Being Teachable through Hunger
A spiritual lesson on being hangry
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” (Mt. 5:6)
“Hunger,” the well-worn Greek aphorism said, “is a teacher of many things.” When we deprive ourselves of the food our stomach enjoys, we gain a deeper understanding of the kind of people we are. Withholding ourselves the sustenance of the body, we can quickly come to see how quickly we move to anger, how easily we become irritable, and how slow we are to be patient. Want evidence of how formed (or unformed) you remain in your walk with Christ? Refuse to eat for a day. Or, for some of us, just a lunch. Hunger reveals.
But hunger has the power to awaken something within us. Case in point: writing. Every writer is different. If you’ve met one writer, you’ve met one writer. Anyone who dedicates themselves to the sacred vocation of words will discover what set of skills and habits best shape the work that they do. I recall reading a book by Mason Currey entitled Daily Rituals, which narrates how various writers discovered their creative groove. One writer woke early, before everyone else, and stood in the cold backyard naked to awaken their souls; one horror novelist would write while sitting in a coffin, and another screenwriter would smoke a pack of cigarettes and force themselves to finish a chapter before the pack was finished. None of these have I tried (for everyone’s benefit). Still, I’ve learned one thing about myself as a writer.
I write best when I’m hungry.
Hands down, my best writing takes place after lunch. To be more specific, after not having eaten breakfast or lunch. Weird, right? I’m not exactly sure why. But my hunch is that when I eat breakfast, my metabolism takes a nosedive. Then, after lunch, I’m just downright tired and ready for a nap. There’s likely a somatic explanation that one of my medical readers can clue me in on. But, still, I’ve got another theory—one that’s rooted in the story of Jesus fasting in the desert. And it entails me finding my greatest strength right next to my empty stomach.
Why do I do my best work when I’m hangry?
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst”? What could Jesus have meant by this? Blessedness for the hungry? This little line at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 is intriguingly preceded by Jesus being in the desert, where the devil tempted him after forty days of fasting. Jesus had just finished his hunger strike in the desert. And now, he blesses the experience of hunger. The connection is unmistakable.
When we examine the story of Jesus in the desert closely, we observe that the devil approaches Jesus after he has been fasting for 40 days (Mt. 4:1-11). Traditionally, when this text is preached, it is boldly taught as a point that the devil came to Jesus in his weakness—so, he will come to us in our weakness. Was Jesus hungry? Sure! But by the time the story is finished, we see that Jesus still has not eaten. And so when Luke picks up with Jesus right after the temptation in the desert, he simply records that “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit.” (Lk. 4:14; italics mine) What appears to be happening is the opposite of what we would think should happen. Jesus isn’t made weaker by his fasting. Jesus appears to be embodying his power as the Son of God in a palpable, enlivening way.1
That line turns the story around. The picture we get of the devil tempting Jesus in the Gospels is not, as we’re often told, of the devil coming at Jesus in his greatest weakness. Instead, it appears that the devil comes to Jesus while Jesus is experiencing profound and powerful intimacy with his Father through prayer and fasting in the desert. Jesus isn’t weak and sick as he fasts. Jesus is being empowered by fasting. This has great explanatory power for my life. Most assuredly, at times, temptation comes to us at our weakest moments. However, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that temptations arise precisely at the very place where we are experiencing newfound power in our intimacy with God. Many of us will experience that we face more temptation, spiritual attack, and dark thinking just after or in the midst of having experienced something that brought us close to God. I tell you: I face more dark enticement after preaching an anointed sermon or delivering a powerful lecture than at any other time of the week.
Where I think I’m strong, he comes at me.
Fasting (in this instance, the intentional act of restraining our consumption) is not what we often think it is. Many people perceive fasting as a dogged denial of good things. But what if fasting is intended to signal our return to the way we were meant to live in a world without sin? The Eastern Orthodox have a much greater appreciation for this than we do. For the Orthodox, the first fast in Scripture is in the Garden of Eden as God commands the first humans not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Yes, they were free to eat from any other tree, but they were meant to exercise self-control in avoiding one of them. As Orthodox Father Alexander Schmemann wrote, too often, Christians think that fasting entails:
The time when something which may be good in itself is forbidden, as if God were taking pleasure in torturing us. Instead, fasting is a return to the ‘normal’ life, to that ‘fasting’ which Adam and Eve broke, thus introducing suffering and death into the world.2
Did you catch it? The rebellion of the world (what some call ‘the fall’) is the result of a fast that was wrongly broken. A good, complete, and peaceful Eden was a place where fasting was a ‘normal’ (so Schmemann) part of the human experience. Humans, even in Paradise, were to know what it was like not to get everything their bellies growled for. Fasting isn’t the result of sin. It existed before sin. To fast, then, is to willingly restore the art of trusting that the first humans had God in Eden.
Hunger is meant to teach us. God is not only the God who invented food. God is also the one who created the hunger that was made to long for it; and for Him! Hunger was built into the experience of Eden. To be clear: starvation wasn’t. True, biblical, God-ordained fasting should never be forced or a necessity. It is something that must be willingly accepted by one’s will and not imposed or forced. Sometimes it is in our physical hunger that our hunger for God is reawakened. Samuel Rutherford once had a line in one of his writings that summed this up best: “His wise love feeds us with hunger. It fattens us with famine. Lord, spill my fool’s heaven I built on Earth that I might have your heaven forever.”
Learn from your hunger. Give it a chance to have a voice in your life. Don’t eat for a meal or two. Refuse to add sugar to your coffee or fill the time with a glance at the news. And don’t watch Netflix tonight as you go to bed. Allow some hunger to arise from the surface. And let it teach you. Not only will it often reveal some of your deepest idols and enmeshments. It may, if you are willing to learn from it, teach you a new form of power you have in God.
And, for a few weirdos like me, a better way to write.
Thanks for being a reader of the Low-Level Theologian. As always, you can find me wasting as little time as possible on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or, check out my podcast with Dr. Nijay Gupta at Slow Theology. Do remember that I just released A Teachable Spirit: The Virtue of Learning from Strangers, Enemies, and Absolutely Anyone with the folks at Zondervan Reflective. Pick up a copy and dig on in.
An insightful point made by my friend David Reed in a sermon on “self-control” at North Park Church on May 25, 2025.
The context in mind for the author here is Lent. While directly addressing Lent, he discusses the role of fasting in the Christian life. I’ve slightly adapted to fit our topic at hand on fasting. See Schmemann, Alexander, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1969), 43.
Great stuff there AJ—as always! Deb and I are just starting on a journey of learning about fasting. I’ve never thought of it as ‘normative’ as you indicate for the Orthodox.
So interesting and insightful, A.J.! As I continue to lose my physical life, I find myself completely reliant on the Godhead for my daily bread, which in my case, has become life itself. My fasting of life is my greatest blessing!