Хришћански пост у постмодерном друштву: испитивање критеријума
Christian Fasting in Postmodern Society: Considering the Criteria

Summary/Abstract: The contemporary world is a complex and fluid reality, an amalgam in the making. For Christians, being aware of the worldly realities they live in is interwoven with the very self of the Church and her mission, that is with the process of encountering the world and manifesting the Kingdom, inviting the world in and transforming it into a new creation. The Church has to meet this complex world and articulate an invitation of hope in contemporary language. For Christians, receiving food is an act of thanksgiving and experiencing the world as a gift. Yet, abstaining from food is a confession that the world is not the source of life. The feast is a sign of the joyful Kingdom, while fasting declares that the Kingdom in its completeness is still expected. It is the dialectics of the presence and absence of the Bridegroom, as Christ himself put it (cf.Lk 5, 33–35). In the Christian way, however, hunger and thirst are to be transformed into a quest for what is truly substantial for humans, for the food that does not perish(cf. Jn 6, 27). The Gospel says that the fasting Christ was confronted with the devil in the desert after he became hungry (cf. Mt 4, 2–3; Lk 4, 4–3). It was a hungry and thirstyGod-man who showed us the way out of the three major religio-political temptations of the human person: the miracle that enslaves freedom, the mystery of self-assertion, and the power to subjugate. To be a Christian coincides with being hungry and thirsty, that is an incomplete being, a being in the making, in statu viae until the final banquet is held, in statu belli until resurrection, hungry and thirsty for justice. If we are not in a position to testify to this prophetic outlook, what will be left is a task for dieticians and cooks. ▶ Key words: fasting, postmodern society, Church, food

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