I was doomscrolling on Instagram the other day when I came upon a reel from a popular account called “streetpoller.” The video was one of those man-on-the-street interviews where creators ask questions of strangers in public spaces. In this particular reel, the interviewer asked a pair of girl friends if they would rather have “dinner with Jesus or $500,000.”
“Dinner with Jesus,” the first girl responded, “I’m Jewish but I think it’d be cool to have dinner with Jesus, and I think I’d choose that over money.”
“Dinner with Jesus 100%,” her friend jumped in, “I feel like it would change my life more than money could.”
I am rather ashamed to admit that when I first watched the video, my immediate reaction was to prefer the $500,000 over dinner with Jesus. In fairness, my rationale was something along the lines of: “I eat at the Lord’s Table every Sunday at church anyway, so obviously I should pick the option that I don’t already have access to.”
However, when I shared this story with a couple of friends at our Tuesday night Bible study, they were quick to point out that partaking of the Eucharist on Sunday mornings is not exactly the same as physically sharing a full meal with the Incarnated Christ. If anything, the beauty of the Eucharist — also known as the Lord’s Supper and/or Holy Communion — will only be fulfilled at the last day when, Lord willing, we shall all be “invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9).
In the same way that marriage functions as a sacrament (visible sign of an invisible reality) on this side of eternity by pointing us to the metaphysical union between Christ and the Church which will culminate in Revelation 19’s “marriage supper of the Lamb,” the Eucharist in all its beauty is but a shadow of what awaits us on the other side of eternity.
“This is my body that is for you,” said Jesus to His disciples at dinnertime the night He was ultimately betrayed by Judas, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthian 11:24). Partaking of the Eucharist, therefore, is how we “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (v.26). It certainly pales in comparison to the fullness of what communion with Christ will one day be like, but it will do for now. The girls in the streetpoller video are thus more than justified in their choice to physically have dinner with Jesus if the opportunity presented itself.
But what about all that they could do for the Kingdom with $500,000? Did the Apostle Paul not say that “living is Christ and dying is gain” (Philippians 1:21), meaning that we ought to dedicate ourselves fully to the expansion of the Kingdom while we are alive even as we look forward to meeting Christ face to face after our deaths?
This was my argument last Tuesday night as I stubbornly defended my impulse to score $500,000 instead of enjoying a meal with my Lord and Saviour.
Then it hit me.
This had been Judas Iscariot’s very argument against Mary of Bethany as she anointed Jesus’s feet in John 12 with about a year’s wages’ worth of perfume.
“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” inquired Judas (v.5) before Jesus’s response in verses 7 and 8:
Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.
While Judas’s concern for the poor — albeit hardly genuine (see v.6) — was in principle admirable, his real problem was that his heart was too cold to see the beauty in Mary’s extravagant expression of worship towards her God. His posture was reminiscent of the Jews who questioned Jesus on why His disciples did not fast like the Pharisees and disciples of John the Baptist did.
“The wedding attendants cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they?” Jesus responded to His critics. “The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them,” He continued, “and then they will fast” (Matthew 9:15).
In other words, what is the point of fasting if not to be drawn closer into communion with Christ? And by the same token, what could possibly be wrong with feasting if Christ Himself is at the centre of the feast? Herein lies the tension that Fr. Michael Rutledge articulates so well in his piece on “Extravagant Asceticism.”
“From the very earliest days,” he writes, “Christians ordered their weeks around Feasts and Fasting, celebrating the Lord’s Supper every Sunday and fasting every Wednesday and Friday.”
This weekly and yearly pattern of Asceticism and Extravagance, of Fasting and Feasting, formed the heart of the Church. These two things held both sides in check, for a Feast is only Extravagant when it is done with the Fast in mind [and] fasting, likewise, is bearable and joyful, knowing that there is always a Feast that frames it. Fasting with no end is not the goal, and feasting without restriction is not the goal. But the Joy and sacrifice of both are needed to form the soul rightly.
I think that this is where I have personally fallen short in recent weeks and months. I think that my failure to incorporate the sacrificial, sobering, tempering elements of asceticism (the word which Rutledge defines in terms of a “monastic self-denial”) has prevented me from leaning into the holy kind of extravagance that Mary of Bethany displayed when she anointed Jesus’s feet on the first day of Passion Week. Instead, I — much like Judas Iscariot — have allowed the spirit of consumerism to increase my love of the world whilst suppressing my love for God. I am reminded of the following admonishment from the book of 1 John:
Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world, for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God abide forever.
Clearly, I have issues. But thank God for hope. Thank God that there does indeed exist a cure to the consumeristic curse which continues to plague our culture. In much the same vein as Fr. Rutledge, Josh Nadeau explains why fasting is the key to this cure.
In part one of his three-part commentary on the Hollywood classic Fight Club, Nadeau writes that fasting “inverts greed and lust and gluttony [by tuning] our souls outward, toward God, so that we can be generous, chaste, and temperate; so that creation can be received with joy rather than avarice.” A few sentences later, he drops my favourite quote of the piece:
Healing starts by aiming your hungers at the right things. By the slow and hidden transformation of worship. And then, once your hungers are properly aimed, you are healed by feasting on the Good.
In “Extravagant Ascetism,” Fr. Rutledge reminded me that “the Church built a calendar that… built around the Feasts and the Fasts. Lent and Easter, Advent and Christmastide.” Perhaps this Advent season — notwithstanding the fact that it is already over a week old — presents the perfect opportunity for myself and others to reverse course and lean into fasting and asceticism so that we may feast, come Christmas, like we have not done in a long time.
If you have made it this far, I would love to hear how you have been fasting/are considering fasting this Advent—not just what you are giving up, but how you are intentionally leaning into communion with Christ as you await His coming.
I honestly haven't had opportunity to learn much about Judas and never thought of the angle, What would Judas do?" Your post changed things for me. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!