How do we understand what we are heading towards, that is, the Passover? How do we understand that we are going in our course to the table where “the fatted calf, so that none departs hungry,” as Saint John Chrysostom says? And what is the connection of food to death and victory? Are they symbols? Or is it fine literature to delight man?
Man has seen death since the beginning: it is a hungry mouth that is not satisfied, for it devours and is not devoured, it eats and is not eaten, it kills and none kills it or overcomes it. So the war of man against death was a fierce war, in which man inevitably reaches vanishing. For 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 conquer it and to live forever.
The pharaohs, for example, sought immortality, and so they made of the tombs of their kings gardens of art, paintings of the lost paradise, and they carried into them, in their coffins, royal garments and gold, and preserved them with embalming until the day the king would be raised alive. They truly believed in immortality, but they fought death by keeping their bodies safe from the corruption of the dust and the decay of time, and so man became among them a mummy.
And as for the peoples of Mesopotamia, whoever reads their Epic of Gilgamesh sees that King Gilgamesh’s obsession was to remain immortal, not to die, and so he searched with all his strength for the elixir of life, to remain safe from corruption. But after a long search, he returns empty-handed of the medicine of immortality, and looks at the wall of his city, which he had built high and splendid, to say that this wall is the best way to immortality. That is, after his defeat he concluded that work is what immortalizes the memory of man. And so man remained among them a mere memory.
Philosophy also tried to solve the problem of death. Some said, after successive frustrations: eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. And some said, by reincarnation, that man lives many lives. And today we try, like those before us, to search for immortality in our world. For some push back death with medicine, even a little, and drive away old age with cosmetics, in the hope that youth might return, or build a tower or a statue and thus be immortalized by his memory, so that it is said of so-and-so that he is immortal while he is mortal. Or, like the various religions, by prayer, like one who mounts a horse and leaps over a barrier into another world. Or by the child, leaving a part of his body to live in the body of his son 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, or drawing and art, or a book.
So whether man is a believer or an atheist, he yearns 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 failed to attain? How do we find what civilizations failed to find, while we are weak under illness, decay, and the wearing away of the body, and yet remain and extend to a life that does not end and defeat death?
The German philosopher Feuerbach says: “man is what he eats,” and this philosopher answered, from where he did not know, how man’s existence is through his food. When man eats material food, he remains with it and perishes with it, but whoever eats the food of Jesus becomes immortal. For immortality is not a property we possess or that we manufacture by our power, but a gift made by God. Therefore immortality was through a table that God made, and we are on our way to it now, in this fast.
In the course of the Great Fast we always believe that we are only sinners and need forgiveness, and therefore we fast. But this is the beginning of the word, and the beginning of the spiritual work. For we fast from the material food that keeps us preserved in the dust, while the material body remains in a movement whose end is death. We fast in order to reach the paschal table, where Jesus is the fatted calf, so that we might become with Him in the book of life.
We direct to the Virgin a praise, that she might return Him to us with longing, as though she were saying: if you desire life, take my Son as food for you and drink, and you shall become with Him like me. The antidote to life is Jesus, whom we seek hungering, for the goal of the Christian life is immortality.
The course of the fast clarifies to us that we hunger for the face of Jesus, who not only became like us as a man, but became food for us because He knows that we are always hungry. Did man not fall because of eating?
Whoever desires life must cling to the one who defeated death and shattered it, and be united with him and become with him one body. When the philosopher said that man is what he eats, that is, man becomes a part of his food, and our food is Christ, He transforms us into Himself, so that we become, if we eat Him, Him, and He dwells in us, and death becomes in us a passing over and unto vanishing.
Does not the one who drinks wine become drunk, and likewise the one who drinks Jesus becomes Jesus? We must read “the eating of the body of the Son of Man and His blood” in a deeper way, for it is not only for the forgiveness of sins, but for much farther.
So do not let this cruel world, beloved, drowning in wars, harshness of living, disturbances, and the anxieties of livelihood, rob you of the goal of life. Do not let society deceive you into thinking that immortality is by authority, or the abundance of wealth, or glory and power, for everyone immortal in these things is passing away. Whoever wishes to be alive forever must 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, that we might rise with Christ, standing in immortality, as He rose immortal and will rise again after a while. Amen.