Acts of True Piety - Reflections on Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21, Ash Wednesday, Year C

by John C Holbert on Saturday, February 1, 2025

While the Hebrew Bible passage from Joel 2, assigned for Ash Wednesday, offers us a dire warning concerning the coming of God into our worship lives, coming with anger and demands for our conversion, Matthew focuses his attention on the appropriate actions of a true worshipper of God in any age and at any time. He begins with what might be called a basic statement of principle: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness before people to be seen by them” (Mt.6:1). In other words, whenever you worship, your focus must always be on God, not on how you look to others when you worship. 

         These are famous admonitions, but they seem rather obvious, do they not? Of course, when I pray, I have God in my heart and thought, not the way I look while doing it, whether I surreptitiously open my eyes or not. When I fast, I do not fast because I want others to laud my gloomy and haggard face, do I? When I offer gifts to those in need, surely I do not do so to achieve the approbation of those who witness my generosity? Well, I may be after the tax write-off, I suppose, but I do not expect fireworks and loud hosannas to accompany my acts of generosity, do I? My prayer should be my own, in secret, in private, says Matthew; my alms-giving should be done in such a way is not to allow my left hand to know what my right hand is doing; this may be another rather clever way of saying that the only one who should be aware of my gift is God, not even my closest friend. And my fast is for God, not to demonstrate just how wondrously pious I am; I should fast with a clean face, an oiled head (or the modern equivalent of one!), not appearing about to die of hunger.

         Well, OK. But just who is Matthew addressing with these well-known demands? In keeping with Matthew’s usual audience, it must be the Jews of his day. But, if that is so, and I imagine it is, we modern Christians should tread very carefully here. It is far too easy to suggest—and many Christians over the centuries have done more than merely suggest—that Matthew is rejecting the Jewish piety of his time, intending to replace it with a far more modest, freshly Christian take on these pious acts. This has led more than once to a roundly anti-Jewish polemic, assuming that the Jews of Matthew’s day spent their days blowing trumpets to announce their grand gifts, praying loudly and at length in the synagogues to demonstrate their exemplary piousness, etching their faces with deep lines, matched by feigned gloom, to portray their wonderful and physically dangerous actions toward God. 

         We do well to remember that nearly all of Matthew’s audience were themselves Jews, struggling to understand just how the coming of Jesus of Nazareth has affected their understanding of what it means to be Jewish. If Jesus is indeed Messiah, the long-awaited one, then how will my daily practice of worship change? I would answer very little in the practice of piety will change at all. In fact, there is very little if anything in the material to be found in Mt.6 that a pious  Jew of the first century would find objectionable. Any good Jew then would know that true piety toward God does not consist of public displays for the expectation of human reward, that true piety consists of private prayer, quiet and consistent gifts for those in need, and fasts that direct the mind and heart toward the divine, not toward the eager masses of people. Rewards do not come from fellow humans, but only from God.

         And something else should be noted. The material that the lectionary excludes from today’s reading is Matthew’s take on the Lord’s Prayer. His recitation of the famous prayer is far more extensive than Luke’s in nearly every way. In fact, it contains many of the same notions that one finds in the most famous Jewish prayer of the time, the so-called ‘Amidah (from the Hebrew for “standing,” since the prayer was often done while standing). It must be noted that practically every phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, according to Matthew, appears in the Eighteen Benedictions (another name for the ‘Amidah). Since the ‘amidah is apparently from the same time as Matthew’s gospel, by most accounts, it could further be said that the Lord’s Prayer may well have taken the place of the Eighteen Benedictions as a regular feature of the worship of the Jewish Christians.

         Any preacher must make it quite clear that Matthew 6 is in no way a general attack on the public piety of first-century Jews, but is a sharp criticism of ostentatious displays of what should be private religious acts; that criticism would be leveled at Jews and Jewish Christians alike. Hence, it might well behoove us Ash Wednesday worshippers not to flash our ashen crosses too ostentatiously following the imposition of them. No need to demonstrate our piety in such public ways. God will know, and since it is for God that we have received the ashes in the first place, that will be our reward. It is enough.