3. Christian fasting (16–18)
A Christian’s religion: not hypocritical but real
(Matthew 6:1–6, 16–18)
Jesus began his instruction on the hill by portraying in the beatitudes the essential elements of Christian character, and went on to indicate by his metaphors of salt and light the influence for good which Christians will exert in the community if they exhibit this character. He then described Christian righteousness which must exceed the righteousness of scribes and Pharisees by accepting the full implications of God’s law without dodging anything or setting artificial limits. Christian righteousness is righteousness unlimited. It must be allowed to penetrate beyond our actions and words to our heart, mind and motives, and to master us even in those hidden, secret places.
Jesus now continues his teaching on ‘righteousness’. Chapter 6 begins (literally), ‘Beware of doing your righteousness before men.’ The word used (according to the correct reading) is dikaiosunē, the same as in 5:6, 20. Yet, although the word is the same, the emphasis has shifted. Previously ‘righteousness’ related to kindness, purity, honesty and love; now it concerns such practices as almsgiving, praying and fasting. Thus Jesus moves from a Christian’s moral righteousness to his ‘religious’ righteousness. Most versions recognize this change of subject in their translation. RSV renders the sentence, ‘Beware of practising your piety before men,’ and NEB, ‘Be careful not to make a show of your religion before men.’
It is important to acknowledge that according to Jesus Christian ‘righteousness’ has these two dimensions, moral and religious. Some speak and behave as if they imagine their major duty as Christians lies in the sphere of religious activity, whether in public (church-going) or in private (devotional exercises). Others have reacted so sharply against such an overemphasis on piety that they talk of a ‘religionless’ Christianity. For them the church has become the secular city, and prayer a loving encounter with their neighbour. But there is no need to choose between piety and morality, religious devotion in church and active service in the world, loving God and loving our neighbour, since Jesus taught that authentic Christian ‘righteousness’ includes both.
Moreover, in both spheres of righteousness Jesus issues his insistent call to his followers to be different. In Matthew 5 he teaches that our righteousness must be greater than that of the Pharisees (because they obeyed the letter of the law, while our obedience must include our heart) and greater also (in the form of love) than that of the pagans (because they love each other, while our love must include our enemies as well). Now in Matthew 6, with regard to ‘religious’ righteousness, he draws the same two contrasts. He takes the ostentatious religion of the Pharisees first and says: You must not be like the hypocrites (5). He then moves on to the mechanical formalism of the heathen and says: Do not be like them (8). Thus again Christians are to be different from both Pharisees and pagans, the religious and irreligious, the church and the world. That Christians are not to conform to the world is a familiar concept of the New Testament. It is not so well known that Jesus also saw (and foresaw) the worldliness of the church itself and called his followers not to conform to the nominal church either, but rather to be a truly Christian community distinct in its life and practice from the religious establishment, an ecclēsiola (little church) in ecclēsia. The essential difference in religion as in morality is that authentic Christian righteousness is not an external manifestation only, but one of the secret things of the heart.
6:1 Beware of practising your piety before men in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.
The fundamental warning Jesus issues is against practising your piety before men in order to be seen by them. At first sight these words appear to contradict his earlier command to ‘let your light shine before men, that they may see …’. In both verses he speaks of doing good works ‘before men’ and in both the objective is stated, namely in order to be ‘seen’ by them. But in the earlier case he commands it, while in the later one he prohibits it. How can this discrepancy be resolved? The contradiction is only verbal, not substantial. The clue lies in the fact that Jesus is speaking against different sins. It is our human cowardice which made him say ‘Let your light shine before men’, and our human vanity which made him tell us to beware of practising our piety before men. A. B. Bruce sums it up well when he writes that we are to ‘show when tempted to hide’ and ‘hide when tempted to show’. Our good works must be public so that our light shines; our religious devotions must be secret lest we boast about them. Besides, the end of both instructions of Jesus is the same, namely the glory of God. Why are we to keep our piety secret? It is in order that glory may be given to God, rather than men. Why are we to let our light shine and do good works in the open? It is that men may glorify our heavenly Father.
The three examples of ‘religious’ righteousness which Jesus gives—almsgiving, praying and fasting—occur in some form in every religion. They are prominent, for example, in the Koran. Certainly all Jews were expected to give to the poor, to pray and to fast, and all devout Jews did so. Evidently Jesus expected his disciples to do the same. For he did not begin each paragraph, ‘If you give, pray, fast, then this is how you should do it’ but ‘When’ you do so (2, 5, 16). He took it for granted that they would.
Further, this trio of religious obligations expresses in some degree our duty to God, to others and to ourselves. For to give alms is to seek to serve our neighbour, especially the needy. To pray is to seek God’s face and to acknowledge our dependence on him. To fast (that is, to abstain from food for spiritual reasons) is intended at least partly as a way to deny and so to discipline oneself. Jesus does not raise the question whether his followers will engage in these things but, assuming that they will, teaches them why and how to do so.
The three paragraphs follow an identical pattern. In vivid and deliberately humorous imagery Jesus paints a picture of the hypocrite’s way of being religious. It is the way of ostentation. Such receive the reward they want, the applause of men. With this he contrasts the Christian way, which is secret, and the only reward which Christians want, the blessing of God who is their heavenly Father and who sees in secret.
1. Christian giving (2–4)
There is much teaching in the Old Testament on compassion for the poor. The Greek word for almsgiving in verse 2 (eleēmosunē) means a deed of mercy or pity. Since our God is a merciful God, as Jesus has just emphasized, ‘kind to the ungrateful and the selfish’, his people must be kind and merciful too. Jesus obviously expected his disciples to be generous givers. His words condemn ‘the selfish stinginess of many’, as Ryle put it.
Generosity is not enough, however. Our Lord is concerned throughout this Sermon with motivation, with the hidden thoughts of the heart. In his exposition of the sixth and seventh commandments he indicated that both murder and adultery can be committed in our heart, unwarranted anger being a kind of heart-murder and lustful looks a kind of heart-adultery. In the matter of giving he has the same concern about secret thoughts. The question is not so much what the hand is doing (passing over some cash or a cheque) but what the heart is thinking while the hand is doing it. There are three possibilities. Either we are seeking the praise of men, or we preserve our anonymity but are quietly congratulating ourselves, or we are desirous of the approval of our divine Father alone.
A ravenous hunger for the praise of men was the besetting sin of the Pharisees. ‘You … receive glory from one another,’ Jesus said to them, ‘and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God.’ Similarly John the evangelist commented: ‘They loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.’ So insatiable was their appetite for human commendation that it quite spoiled their giving. Jesus ridicules the way they turned it into a public performance. He pictures a pompous Pharisee on his way to put money into the special box at the temple or synagogue, or to take a gift to the poor. In front of him march the trumpeters, blowing a fanfare as they walk, and quickly attracting a crowd. ‘They pretended, no doubt,’ comments Calvin, ‘that it was to call the poor, as apologies (sc. excuses) are never wanting: but it was perfectly obvious that they were hunting for applause and commendation.’ Whether Pharisees sometimes did this literally or whether Jesus was painting an amusing caricature does not really matter. In either case he was rebuking our childish anxiety to be highly esteemed by men. As Spurgeon put it, ‘To stand with a penny in one hand and a trumpet in the other is the posture of hypocrisy.’
And ‘hypocrisy’ is the word which Jesus used to characterize this display. In classical Greek the hupokritēs was first an orator and then an actor. So figuratively the word came to be applied to anybody who treats the world as a stage on which he plays a part. He lays aside his true identity and assumes a false one. He is no longer himself but in disguise, impersonating somebody else. He wears a mask. Now in a theatre there is no harm or deceit in the actors playing their parts. It is an accepted convention. The audience know they have come to a drama; they are not taken in by it. The trouble with the religious hypocrite, on the other hand, is that he deliberately sets out to deceive people. He is like an actor in that he is pretending (so that what we are seeing is not the real person but a part, a mask, a disguise), yet he is quite unlike the actor in this respect: he takes some religious practice which is a real activity and he turns it into what it was never meant to be, namely a piece of make-believe, a theatrical display before an audience. And it is all done for applause.
It is easy to poke fun at those Jewish Pharisees of the first century. Our Christian pharisaism is not so amusing. We may not employ a troop of trumpeters to blow a fanfare each time we give to a church or a charity. Yet, to use the familiar metaphor, we like to ‘blow our own trumpet’. It boosts our ego to see our name as subscribers to charities and supporters of good causes. We fall to the very same temptation: we draw attention to our giving in order to ‘be praised by men’.
Of such people, who seek the praise of men, Jesus says with emphasis: they have their reward. The verb translated ‘have’ (apechō) was at that time a technical term in commercial transactions; it meant to ‘receive a sum in full and give a receipt for it’. It was often so used in the papyri. So the hypocrites who seek applause will get it, but then ‘they have had all the reward they are going to get’. Nothing further is due to them, nothing but judgment on the last day.
Having forbidden his followers to give to the needy in the ostentatious manner of the Pharisees, Jesus now tells us the Christian way, which is the way of secrecy. He expresses it by another negative: But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret. The right hand is normally the active hand. So Jesus assumes we shall use it when handing over our gift. Then he adds that our left hand must not be watching. There is no difficulty in grasping his meaning. Not only are we not to tell other people about our Christian giving; there is a sense in which we are not even to tell ourselves. We are not to be self-conscious in our giving, for our self-consciousness will readily deteriorate into self-righteousness. So subtle is the sinfulness of the heart that it is possible to take deliberate steps to keep our giving secret from men while simultaneously dwelling on it in our own minds in a spirit of self-congratulation.
It would be hard to exaggerate the perversity of this. For giving is a real activity involving real people in real need. Its purpose is to alleviate the distress of the needy. The Greek word for almsgiving, as we have seen, indicates that it is a work of mercy. Yet it is possible to turn an act of mercy into an act of vanity, so that our principal motive in giving is not the benefit of the person receiving the gift but our own benefit who give it. Altruism has been displaced by a distorted egotism.
So then, in order to ‘mortify’ or put to death our sinful vanity, Jesus urges us to keep our giving secret from ourselves as well as from others. By his words ‘Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,’ writes Bonhoeffer, Jesus ‘was sounding the death-knell of the old man,’ For self-centredness belongs to the old life; the new life in Christ is one of uncalculating generosity. Of course it is not possible to obey this command of Jesus in precise literalness. If we keep accounts and plan our giving, as conscientious Christians should, we are bound to know how much we give away. We cannot very well close our eyes while writing out our cheques! Nevertheless, as soon as the giving of a gift is decided and done, it will be in keeping with this teaching of Jesus that we forget it. We are not to keep recalling it in order to gloat over it, or to preen ourselves on how generous, disciplined or conscientious our giving may have been. Christian giving is to be marked by self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness, not by self-congratulation.
What we should seek when giving to the needy is neither the praise of men, nor a ground for self-commendation, but rather the approval of God. This is implied in our Lord’s reference to our right and left hands. ‘By this expression’, Calvin writes, ‘he means that we ought to be satisfied with having God for our only witness.’ Although we can keep our giving secret from others, and to some extent secret even from ourselves, we cannot keep it secret from God. No secrets are hidden from him. So your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Some people rebel against this teaching of Jesus. They neither want nor expect a reward of any kind from anybody, they say. More than that, they find in our Lord’s promise of a reward an inherent inconsistency. How can he forbid the desire for praise from others or from ourselves and then command us to seek it from God? Surely, they say, this merely exchanges one form of vanity for another? Should we not rather give purely for the sake of giving? To seek praise from any quarter—from man, self or God—seems to them to vitiate the act of giving.
The first reason why such arguments are mistaken has to do with the nature of rewards. When people say that the idea of rewards is distasteful to them, I always suspect that the picture in their mind is prize-giving at school, with silver trophies gleaming on the platform table and everybody clapping! The conjuring up of this kind of scene may be due to the AV words ‘shall reward thee openly’. This adverb should be omitted, however. The contrast is not between a secret gift and a public reward, but between the men who neither see nor reward the gift and the God who does both.
C. S. Lewis wisely wrote in an essay entitled ‘The weight of glory’: ‘We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of reward. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it, and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it.’ Similarly we might say that a silver cup is not a very suitable reward for a schoolboy who works hard, whereas a scholarship at the university would be. C. S. Lewis concludes his argument: ‘The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.’
What, then, is the ‘reward’ which the heavenly Father gives the secret giver? It is neither public nor necessarily future. It is probably the only reward which genuine love wants when making a gift to the needy, namely to see the need relieved. When through his gifts the hungry are fed, the naked clothed, the sick healed, the oppressed freed and the lost saved, the love which prompted the gift is satisfied. Such love (which is God’s own love expressed through man) brings with it its own secret joys, and desires no other reward.
To sum up, our Christian giving is to be neither before men (waiting for the clapping to begin), nor even before ourselves (our left hand applauding our right hand’s generosity) but ‘before God’, who sees our secret heart and rewards us with the discovery that, as Jesus said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’
2. Christian praying (5, 6)
In his second example of the ‘religious’ kind of righteousness Jesus depicts two men at prayer. Again the basic difference is between hypocrisy and reality. He contrasts the reason for their praying, and its reward.
What he says of the hypocrites sounds fine at first: ‘They love … to pray.’ But unfortunately it is not prayer which they love, nor the God they are supposed to be praying to. No, they love themselves and the opportunity which public praying gives them to parade themselves.
Of course the discipline of regular prayer is good; all devout Jews prayed three times a day like Daniel. And there was nothing wrong in standing to pray, for this was the usual posture for prayer among Jews. Nor were they necessarily mistaken to pray at the street corners as well as in the synagogues if their motive was to break down segregated religion and bring their recognition of God out of the holy places into the secular life of every day. But Jesus uncovered their true motive as they stood in synagogue or street with hands uplifted to heaven in order that they might be seen by men. Behind their piety lurked their pride. What they really wanted was applause. They got it. ‘They have received their reward in full’ (NIV).
Religious pharisaism is far from dead. The accusation of hypocrisy has often been levelled at us church-goers. It is possible to go to church for the same wrongheaded reason which took the Pharisee to the synagogue: not to worship God, but to gain for ourselves a reputation for piety. It is possible to boast of our private devotions in the same way. What stands out is the perversity of all hypocritical practice. The giving of praise to God, like the giving of alms to men, is an authentic act in its own right. An ulterior motive destroys both. It degrades the service of God and men into a mean kind of self-service. Religion and charity become an exhibitionist display. How can we pretend to be praising God, when in reality we are concerned that men will praise us?
How, then, should Christians pray? Go into your room and shut the door, Jesus said. We are to close the door against disturbance and distraction but also to shut out the prying eyes of men and to shut ourselves in with God. Only then can we obey the Lord’s next command: Pray to your Father who is in secret, or, as the Jerusalem Bible clarifies it, ‘who is in that secret place’. Our Father is there, waiting to welcome us. Just as nothing destroys prayer like side-glances at human spectators, so nothing enriches it like a sense of the presence of God. For he sees not the outward appearance only but the heart, not the one who is praying only but the motive for which he prays. The essence of Christian prayer is to seek God. Behind all true prayer lies the conversation which God initiates:
Thou hast said, ‘Seek ye my face.’
My heart says to thee,
‘Thy face, Lord, do I seek.’
We seek him in order to acknowledge him as the person he is, God the Creator, God the Lord, God the Judge, God our heavenly Father through Jesus Christ our Saviour. We desire to meet him in the secret place in order to bow down before him in humble worship, love and trust. Then, Jesus went on, your Father who sees in secret will reward you. R. V. G. Tasker points out that the Greek word for the ‘room’ into which we are to withdraw to pray (tameion) ‘was used for the store-room where treasures might be kept’. The implication may be, then, that ‘there are treasures already awaiting’ us when we pray. Certainly the hidden rewards of prayer are too many to enumerate. In words of the apostle Paul, when we cry, ‘Abba, Father,’ the Holy Spirit witnesses with our spirit that we are indeed God’s children, and we are granted a strong assurance of his fatherhood and love. He lifts the light of his face upon us and gives us his peace. He refreshes our soul, satisfies our hunger, quenches our thirst. We know we are no longer orphans for the Father has adopted us; no longer prodigals for we have been forgiven; no longer alienated, for we have come home.
Our Lord’s emphasis on the need for secrecy should not be driven to extremes. To interpret it with rigid literalism would be guilty of the very pharisaism against which he is warning us. If all our praying were to be kept secret, we would have to give up church-going, family prayers and prayer meetings. His reference here is to private prayer. The Greek words are in the singular, as the AV indicates: ‘But thou, when thou prayest, enter thy closet, … shut thy door, pray to thy Father.’ Jesus has not yet come to public prayer. When he does, he tells us to pray in the plural ‘Our Father’, and one can scarcely pray that prayer in secret alone.
Rather than becoming absorbed in the mechanics of secrecy, we need to remember that the purpose of Jesus’ emphasis on ‘secret’ prayer is to purify our motives in praying. As we are to give out of a genuine love for people, so we are to pray out of a genuine love for God. We must never use either of these exercises as a pious cloak for self-love.
3. Christian fasting (16–18)
The Pharisees fasted ‘twice a week’, on Mondays and Thursdays. John the Baptist and his disciples also fasted regularly, even ‘often’, but the disciples of Jesus did not. So how is it that in these verses of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus not only expected his followers to fast, but gave them instructions how to do so? Here is a passage of Scripture which is commonly ignored. I suspect that some of us live our Christian lives as if these verses had been torn out of our Bibles. Most Christians lay stress on daily prayer and sacrificial giving, but few lay any stress on fasting. Evangelical Christianity in particular, whose characteristic emphasis is on an inward religion of heart and spirit, does not readily come to terms with an outward bodily practice like fasting. Is it not an Old Testament exercise, we ask, enjoined by Moses for the Day of Atonement, and after the return from Babylonian exile required on some other annual days, but now abrogated by Christ? Did not people come to Jesus and ask: ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast’? And is fasting not a Roman Catholic practice, so that the medieval church developed an elaborate calendar of ‘feast days’ and ‘fast days’? Did it not also become associated with a superstitious view of the mass and of ‘fasting communion’?
We can answer ‘yes’ to all these questions. But it is easy to be selective in our knowledge and use of both Scripture and church history. Here are some other and balancing facts: Jesus himself, our Lord and Master, fasted for forty days and nights in the wilderness; in reply to the question people asked him, he said, ‘When the bridegroom is taken away, … then they (sc. my disciples) will fast.’ In the Sermon on the Mount he told us how to fast, on the assumption that we would. And in the Acts and the New Testament letters there are several references to the apostles fasting. So we cannot dismiss fasting as either an Old Testament practice abrogated in the New or a Catholic practice rejected by Protestants.
First, then, what is fasting? Strictly speaking, it is a total abstention from food. It can be legitimately extended, however, to mean going without food partially or totally, for shorter or longer periods. Hence of course the naming of each day’s first meal as ‘breakfast’, since at it we ‘break our fast’, the night period during which we ate nothing.
There can be no doubt that in Scripture fasting has to do in various ways with self-denial and self-discipline. First and foremost, to ‘fast’ and to ‘humble ourselves before God’ are virtually equivalent terms (e.g. Ps. 35:13; Is. 58:3, 5). Sometimes this was an expression of penitence for past sin. When people were deeply distressed over their sin and guilt, they would both weep and fast. For example, Nehemiah assembled the people ‘with fasting and in sackcloth’, and they ‘stood and confessed their sins’; the people of Nineveh repented at Jonah’s preaching, proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth; Daniel sought God ‘by prayer and supplications with fasting, sackcloth and ashes’, prayed to the Lord his God and made confession of the sins of his people; and Saul of Tarsus after his conversion, moved to penitence for his persecution of Christ, for three days neither ate nor drank.
Sometimes still today, when the people of God are convicted of sin and moved to repentance, it is not inappropriate as a token of penitence to mourn, to weep and to fast. The Anglican Homily entitled ‘Of good works, and first of fasting’ suggests this as the way to apply to ourselves the word of Jesus that ‘when the bridegroom is taken away, then my disciples will fast’. It argues that Christ the bridegroom may be said to be ‘with us’ and we may be said to be enjoying the marriage feast, when we are rejoicing in him and his salvation. But the bridegroom may be said to be ‘taken away from us’ and the feast to be suspended when we are oppressed by defeat, affliction and adversity. ‘Then is it a fit time’, says the Homily, ‘for that man to humble himself to Almighty God by fasting, and to mourn and bewail his sins with a sorrowful heart.’
We are not to humble ourselves before God only in penitence for past sin, however, but also in dependence on him for future mercy. And here again fasting may express our self-humbling before God. For if ‘penitence and fasting’ go together in Scripture, ‘prayer and fasting’ are even more often coupled. This is not so much a regular practice, so that whenever we pray we fast, as an occasional and special arrangement, so that when we need to seek God for some particular direction or blessing we turn aside from food and other distractions in order to do so. Thus Moses fasted on Mount Sinai immediately after the covenant was renewed by which God had taken Israel to be his people; Jehoshaphat, seeing the armies of Moab and Ammon advancing towards him, ‘set himself to seek the Lord and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah’; Queen Esther, before she took her life in her hands by approaching the king, urged Mordecai to gather the Jews and ‘hold a fast’ on her behalf, while she and her maids did the same; Ezra ‘proclaimed a fast’ before leading the exiles back to Jerusalem, ‘that we might humble ourselves before our God to seek from him a straight way’; not least, as already mentioned, our Lord Jesus himself fasted immediately before his public ministry began; and the early church followed his example, the church of Antioch before Paul and Barnabas were sent out on the first missionary journey, and Paul and Barnabas themselves before appointing elders in every new church which they had planted. The evidence is plain that special enterprises need special prayer, and that special prayer may well involve fasting.
There is another biblical reason for fasting. Hunger is one of our basic human appetites, and greed one of our basic human sins. So ‘self-control’ is meaningless unless it includes the control of our bodies, and is impossible without self-discipline. Paul uses the athlete as his example. To compete in the games he must be physically fit, and therefore he goes into training. His training will include a disciplined regime of food, sleep and exercise: ‘every athlete exercises self-control in all things’. And Christians engaged in the Christian race should do the same. Paul writes of ‘pommeling’ his body (beating it black and blue) and ‘subduing’ it (leading it about as a slave). This is neither masochism (finding pleasure in self-inflicted pain), nor false asceticism (like wearing a hair shirt or sleeping on a bed of spikes), nor an attempt to win merit like the Pharisee in the temple. Paul would reject all such ideas, and so must we. We have no cause to ‘punish’ our bodies (for they are God’s creation), but must discipline them to make them obey us. And fasting (a voluntary abstinence from food) is one way of increasing our self-control.
One further reason for fasting should be mentioned, namely a deliberate doing without in order to share what we might have eaten (or its cost) with the undernourished. There is biblical warrant for this practice. Job could say that he had not ‘eaten his morsel alone’ but shared it with orphans and widows.’ By contrast, when through Isaiah God condemned the hypocritical fasting of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, his complaint was that they were seeking their own pleasure and oppressing their workers on the very day of their fast. This meant partly that there was no correlation in their mind or actions between the food they did without and the material need of their employees. Theirs was a religion without justice or charity. So God said: ‘Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, … to let the oppressed go free? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house …?’ Jesus implied something similar when he told of the rich man feasting sumptuously every day while the beggar lay at his gate, desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from his table.
It is not difficult to find more modern applications. In sixteenth-century England abstinence from meat was enjoined on certain days, and the eating of fish instead, not by the church but by the state, in order to help maintain ‘fishertowns bordering upon the seas’ and thereby to reduce ‘victuals to a more moderate price, to the better sustenance of the poor’. In our own day, the plight of the hungry millions in some developing countries is brought before us daily on our television screens. To have an occasional (or, better, regular) ‘hunger-lunch’, or miss a meal once or twice a week, and at all times to avoid being overweight by overeating—these are forms of fasting which please God because they express a sense of solidarity with the poor.
So whether for penitence or for prayer, for self-discipline or for solidary love, there are good biblical reasons for fasting. Whatever our reasons, Jesus took it for granted that fasting would have a place in our Christian life. His concern was that, as with our giving and praying so with our fasting, we should not, like the hypocrites, draw attention to ourselves. Their practice was to look dismal and disfigure their faces. The word translated ‘disfigure’ (aphanizo) means literally to ‘make to disappear’ and so to ‘render invisible or unrecognizable’. They may have neglected personal hygiene, or covered their heads with sackcloth, or perhaps smeared their faces with ashes in order to look pale, wan, melancholy and so outstandingly holy. All so that their fasting might be seen and known by everybody. The admiration of the onlookers would be all the reward they got. ‘But as for you, my disciples,’ Jesus went on, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that is, ‘brush your hair and wash your face’. Jesus was not recommending anything unusual, as if they were now to affect a particular kind of gaiety. For, as Calvin justly comments, ‘Christ does not withdraw us from one kind of hypocrisy, to lead us into another.’ He assumed that they would have a ‘wash and brush up’ every day, and on fast days they were to do it as usual, so that nobody would suspect that they were fasting. Then once again your Father who sees in secret will reward you. For the purpose of fasting is not to advertise ourselves but to discipline ourselves, not to gain a reputation for ourselves but to express our humility before God and our concern for others in need. If these purposes are fulfilled, it will be reward enough.
Looking back over these verses, it is evident that throughout Jesus has been contrasting two alternative kinds of piety, pharisaic and Christian. Pharisaic piety is ostentatious, motivated by vanity and rewarded by men. Christian piety is secret, motivated by humility and rewarded by God.
In order to grasp the alternative even more clearly, it may be helpful to look at the cause and effect of both forms. First the effect. Hypocritical religion is perverse because it is destructive. We have seen that praying, giving and fasting are all authentic activities in their own right. To pray is to seek God, to give is to serve others, to fast is to discipline oneself. But the effect of hypocrisy is to destroy the integrity of these practices by turning each of them into an occasion for self-display.
What, then, is the cause? If we can isolate this, we can also find the remedy. Although one of the refrains of this passage is ‘before men in order to be seen and praised by men’, it is not men with whom the hypocrite is obsessed, but himself. ‘Ultimately’, writes Dr Lloyd-Jones, ‘our only reason for pleasing men around us is that we may please ourselves.’ The remedy then is obvious. We have to become so conscious of God that we cease to be self-conscious. And it is on this that Jesus concentrates.
Perhaps I can put it in this way: absolute secrecy is impossible for any of us. It is not possible to do, say or think anything in the absence of spectators. For even if no human being is there, God is watching us. Not as a species of celestial policeman ‘snooping’ in order to catch us out, but as our loving heavenly Father, who is ever looking for opportunities to bless us. So the question is: which spectator matters to us the more, earthly or heavenly, men or God? The hypocrite performs his rituals ‘in order to be seen by men’. The Greek verb is theathēnai. That is, they are in a theatre giving a performance. Their religion is a public spectacle. The true Christian is also aware that he is being watched, but for him the audience is God.
But why is it, someone may ask, that a different audience causes a different performance? Surely the answer is this. We can bluff a human audience; they can be taken in by our performance. We can fool them into supposing that we are genuine in our giving, praying, fasting, when we are only acting. But God is not mocked; we cannot deceive him. For God looks on the heart. That is why to do anything in order to be seen by men is bound to degrade it, while to do it to be seen by God is equally bound to ennoble it.
So we must choose our audience carefully. If we prefer human spectators, we shall lose our Christian integrity. The same will happen if we become our own audience. As Bonhoeffer put it: ‘It is even more pernicious if I turn myself into a spectator of my own prayer performance … I can lay on a very nice show for myself even in the privacy of my own room.’ So we must choose God for our audience. As Jesus watched the people putting their gifts into the temple treasury, so God watches us as we give. As we pray and fast secretly, he is there in the secret place. God hates hypocrisy but loves reality. That is why it is only when we are aware of his presence that our giving, praying and fasting will be real.