Lent: An Exchange of Goods

It is sometimes easy to forget that there are different kinds of goods. We get used to something good. It becomes our normal. And we start to think of other options as bad. We might miss that they’re actually better. 

Many of us are used to, perhaps even drugged by, the good of abundance. It is a tremendous good to have access to food and drink. It is good to have access to entertainment and news.

The season of Lent is not a time when we say those things are bad. It is a time when we give up the good of having for the good of not having.

One of the paradoxes of fasting is that it is not a denial of our embodiment. It is actually an affirmation of our embodiment. What we are denying when we fast is that our bodily life is threatened the minute we stop striving to beat back every pain or longing by satisfying our own desires.

Fasting is the exchange of the good of having and using for the good of entrusting ourselves, body and soul, into the hands of God.

This is the cluster of themes that Scott MacDougall and I weave together in this week’s LectioCast.

It’s a tremendous episode, that includes conversation about the most important thing Paul ever says about the Law and the paradox of Jesus’s own life, when death was the better good for him to embrace than continued life on earth.

Check it out on iTunes or stream it from the site. See you in your earbuds!