Parallels of fasting and feasting

March 18, 2007 -- Fourth Sunday of Lent

By Fr. Michael Stubbs

	Fr. Mike Stubbs

We associate certain foods with Christmas: gingerbread, candy canes, roasted turkey. But in predominantly Catholic countries, the menu for Christmas Eve often features fish. That is because, until rather recently, Christmas Eve was a day of abstinence from meat.

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In the Catholic tradition, we ordinarily anticipate a feast day with a time of self-denial. It's either feast or famine. The classic example of that is Lent. We often claim that those forty days prepare us for Easter, but how does that preparation work?

Some believe that the period of sacrifice helps us to appreciate more fully the celebration that follows. As Benjamin Franklin pointed out in Poor Richard's Almanac: "Hunger is the best sauce." If we fast beforehand, we will enjoy the feast more.

Others believe that linking penance to celebration preserves a certain balance in the scheme of things. Both sorrow and joy belong to life. The cross must take place before the resurrection. Scheduling a time of fasting before a feast reminds us of that fact.

The themes of fasting and feasting run throughout Sunday's gospel reading, Luke 15:1-3, 11-32. We know that passage more commonly as the parable of the prodigal son.

The parable begins with the younger son squandering his inheritance on a life of dissipation. It is a time of feasting. But eventually, he runs out of money. He is reduced to tending hogs as a farm hand, and longing to eat the hog feed. That is the time of fasting.

Perhaps we can see in this a parallel to the story of Joseph and his brothers in Genesis 37-50. Joseph predicts seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of famine. Joseph's ability to make that prediction puts him at the head of the Egyptian government. The seven years of famine bring Joseph's long-lost brothers to Egypt, to make possible a reconciliation between Joseph and his brothers.

The life of dissipation and feasting by the prodigal son parallels the seven years of plenty predicted by Joseph. Similarly, the hunger experienced by the prodigal son in his life as a swineherd parallels the seven years of famine predicted by Joseph.

Of course, there is another point of contact between the story of Joseph and his brothers and the parable of the Prodigal Son. Both stories focus upon sibling rivalry. Both stories aim at reconciliation between the warring brothers. In the case of Luke's gospel, that means a reconciliation between the prodigal son and his elder brother.

The father encourages the elder son to enter and join in the feast. "But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again: he was lost and has been found." At the beginning of the story, the feasting by the prodigal son forms a part of his life of dissipation, his distancing himself from his father and his family. But through the telling of the story, the feast undergoes a process of transformation. Now, it means something entirely different. Now, the feast stands for reconciliation and renewal. It anticipates our feast of Easter. Just as the down-on-his-luck prodigal son went through a time of hardship, we pass through the time of Lent. But then, we arrive at the feast of Easter, the time to celebrate reconciliation and renewal.

(Fr. Stubbs, a priest of the Archdiocese of Kansas City, Kansas, has a master's degree in theology from Harvard.)