How come you don’t hear us?

Readings: Isaiah 58:1-9A; Matthew 9:14-15

I find this reading from Isaiah a very challenging one.

God says that the people keep crying out (and I am paraphrasing), “God, how come we keep doing religious observances and praying for things to change but you do not hear us?”

Then God says in response, “You say you are fasting, but instead carry out your own pursuits!”  And God goes on to say that the ‘real’ fasting that you should be doing is, “releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; Setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke; Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; Clothing the naked when you see them and not turning your back on your own.”  It’s only then that our light will truly shine. In Isaiah’s time it was possible to follow all the rules and do none of the above. It’s likely that we haven’t shifted all that far from what Isaiah described.

God’s challenge to the people reminds me a lot of the powerful words of Frederick Douglass when he said that, “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

We might pray for “justice” or “peace” or “equity” in the world and yet if nothing fundamentally changes in our mindset and actions, nothing will fundamentally change.  And God’s not going to do the heavy lifting for us.  This is our work to do.

It gets me thinking about what struggles our faith generates in our life. Does it put us at odds with the dominant culture? Does it create any cognitive dissonance for us? Does it encourage us to agitate?

As we see in the gospel from today, Jesus is at odds with the religious authorities. They question why he’s not following the rules of fasting (and yet he is doing exactly the works described in Isaiah) . He’s not trying to be a troublemaker, per se, he’s just tuned in to a deeper ethic that must be obeyed (an ethic that has the power to transform us individually and collectively). And once we transform, we cannot conform.

During Lent, may we reflect more deeply on the words from Isaiah about the fasting that God desires and work to incorporate that more and more into our practices.