The Sundays of Lent have traditionally stood apart from other days of this season. While we spend the rest of the week fasting and pondering our mortality, Sunday is different. Sundays are usually feast days, highlighting the coming resurrection—small flashes of worshipful hope along the darker 40-day Lenten road.
Sundays are miniature feasts among the weeks of prolonged fasting because they are the Lord’s Days. As the people of God come into the house of God, they gather around the Word of God and the Lord’s Table. And in the presence of the Bridegroom, the wedding guests cannot fast. But the rest of the week? They remember his death and their own impending demise and return to fasting, awaiting the glorious feast of Easter and the foreshadowed supper of the Lamb. (Yes, yes, Jesus is always with us. But you understand the larger point.)
Initially, this seems like a great deal of trouble. Why have miniature feasts in the midst of such a great fast?
In my estimation, the best answer is not in the church calendar but in our own lives. Life is rarely entirely a fast or a feast. It is instead something far more complex. Even in our darkest seasons, the light occasionally breaks through. Even in our deepest sadness, we experience deep breaths of grace. Life is layered. It is rarely all good or all bad at any given moment. Often, it is instead an ill-distributed mixture of the good and the bad—blessing and stumbling, hurt and healing, profound loneliness and beautiful encounters.
Twenty-five years ago, I discovered I had heart failure caused by a virus. I was 24 years old at the time, a newlywed brimming with optimism. In one single doctor visit, it all seemed to vanish. I was given a grim prognosis—two years of life. My wife of just months was newly pregnant. I was a full-time student. We were poor, and I was dying.
Yet glimpses of hope—often on Sundays—refused to acknowledge my circumstances. We would attend worship, and the beauty of the music in our church would soar, creating something akin to rapturous delight in my soul. We would sit with friends, and I would still find myself laughing at stories and jokes. Family sent gifts, sometimes surprising me with their generosity. Everything within me wanted to retreat into an all-enveloping darkness, but glimmers of grace insisted on brightening things up, forcing me to resist despair.
This is what it means to live, to walk as a child of God in this world. We experience the deepest of pains and greatest of joys. And Jesus is there through it all. He never leaves us. He never forsakes us. He is with us, even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
This is why on the Sundays of Lent, as we prepare to worship the God who never leaves, we set the fasting aside, even if just for a day. How can we fast as we gather with the people of God, those living layered lives like us—a holy recipe of love and loss? How can we fast as we encounter power through prayer, glory in song? How can we fast when we take the broken loaf and shimmering cup, remembering what our God has done? How can we fast as we celebrate the presence of the Bridegroom who never leaves?
We cannot. And so for these Sundays, as we return to the good truth of the gospel even in the midst of longing and hurt, the Bridegroom joins us, embraces us, receives us, and loves us.
And that is an occasion to feast.
Steve Bezner (PhD) is associate professor of pastoral ministry and theology at Truett Seminary at Baylor University and the author of Your Jesus Is Too American. He is heavily involved with GlocalNet and writes regularly on his Substack.
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