Lent and Fasting 3

from Alexander Schmemann's book "The Great Lent" - this is good stuff. This is similar in concept to John Milton's "Paradise Regained" which is basically Irenaeus' theory of "recapitulation" - that Jesus was representative Adam (and Israel) and faithfully lived out and won back through his life, death and resurrection all God's promises for a new humanity.

"Christ is the New Adam. He comes to repair the damage inflicted on life by Adam, to restore man to true life, and thus He also begins with fasting 'When He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He became hungry' (Matt. 4:2). Hunger is that state in which we realize our dependence on something else - when we urgently and essentially need food - showing thus that we have no life in ourselves. It is that limit beyond which I either die from starvation or, having satisfied my body, have again the impression of being alive. It is, in other words, the time when we face the ultimate question: on what does my life depend? And, since the question is not an academic one but is felt with my entire body, it is also the time of temptation. Satan came to Adam in Paradise; he came to Christ in the desert. He came to two hungry men and said: eat, for your hunger is the proof that you depend entirely on food, that your life is in food. And Adam believed and ate; but Christ rejected that temptation and said: man shall not live by bread alone but by God. He refused to accept that cosmic lie which Satan imposed on the world, making that lie a self-evident truth not even debated any more, the foundation of our entire world view, of science, medicine, and perhaps even of religion. By doing this, Christ restored that relationship between food, life, and God which Adam broke, and which we still break every day." (pp. 95-96)