Learn Through Your Body: Lenten Opportunities

Lent is a season for the body. Through the imposition of ashes and cycles of fasting and feasting, Lent kneads—through our bodies, into our souls—truths we cannot live without. 

For the many ways this tech age tells us we are just brains with credit cards, the truth remains that we are embodied souls. We are made for God and by God from the dust. We have hearts that pump blood to our brains so we can think deep thoughts about God, and then we love him from our hearts and in ways that require our bodies, like feeding the poor or hugging our wives. 

There is no season of the church calendar that makes better use of this truth than Lent. (As we explain here, Lent is the 40 days leading up to Easter and is traditionally a season for fasting, prayer, self-reflection, and repentance.) 

Lent is a season for the body. Through the imposition of ashes and cycles of fasting and feasting, Lent kneads—through our bodies, into our souls—truths we cannot live without. 

Here are three sensory experiences of Lent, what they teach us, and why we should give ourselves to them. 

Ashes: You are going to die.

Ashes are applied on Ash Wednesday because of verses like Genesis 3:19:

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return. (emphasis added)

That is, you will go back from where you came. You came from the ground, and you will return to the ground—in death. This, along with the Old Testament use of ashes for repentance (Esther 4:1; Job 42:6; Daniel 9:3; Jonah 3:5–6), are why we spread ashes over our foreheads on Ash Wednesday. They are a visible manifestation of the truth that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).

But, do we really need ashes to know this? Can’t we just know it? 

Sure, but know it to what degree? 

I might never forget what it was like to spread ashes on the foreheads of our congregation last year. I touched all kinds of foreheads: old wrinkly ones, youthful ones, brand new soft ones. It was particularly arresting when a mother presented her infant to receive the ashes. I looked the child in the eyes, with her mom looking on, and said, “From dust you came; to dust you shall return.” I may as well have looked at her mom and said, “Your baby is going to die.” 

And it didn’t stop there. At the end of the service, as I looked out over the congregation, I was overwhelmed by the sight. With every man, woman, and child wearing a black cross across their forehead, they looked like lambs prepared for the slaughter. It was a visualization of an inescapable truth: that from the moment we are born, the crosshairs of death have found us. 

Now, I know conceptually that everyone is going to die. But to see the truth written on our foreheads drove it home to me in a way mere words never could. 

So, when Lent comes around each year, you should go to an Ash Wednesday service, receive the ashes, and then look in a mirror. Receive a visual aid to help you number your days, that you might get a heart of wisdom (Psalm 90—a great psalm to pair with some time of reflection and prayer). 

Fasting: You need bread from heaven.

Fasting is a practice in both the Old and New Testament that is associated with grief, repentance, testing, purification, and dependence on God. Typically paired with prayer, it is a way of saying to God, “I need you and am nothing without you.”  

So why do we fast during Lent? To remind our souls, through our body, that life is more than food and the body more than clothing. That the temporal is not the ultimate.

In particular, fasting in Lent is built upon Jesus’ words during his 40-day temptation in the wilderness:

And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written,

‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Here Jesus is quoting Moses in one of his speeches to the wilderness generation:

And [God] humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 8:3)

Taken together, Jesus is saying to the tempter, “There is more to life than food—to know and love God, this is life.” 

In fact, Jesus says as much when, after feeding the 5,000—a purposeful allusion to God feeding the wilderness generation with manna—he says:

Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world … I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

So why do we fast during Lent? To remind our souls, through our body, that life is more than food and the body more than clothing. That the temporal is not the ultimate. That the material serves the immaterial. That true life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. That we have no good apart from him (Psalm 16:1). That there is nowhere else to go, because he alone has the words of eternal life (John 6:68). 

It is worth noting that many people choose to fast from things besides food, like Netflix or social media.* While this can be helpful, it is not really fasting and is divorced from the actual Biblical themes of fasting, which typically relate to food. Food is a necessity, and that's the power of fasting: you are teaching yourself that there is more to life than even what you need to survive.

So let yourself be hungry, and let the hunger pains teach you that you need God—and then praise God that he gives himself to you in Christ.

Feasting

We come now to the third sensory experience of Lent: breaking the fast on the Sabbath for a day of feasting. 

The idea here is that the Lord’s Day is a day for celebrating the work of God in the death and resurrection of Christ. And seeing as fasting and celebration do not go together (Mark 2:19–20), Christians have historically broken their Lenten fast for feasting. 

Your body has something to teach your soul. Give your body to the sensory experiences of Lent, and let your soul learn more deeply that you are made for God.

In feasting, we taste the goodness of God and his rest in contrast to the toil of life and the bitterness of sin. We reflect all week on sin and mortality, but we then rejoice on Sunday over righteousness and eternal life. Fasting pairs with mourning over sin and death and all that is broken in the world; feasting pairs with celebration over the reconciling work of Christ and the restoration of all things in him. 

So let yourself be hungry, but then let yourself be filled. Pay attention to the wonderful taste of food on your tongue, to the fullness of your belly at the end of the meal. Taste and see that your food is good, and then remember that your God is better. Thank God for your full belly and then thank him for the fullness of joy in God’s presence (Psalm 16:8) and the fulness of Christ in the church (Ephesians 1:23).

Your body has something to teach your soul. Give your body to the sensory experiences of Lent, and let your soul learn more deeply that you are made for God. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” And you will. The promise of the gospel is that our dying gives way to everlasting life, our hunger to a Marriage Feast, our thirst to the water of life, world without end. 

* If Netflix and social media are worth cutting out of your life to make room for God, why not just cut them out anyway or seriously reform your use of them? I encourage you to use Lent as a season for purging. For example, take a clean break from social media for 40 days and assess at the end whether it was really serving you in serving God. I have known people who took a break from social media during Lent only to never return to it again—joyfully. For you, it may not be social media but video games, TV, YouTube, or something else. We all creep toward overindulgence and find that our lives are cluttered with the trivial at the expense of substance. Why not use Lent to clear some clutter?