently left outside the cloister. And I might add that some of my most astute clients have been apparently unworldly religious.
This is not, however, enough to explain what Isaiah is saying. The essence of his message is that God does not seek humility and submission. He does not want us to bow our heads like rushes and spread sackcloth and ashes under ourselves. What he wants is dialogue with his people so that we may “call out and the Lord shall answer and we may cry and the Lord shall say “I am here.”” It is this relationship of mutuality and reliance, almost intimacy, that will bring about man’s fulfilment, described in almost divine terms in verse 8:-
‘Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you, the glory of the lord shall be your rear guard’
The same theme reappears even more directly in the last verses which we heard; social responsibility will result both in individual fulfilment as the Lord guides us, and satisfies our desires and makes our bones strong, as well as a more communal fulfilment as we become like a watered garden or a rebuilt city. These are neither heavenly nor utopian aspirations but realistic possibilities: they belong to this word, not another, just as the poor, the homeless are around about us here and now.
To be fulfilled as individuals and a society we need a righteousness which is based in an open and free relationship with God- why should breaking the yoke of the oppressed, feeding the hungry etc achieve that? The answer is surely that God hates all those things which reduce man’s humanity: the hungry, homeless and naked are all diminished; their potential as human beings is reduced. Man needs to be free to be righteous.
It is noticeable that the disabilities that Isaiah lists are social and economic. Elsewhere Isaiah talks of healing the sick, the blind etc. But the evils to be remedied in this passage are all ones which require social action, not miracles or even medication or surgery. The poor etc. are enslaved by their condition and like literal slaves, but they may be set free by systematic and communal kindness, generosity and care- all things well within our power.
Righteousness is a very common word in the Bible and, naturally, it can mean various things, but at its centre is always the idea of a right relation with God, which I have suggested involves a mutual and almost intimate respect. You may think this is all a bit chummy, and I accept that here is, of course, another aspect to our relation with God, that of awe, “the fear of the Lord”. God is our creator, an all powerful controller of terrifying natural forces. Yet his creative power is always accompanied by wisdom and to this extent he is conceived as having human characteristics- even desiring vengeance as well as being capable of compassion, as humans beings are. God is to be respected and feared, but this respect and fear are the reactions of equals, because we can’t help conceiving of God in human terms. To love and respect God and his creation meaningfully we must do so freely and to that extent as God’s equals. When we can achieve that righteousness, bridging the gap between our humanity and God’s divinity with love, in a dialogue which gives and accepts, then we shall ourselves shine like the dawn, and the glory of God shall be renewed. Bringing Light to primordial and chaotic gloom was God’s first creative act.
God believes we can achieve this- but the way to do so is not excessive abasement, fasting and contrition, but to do all we can to ensure that every human being is free and capable of dialogue with God. So Matthew’s Jesus tells us to put our light on a bushel, and not let it be smothered in sackcloth and ashes.
For the Christian, Jesus is the supreme expression of this idea; he is fully man but expresses the divine: we believe our task is to emulate him. But there is a sort of reciprocity in the relationship, as expressed in another part of Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus must, I think have had these words of Isaiah in mind when says, dividing the righteous sheep from the unrighteous goats: “For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ This is the closeness of our relationship with God that we find him in our neighbours and those of our fellow creatures that need our help. The challenge this poses is, surely, enormous- as are the rewards- but both Jesus and Isaiah makes it quite clear where we are to start work- among the hungry, the homeless and naked as Jesus himself did.
Amen.