Take care not to perform righteous deeds
in order that people may see them;
otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father.
The point of our practices is prayer, fasting, and alms-giving must not be one of cultivating a religious self-image. All three of these practices are together a call to allow God himself to take the first place in our hearts. The trouble is before we feel the truth of that in an experiential way we often experience a vacuum in the space that we used to fill by self-centered, self-focused, and self-directed choices, often by the seeking of pleasure and entertainment and the avoidance of difficulty. Lent is a call to inhabit the vacuum rather than seeking to fill it ourselves. It is a call to trust in the Lord himself to give us recompense and reward.
When you give alms,
do not blow a trumpet before you,
as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets
to win the praise of others.
Given that most of us aren't blowing a trumpet or standing on street corners to pray, we may wonder, is there really anything about which we should worry? While it is true that we refrain from such obvious ways of seeking validation it still often the case that our left hand is entirely preoccupied with what our right hand is doing. Somehow our practices come to dominate our own attention as we strive struggle to get things just right so that we can then in turn be just right in our own eyes. Jesus calls us rather to be as forgetful as we can of our prayer, fasting, and alms-giving, while still persisting in doing them.
But when you pray, go to your inner room,
close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.
And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.
Lent is a call to enter deeply into the inner room of our hearts where we are alone with the Father who is hidden. There are also outer rooms of the heart that are too full for this purpose, where we are still too much on our minds for there to be room for us to encounter God. Those rooms are insufficient because the purpose of Lent is not one of a negation. It is not giving things up to punish ourselves nor even merely to make us more virtuous and less sinful in some abstract sense. Rather Lent is meant to facilitate an encounter with the living God. It is meant to be a setting aside of the things that normally distract us, and the intentional alignment of our time and our treasure with his will. It is not, properly speaking that any of our practices earn his presence. But as we respond to grace by removing obstacles to his presence he delights to come to us in new and life changing ways.
And your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you.
Isn't it better to wait for the Father than to try to seek repayment by the mere sympathy we might get by making ourselves look pathetic and pitiful in the eyes of others because of all the work we imagine ourselves to be doing? Let's try to enter in a bit more, to think of ourselves a bit less, and to make room for God this Lent.
Why should they say among the peoples,
‘Where is their God?’”
Then the LORD was stirred to concern for his land
and took pity on his people.
Lent may feel like routine after having lived through a few (or more than a few) Lents in years passed. Yet if our experience of Lent has been thus far one of mere commitment and routine (and there are worse things than that) it can be more for us this year.
For he says:
In an acceptable time I heard you,
and on the day of salvation I helped you.
Behold, now is a very acceptable time;
behold, now is the day of salvation.
We need not rush through this season, as though Lent was merely to be endured until we were finally allowed to celebrate Easter. The ways that Lent can restore God's primacy in our hearts and remove the obstacles that keep us from experiencing the reality of his Lordship in our lives are valuable in their own right, here and now. May we not receive this grace of Lent in vain.
Give me back the joy of your salvation,
and a willing spirit sustain in me.
O Lord, open my lips
and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.
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