"on that day they will fast" (vs.20)

The scene is still so vivid and the emotions associated with it still tender. Since my parents were missionaries in the isolated jungles of Irian Jaya there were no schooling options other than the boarding school located some 300 miles away from home. As I sat on the first day in the single engine airplane now racing down the dirt runway my eyes shifted away from the fading image of my parents waving goodbye to the small package held in my hands. My mother gave me clear instructions not to open the package until the plane was well off the ground. For a moment I forgot my tears and excitedly ripped open the wrapping, which revealed a small colourful ring that fitted perfectly on my finger. In the weeks and months that followed with the adjustments and pangs for home, that little ring would serve as slight comfort in the separation that would be a pattern for my life in the years that followed.

I learned something valuable about separation in those formative years. That is, until you are with the ones you love the most (in my case, my parents) you are never really settled or feel that you are at home. The passage on fasting that we are looking at has really more to do with separation and reunion than it does the discipline of fasting. To Jesus there was no sense in his disciples fasting when the one they loved most, the giver and provider of life himself, was with them. A time would come however, and we live in that time today, when Jesus would be physically removed from their presence leaving them and all his followers with a sense of something missing that would remain until he returned. It is in his absence that our longing for him increases. Fasting during that separation would ensure that nothing or no one else would fill the vacuum caused by his absence.

I really don't think Jesus is all that interested in whether I fast or not. He wants to know if I miss him. Do I long to be with him as though I can never become settled until I am? Do I feel out of place in this world knowing that he is preparing a better place for me and one day will return to take me there? Am I determined to allow nothing else to become a substitute for him? I don't know whatever happened to that colorful ring. If I found it, it would bring back a flood of memories of separations and reunions. But my personal experience has prepared me for a far greater reunion, and I can't wait for it.

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