Fasting on the Lord’s Day

From ancient times, the Church has kept the rule that the faithful approach the holy Chalice fasting, receiving the Eucharist on the Lord’s Day before any other food or drink, ordinarily from midnight. The custom is apostolic in spirit and pre-Nicene in attestation. Already in the second century, Christians took care that the Eucharist be received before ordinary food: Tertullian, writing about the year 200, mentions as a matter of course the practice of “receiving the Body of the Lord before all other food”, treating it as the settled discipline of Christians in his day and coupling it with the reverent anxiety “that no fragment of the bread or drop of the cup fall to the ground” (Tertullian, To His Wife, II.5; On the Crown, 3, where reception “before dawn” is listed among the unwritten traditions observed everywhere). St Hippolytus of Rome (†235) makes the rule explicit in the ancient church order that bears his witness: “Let every one of the faithful take care to receive the Eucharist before he eats anything else” (Apostolic Tradition 36); and by the time of St Augustine the custom was universal and understood as apostolic: “it has pleased the Holy Spirit that, in honor of so great a Sacrament, the Body of the Lord should enter the mouth of a Christian before all other food” (Augustine, Letter 54 to Januarius), a discipline later confirmed in the canons (Carthage, canon 41; Trullo, canon 29).

The meaning of the fast is honor, hunger, and watchfulness, not payment. It is honor: the first food of the day, and the first appetite of the heart, are given to the Lord, who is received into a body kept empty for him as into a room prepared, “seek first the Kingdom of God” (Mat 6:33) applied to the stomach itself, the reverse of Esau, who sold what was holy for a meal (Gen 25:29–34; Heb 12:16; see Q486). It is hunger made into prayer: the fasting body preaches to the soul what the soul should feel, “as the deer pants for streams of water” (Psa 42:1; see Q008, Q455), so that we come to the Mysteries as the hungry are filled (Luk 1:53; see Q458), tasting first that day that “man shall not live by bread alone” (Mat 4:4), and receiving as our literal first bread him who said, “I am the living bread which came down out of heaven” (Joh 6:51; see Q432). It is watchfulness: a small, bodily keeping of the Lord’s “watch and pray” (Mat 26:41; see Q390, Q585) on the night in which the Church awaits her Bridegroom at his table.

The rule is therefore kept strictly but never mechanically. It binds the healthy and is measured by the Church’s economy for the sick, the very young, the aged, nursing mothers, and those whose medicine requires food, for “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (Mat 9:13; see Q460), and the fast is the servant of Communion, never its toll-gate; the faithful should settle particular cases with their priest rather than either presuming or scrupling. Nor does the eucharistic fast stand alone: it is the final hour of a larger preparation, the prayers before Communion, peace with all (Mat 5:23–24; see Q348, Q426), and recent Confession according to one’s rule, of which the empty stomach is only the body’s share. He who so prepares finds the ancient promise true: the fast ends not in hunger but at the richest of all tables, “blessed are those who hunger… for they shall be satisfied” (Mat 5:6).