“Beseech that Your servants be written in the Book of Life”
How do we understand what we are heading toward — that is, the Pascha? How do we understand that we go in our procession to the table where “the fatted calf, so that no one departs hungry,” as Saint John Chrysostom says? And what is the connection between food and death and victory — are they symbols, or words of literature to delight a person?
Man has seen death from the beginning: it is a hungry mouth that is never satisfied, for it devours and is not devoured, it eats and is not eaten, it kills and none kills it or destroys it. So the war of man against death was a fierce war, in which man inevitably arrives at concealment. All peoples and religions faced this last enemy and were frustrated and failed, because this war is unequal in strength. His sole concern in facing death was to be victorious and to live immortal.
The pharaohs, for example, sought immortality and made of the tombs of their kings gardens of art, paintings of the lost paradise, carrying into them, in their coffins, royal garments and gold, and preserving them with embalming until the day the king is raised alive. They believed immortality as a reality, but they fought death by keeping their bodies safe from the decay of the dust and the wear of time; so man became, among them, a mummy.
As for the peoples of Mesopotamia, whoever reads their Epic of Gilgamesh sees that King Gilgamesh’s obsession was to remain immortal, never to die. He searched with all his might for the elixir of life, to remain apart from corruption. But after a long search, he returns empty-handed from the medicine of immortality, and he looks at the wall of his city that he built tall and splendid, to say that this wall is the best way to immortality — that is, he concluded after his defeat that work is what immortalizes a person’s memory. So man remains, among them, merely a memory.
Philosophy too tried to solve the problem of death. Some said, after successive frustrations, “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Others spoke of reincarnation — that man lives multiple lives. And today we, like those before us, try to seek immortality in our world: some push back death with medicine, even a little, and ward off old age with cosmetic surgery in the hope of regaining youth; or build a tower or a statue and become immortal through his memory — so it is said of so-and-so that he is immortal, while he is mortal; or, like the various religions, through prayer, like one who mounts a horse and leaps over a barrier into another world; or through the child, leaving a part of his body living in his son’s body as an extension of himself in the world — so-and-so is of the loins of so-and-so; and some try to achieve immortality through writing, drawing, art, or a book.
So whether a person is a believer or an atheist, he longs for immortality in one way or another, and tries to immortalize himself in his own way, which inevitably fails. How then do we attain what many have failed to attain? How do we find what civilizations failed to find, when we are weak beneath illness, decay, and the wear of the body — and remain and extend into a life that does not end and defeat death?
The German philosopher Feuerbach says, “Man is what he eats.” And this philosopher answered, without knowing it, how man’s existence is through his food. When man eats material food, he remains with it and perishes; and whoever eats the food of Jesus becomes immortal. For immortality is not a property we possess or fashion by our power, but a gift from the making of God. Therefore immortality came through a table that God made, toward which we are journeying now in this fast.
In the course of the Great Fast we always believe that we are only sinners and need forgiveness, and so we fast. But this is the beginning of the word and the beginning of the spiritual work: we fast from material food that keeps us preserved in the dust, while the material body continues in a movement whose end is death; we fast in order to reach the Paschal table where Jesus is the fatted calf and so we become, with Him, in the Book of Life.
We address to the Virgin a hymn of praise so that she may restore Him to us in longing, as though she were saying: if you desire life, take my Son as your food and drink, and you shall become like me with Him. The antidote of life is Jesus, whom we seek hungrily; for the goal of the Christian life is immortality.
The course of the fast makes clear to us that we are hungry for the face of Jesus, who not only became human like us but became food for us, because He knows that we are always hungry. Did man not fall because of eating?
Whoever desires life clings to the One who defeated death and crushed it, and unites with Him and becomes with Him one body. When the philosopher said “man is what he eats,” that is, man becomes a part of his food — and for us, Christ is our food, transforming us into Him; we become Him when we eat Him, and He dwells in us, and death in us becomes a passage and a vanishing.
Is not the one who drinks wine becoming a drunkard, and likewise the one who drinks Jesus becomes Jesus? We must read “the flesh of the Son of Man and His blood” in a deeper way, for it is not only for the forgiveness of sins but for far more.
So do not let this harsh world, O beloved, drowning in wars and the harshness of living and disturbances and the cares of livelihood, rob you of the goal of life. Do not let society deceive you that immortality lies in authority, or abundant wealth, or glory and power — for everyone made immortal by these is transient. Whoever wishes to live forever should listen to Jesus who said, and He is truthful, “If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” So cling to Him and pray, until we rise with Christ, standing in immortality, as He rose immortal and will rise again after a while. Amen.