Alastair's Adversaria - Biblical Reading and Reflections: September 4th (Micah 2 & Matthew 6:1-18)

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

Micah challenges economic oppressors. The Lord's Prayer. My reflections are searchable by Bible chapter here: https://audio.alastairadversaria.com/explore/. If you are interested in supporting this project, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (https://bit.ly/2RLaUcB), or buying books for my research on Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/36WVSWCK4X33O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035?mt=2.

Micah chapter 2. Woe to those who devise wickedness and work evil on their beds. When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in the power of their hand. They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them away. They oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance. Therefore thus says the Lord, Behold, against this family I am devising disaster, from which you cannot remove your necks, and you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be a time of disaster. In that, day they shall take up a taunt song against you, and moan bitterly and say, We are utterly ruined, he changes the portion of my people, how he removes it from me, to an apostate he allots our fields. Therefore you will have none to cast the line by lot in the Assembly of the Lord. Do not preach, thus they preach, one should not preach of such things, disgrace will not overtake us. Should this be said, O House of Jacob, has the Lord grown impatient? Are these his deeds? Do not my words do good to him who walks uprightly. But lately my people

have risen up as an enemy. You strip the rich robe from those who pass by trustingly with no thought of war. The women of my people you drive out from their delightful houses, from their young children you take away my splendour forever. Arise and go, for this is no place to rest, because of uncleanness that destroys with a grievous destruction. If a man should go about an utter wind and lies saying, I will preach to you of wine and strong drink. He would be the preacher for this people. I will surely assemble all of you, O Jacob. I will gather the remnant of Israel. I will set them together like sheep in a fold, like a flock in its pasture, a noisy multitude of men. He who opens the breach goes up before them. They break through and pass the gate,

going out by it. Their king passes on before them, the Lord at their head. The prophet Micah lived during a period of socio-economic change and spoke directly to the oppressive and exploitative realities of his day. In Micah Chapter 2 he condemns oppressive landowners. His message in this chapter begins with a statement of woe, and alas, as it were, declaring the doomed status of the people. Their injustice, Micah declares, is deep-rooted within them and is not just an accidental or unintended feature of their society. It springs up from and reveals the hidden intentions of their hearts. They never rest from their injustice. They ruminate upon it on their beds,

and they are eager to get back to its performance when the morning comes. One of the concerns of the Mosaic law was to ensure that families retain their possession in the land. The land was a source of economic security. It was a patrimony that bound people to their place and supported the continued life of the family and the community. It was also a token of the people's membership. of the people of the Lord, who had been given the possession of the land as a sign of his love. One of the purposes of the Jubilee, for instance, was to ensure that people were not alienated

from their ancestral lands, and that people's position in the land did not become precarious. More generally, the law was designed to discourage the establishment of a gulf between rich landowners and a poor landless class. Economic practices were tempered by prohibitions on usury and predatory dealings. We see some of the economic principles of the law expressed at more length in places like Leviticus chapter 25 versus 23 to 42. The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me,

and in all the country you possess you shall allow a redemption of the land. If your brother becomes poor and sells part of his property, then his nearest redeemer shall come and redeem what his brother has sold. If a man has no one to redeem it, and then himself becomes prosperous and finds sufficient means to redeem it, let him calculate the years since he sold it, and pay back the balance to the man to whom he sold it, and then return to his property. But if he does not have sufficient means to recover it, then what he sold shall remain in the hand of the buyer until the year of Jubilee. In the Jubilee it shall be released, and he shall return to his property. If a man sells a dwelling-house in a walled city,

he may redeem it within a year of its sale for a full year he shall have the right of redemption if it is not redeemed within a full year then the house in the walled city shall belong in perpetuity to the buyer throughout his generations it shall not be released in the jubilee but the houses of the villages that have no wall around them shall be classified with the fields of the land they may be redeemed and they shall be released in the jubilee as for the cities of the levites the levites may redeem at any time the houses in the cities they possess. And if one of the Levites exercises his right of redemption, then the house that was sold in a city they possess shall be released in the Jubilee. For the houses in the cities of the Levites are their possession among the people of Israel. But the fields of Pasturland belonging to their cities may not be sold, for that is in their possession forever. If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you.

take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God that your brother may live beside you. You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food for profit. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan, and to be your God. If your brother becomes poor beside you and sells himself to you, you shall not make him serve as a slave. He shall be with you as a hired worker and as a sojourner. he shall serve with you until the year of the Jubilee, then he shall go out from you, he and his children with him, and go back to his own clan and return to the possession of his fathers.

For they are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt, they shall not be sold as slaves. In Micah's day, however, larger landlords were buying up lots of small farms, stripping vulnerable landowners of their ancestral possessions, reducing them from the owners of land and means of production, to a more dependent class of unemployed persons or poor labourers on others' property. Micah's contemporary Isaiah describes the same situation in Isaiah chapter 5 verses 8 to 10.

Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land. The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing, surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses without inhabitant, for ten acres of vineyard shall yield but one bath, and a homer of seed shall yield but an ether. While the economic system and the situation allowed for such accumulation of land in the hands of a few,

this was an abomination to the Lord. It was a practical denial of the fact that the land was his, and that he desired all of his people to enjoy its goodness. The rich were supposed to treat the poor as their brothers and sisters in the land, and not to seek to profit upon the back of their losses. were supposed to act as faithful and responsible stewards of the land, recognising their indebtedness to the goodness of the Lord and their responsibility to their neighbours. They were, as Leviticus chapter 25 teachers, to think of themselves as strangers and sojourners with the Lord himself.

Leslie Allen reminds us of the story of King Ahab and Nabos Vineyard in First Kings chapter 21 as an example of an attempt to take over people's ancestral land. Micah declares that these oppressive landowners will receive their just desserts. The Lord will act against them, stripping them of their possession in the land, and rendering them an object of derision. Versus four and five seem to relate to the practice of reallocating lands in a particular tract by lot. The rich had sought to remove the poor from their portion and stake in the land, and so the rich themselves would suffer the same fate as they had sought to inflict.

They would be uprooted from their territory and left without any stake of their own. Micah's message was not a popular one. It should come as no surprise to us that in speaking out against the rich and powerful in his land, like several of the other prophets, Micah invited opposition and resistance. Micah's words specifically addressed the wealthy landowners, but the immediate resistance he faced, described in verses six and seven, seems to come from false prophets, who opposed Micah's message and his challenge.

to the rich and powerful in the land. Verses six and seven are difficult to translate and interpret. It isn't entirely clear who is speaking at various points, nor is it clear exactly what is being said. Micah's opponents begin by commanding that he not preach. Different commentators divide up the verses that follow in different ways, though. Alan, for instance, translates the verses as follows. Stop your preaching, they preach.

They should stop preaching in this vein. Humiliation won't overwhelm us. The community of Jacob is party to the covenant. Has Yahweh lost his temper? Is this the way he acts? Do not his promises spell good fortune. Do we not keep company with one who keeps his word? He attributes almost all of the words to Micah's opponents.

James Mays does much the same. John Goldingay, however, cuts off the opponent's words halfway through verse 7. Kenneth Barker's reading is similar, but he sees the opening line in verse 7 as introducing a second reported statement to the opponents, rather than itself being part of it. Joanna Hoyt restricts the words of the opponents to the very beginning of verse 6

and the middle lines of verse 7. Their opposition to Micah is reminiscent of Amaziah's confrontation with Amos in Amos chapter 7 verse 16. Do not prophesy against Israel and do not preach against the house of Isaac. Micah does not seem to be alone in his message. We've already noted that his contemporary Isaiah presented the people with a similar challenge on this front. The opponent's imperative to cease from preaching is a plural one. Micah's opponents seem to resist his message on the grounds that it ill accords with the positive way that the Lord treats his people within the covenant.

Micah's message is entirely too negative and judgmental and ends up putting the long-suffering and gracious God in a bad light. One can imagine such a message being very compelling to many of their contemporaries. Besides the way that it can be expressed in a very pious way, it has the advantage of not being awkward and confrontational. It's far more congenial a message to the movers and shakers in Judah's society. Presumably the rich men of Judah were also wealthy patrons of these prophets, who were concerned not to bite the hand that fed them. They were obliging and flattering chaplains, wary of rocking the boat, not faithful prophets. Micah proceeds to speak directly to some of the sins that the false prophets were papering over.

The situation described is likely one of oppression through vicious use of the law, but the villains are described like bandits and enemy warriors, viciously despoiling of vulnerable people. Under the rubric of the Eighth and the Ninth Commandments against stealing and bearing false witness against one's neighbour, the law addressed abuses of power structures and systems of justice and economics, which were most likely the primary mechanisms of oppression here, as the wealthy and powerful used that power and the economic and legal systems as means of predation upon the poor, indebted and vulnerable, rather than seeking to protect them from expropriation and providing charity for them.

Their cruelty is underlined in verse 9. Like a military force they seek to expel widows and orphans from their houses and their heritage for their own selfish gain. Their crime, however, is not merely against the vulnerable poor. They are stripping from the vulnerable poor what the Lord himself has given to them, thereby offending more directly against him too. The verdict against these oppressors is clear. They had polluted and destroyed the Lord's good land with their injustice,

undermining the grace that grounded the people's presence within it. Consequently, they would be expelled from it, as unfit to dwell within it. As they had evicted widows and orphans, the God who protects the defenseless poor would evict them. The Lord's indictment against Micah's opponents is sharp and direct. They are like those who prophesy of the blessings of wine and of intoxication, flattering the people that the Lord will establish their good, and rendering them insensible to the looming disaster. This does not mean that Micah's message is devoid of hope.

Although verses 12 and 13 seem to represent a different oracle, likely from a different time, perhaps around 701 BC and the deliverance of Jerusalem from Senechereb, it illustrates positive dimensions of Micah's message. There is a hope of restoration after judgment, although it does not seem to be directed at the rich oppressors and false prophets to whom the earlier parts of this chapter were addressed. The Lord will gather a remnant of his people, even amidst the crisis, perhaps in Jerusalem itself.

This might relate to the people of the land taking refuge in Jerusalem as Senechrib of Assyria swept through the land. There will, however, be deliverance and triumph. The Lord will lead the people out to repossess the land. He will be at their head. He is their God, and they are his people. A question to consider. what might have been some of the forces encouraging the false prophets in their unfaithfulness?

Matthew chapter 6 verses 1 to 18 Beware of practising your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them for then you will have no reward from your father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets that they may be praised by others. Truly I say to you they have received their reward. when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the

synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room, and shut the door, and pray to your father who is in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this. Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors,

and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses. When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure the their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face that your fasting may not be seen by others, but by your father who is in secret. And your father, who sees in secret, will reward you. In Matthew chapter 6, Jesus is continuing the teaching of the sermon on the Mount,

and his teaching is about the distinct forms of morality, worship, and social relations that should characterize his disciples as they are to be salt and light in the world. This is the sort of righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees. He's already discussed the law and its commands, particularly the second table of the law, and now he moves to discuss Christian forms of religious practice. Jesus' disciples are supposed to behave in a way that bears witness to the truth of God and the kingdom, and there's a repeated contrast between them and the hypocrites who act to be seen by men. That language of hypocrisy originally comes from the world of the theatre, but it had already been adopted by

Jewish teachers to refer to moral pretense. They are hypocrites because they are ungodly, yet trying to project an image of godliness to other men, with whom they are really concerned. What really matters to them is how they appear to other men, not how they are in relationship to God. They give little thought to God's judgment, but a great deal of thought to the judgment and approval of other men. It's important to notice that Jesus is not primarily concerned with motivation here. His instructions are not about the realm of motivation, avoid bad motives for actions, but rather it's about concrete and specific approaches to action. The change in our manner of approaching the action will impact our motivations, but it is not directly aimed at them. So you can see in Jesus calls,

he's giving concrete changes of action, and they're far harder to dodge than just to doge than challenges to our motivations alone. It's very easy to say, don't do these things to be applauded by other people. It's a lot more challenging to starve the desire for applause, because we can very easily hide our desire for applause in different ways to ourselves. We are practiced at deceiving ourselves concerning our true motivations. The best way to reveal our truest motivations is to begin to starve bad motivations by changing practice. So the wisdom and practical of Jesus' teaching at such point should stand out to us. He recognises that those who desire the praise of men are driven by that motivation to particular forms of practice, to the broadcasting or

even the trumpeting of their righteousness before men. And so by forbidding the broadcasting, the motivation itself is starved. By instructing his disciples to pursue their righteousness in secret, the conditions are created for the nurturing of different motivations. So Jesus is not generally focused upon disputing his contemporaries' understanding of the content of ethical practice so much as their hypocritical behaviour and the manner of their piety. He's not saying that we shouldn't do charitable deeds or that the charitable deeds that these people are doing are completely misguided. Rather, it's the way that they're approaching them, a way of approaching them that is completely focused upon how they appear to other men. And that's often how we approach our

righteousness. We want to be seen by other people. We want to be seen as morally up to gain social status through these things. In these teachings, Jesus is continuing the triadic logic, the logic of the traditional teaching or practice, the vicious cycle, and then the transforming initiative. Jesus begins by speaking about the manner in which we should practice our righteousness, and that statement is the heading for the teachings that follow, concerning almsgiving first, then prayer, then fasting.

And Jesus takes it for granted that all these things would be part of the continued practice of his disciples. As people rooted in the Jewish tradition, it would be expected that they would continue its core religious practices. The first form of righteousness in view is acts of arms giving to the needy. In the first century, there were established structures of relief and support for the poor, depending upon the tithe for the poor and voluntary contributions. And Jesus describes a hyperbolic situation where arms givers sound a trumpet before them

to broadcast their practice to others in order to be praised by them. And such people do get the reward that they seek, but it's a paltry reward. They do not realize just how great the prospect of being rewarded by our Father in heaven is. Note that Jesus is quite happy to present rewards as a fitting motivation, but it depends what rewards we're seeking. The alternative transforming practice is arms giving that is so secret that your left hand can be completely unaware of the actions of the right. And note, Jesus using body member language here again, like in his teaching concerning lust.

The you here is singular, in contrast to the plurality of the hypocrites. Their religiosity occurs in the realm of the social spectacle, whereas ours should be in the presence of God alone. Religious practice easily gets conscripted into the activities of social display, used to broadcast our virtue to mark out with whom we are associated and whom we are distanced from, etc. And the practice of Christian faith before the world can so often and easily be hijacked

by a desire to win the applause and the approval of certain people. We want to make clear that we hold the right political and social and ideological views, but can give relatively little thought to the approval of God. The danger of this is quite acute within an age of social media. We should be mindful of the fact that Jesus gives a lot of attention to the context of our action here and the way that different contexts can encourage virtual or vice.

The danger so often is that we want to project an image of our relationship with God designed to maintain and manage our relationship with others. And there is such a danger here in the realm of spectacle. When we're seen by others, everything that we do will be an action that is performed not just for its own ends, but for how it is perceived by those people around us. Which is why Jesus challenges this at the very root. From arms giving, Jesus moves on to discuss prayer.

The hypocrites love to be seen and heard in the act of prayer, but Jesus' followers must not be like that. Jesus' encouragement of secret prayer is not a denial of the place for corporate prayer, but an emphasis upon orientation. The designed audience for our prayers should be God alone, and we should think maybe here of Jesus' own practice of secret prayer. In the next teaching, Jesus gives concerning prayer, the contrast is not between his disciples and the hypocrites,

but between them and the Gentiles, the people who are religious outsiders who are not God-fearers presumably as well. Their prayers are characterized by meaningless babbling and much speaking, and often this can be a way of gesticulating at God with our words, hoping that God will notice us, treating prayer as a magical and somewhat mechanical thing, rather than as communication and turning our hearts towards our Father in heaven. The prayer that Jesus gives is condensed and focused.

The words are very few, but they're to the point. We're not, in this case, verbally desticulating at God to get his attention. His eyes are already upon us. He's aware of our needs. Rather, prayer is a turning of our hearts towards God. Now, we know from the early church that the Lord, Lord's prayer was used in daily prayer from very early on. The Didaicay refers to praying it three times daily. And the poetic form of the prayer suggests also that it was designed for memorization and

non-mechanical mentally and spiritually engaged repetition. The form of the prayer suggests not merely a model prayer, and it is a model prayer, but a specific prayer that is given to us that we should pray this as an alternative to the prayer practice of the Gentiles. And there's a structure to the prayer as well. It begins with the address, Our Father in Heaven, and then moves into three U petitions followed by three we petitions. And the things that are forefront are the name, the kingdom, and the will of God. The address is to our Father in heaven. And perhaps more than anything else, what comes into strong focus in this chapter and the end of the previous chapter is the fatherhood of God. There are 10 references to God as our father in verses 1 to 18 of Matthew 6.

And in the Old Testament, there is recognition of God as Father, but it is so much rarer. You don't see it very often. It really comes into clearer focus in the New Testament, particularly through Christ's own relationship with His Father. and we can see the way it comes into the foreground at times of redemption as well, the language of God as our father. There is a danger of over-intimitizing the language of father. Many have seen in the language of Abba, for instance, the concept daddy,

whereas this does not seem to be the proper sense of the term Abba. The other thing we should notice here is that God is spoken of as our father, not my daddy. That language can often suggest the child's relationship with the child's relationship with father when they're about four or five years old. Whereas in scripture, the emphasis is upon the son as a grown adult. The son is the one who represents the father in the world. The son is the one who does the father's work. The son is the one who's given a bride by the father. The son is the one who bears the name of the father and stands for the father. The son is the one who will inherit all that the father has. The son is the one who bears the image of his father. And in all these ways,

to shift our understanding to think of the son as an adult. And when we're praying this prayer, we're praying it not as infants or young children in the house of God, our father, so much as as adults who are working and acting in his name. As we go out and we act in the world in this way of saving righteousness, the way that has been described in the previous chapter, we will be marked out as the sons of God. That's what will mark us out, not as those who are just passively receiving the love of our father, but as those who are acting and working and expressing a saving, transforming, healing righteousness in his name. As those who work with our father, we are identified as his children. This does not mean there's no place for the concept of childlike dependency upon God

and a sense of God as the good giver who's as a father giving to his young child shows care to give what's good for the child. That is all there in the New Testament. but that needs to be held alongside these other images that foreground an adult child relating to their father. Another important thing about father language is it refers to the other party in a way that reminds them of their relationship with us. It calls upon them to act in the light of that fact. It calls God to recognize us as his children calling to him for aid and to act on our behalf. In Isaiah chapter 63, for instance, we read in verse 15. following, look down from heaven and sea, from your holy and beautiful habitation, where are

your zeal and your might? The stirring of your inner parts and your compassion are held back from me. For you are our father, though Abraham does not know us, and Israel does not acknowledge us, you, O Lord, are our father. Our redeemer from of old is your name. O Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways and harden our heart so that we fear you not? return for the sake of your servants, the tribes of your heritage. Your holy people held possession for a little while. Our adversaries have trampled down your sanctuary. We have become like those over whom you have never ruled,

like those who are not called by your name. Now the point here is we bear the name of God. We are those who are his children. And so when we call to him as Father, we are calling him to act accordingly. The first petition of the prayer expresses the desire that God's name be hallowed. We see God's concern for the holiness of his name in places such as Ezekiel 36. God says,

But when they came to the nations, wherever they came, they profaned my holy name, in that people said of them, these are the people of the Lord, and yet they had to go out of his land. But I had concern for my holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations to be. which they came. Therefore say to the House of Israel, thus says the Lord God, it is not for your sake, O House of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name which you have profaned among the nations to which you came, and I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which

has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them, and the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God. When through you I vindicate my holiness, their eyes. As passages like this make clear, the call for God to hallow his name is not just a statement of fact. The petition is not just saying your name is a holy name, but it's a desire that God act in the world to display the holiness of his name through action. God is ultimately the one who will hallow his own name. The second petition calls for God's eschatological kingdom or reign to come, his reign that he will bring in at the end, for God's rule to be seen in the situations of history. The third petition calls for God's will to be done on earth as in heaven.

This is a redemptive righteousness, the pattern of heaven worked out in the earth. We can think about ourselves as light bearers, reflecting the light of heaven itself and bearing that light out into the world. And we should see that each one of these first three petitions are practicing us in the posture of longing for God's action and calling for God's action in history, for hungering and thirsting after His righteousness. All of this is about conforming us to God's will, teaching us to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.

And the fourth petition turns to our need for bread, perhaps an allusion to manner, our daily bread, a recognition of our utter dependence upon God for our daily sustenance and our immediate provision. We receive all of the good things of the things of the daily, the world as a constant gift and there's a recognition here of a hand behind our own human providence. We may prepare our food but ultimately that food comes from God himself. The fifth petition speaks of forgiving debts. The new covenant involved the general release from Israel's debt as the nation was forgiven its sins. I've already spoken about the importance of Isaiah chapter 61 as a background,

the year of the Lord's favor as the year of Jubilee. And there is a reciprocal element to this. We request forgiveness as we have forgiven others. As Jesus goes on to stress immediately after the prayer, if we do not forgive others, we ourselves will not be forgiven. This means that we need to live as those who have remitted all debts, even the debts of gratitude and compensation that we may believe that people or God owe us. We live as people who relinquish the claims of those types. We put ourselves in the hands of God and in our neighbours.

and all the demands of the ego that we place upon people and upon God must be relinquished. As people who depend upon God's giving and his forgiving, we can give up our claims upon others. God is the guarantor of all our debts. As Paul can say, my God will supply all your needs according to His riches in Christ Jesus as his response to the charity that other people gave to him. He recognizes that God is the one who backs up all his debts. The other thing that we can see here is that God makes us participants in his giving and forgiving process. When we think about the Old Testament Exodus, for instance, God brought his people out of Egypt,

but also gave them the calling to give rest to their servants, to be people who gave rest to others, who extended the principle of Exodus and of Sabbath to the people who worked for them. Now, we're supposed to do that as well. We have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit as the church. but we've been given that in a way that God makes us participants in his giving process. We are those who exercise spiritual gifts that represent the one spiritual gift that has been given to the whole church. Now as we exercise those gifts, we participate in that one gift,

but we also become participants in the giving process. And in the same way, if we're not actually forgiving, we're not truly participating in the release from sins and all these. other things that the kingdom has brought in. We're trying to stand with one foot in and one foot out of the kingdom and that's just impossible. To participate in the life of the kingdom is to become an active participant in the life of the kingdom, someone who's extending its forgiveness and its grace to others. The final petition is a prayer for deliverance from the time of testing and the evil one. We can think of Jesus' own experience in the wilderness. He was led up by the spirit into the wilderness and that testing is one in which he's led by the spirit into temptation and we recognize

our limitations we are people who are weak sinful human beings who are fallible and flawed in a great many ways and we know that if we are brought into the utmost testing we'll fail and so we pray that god will keep us from the utmost testing that he'll keep us from the time of tribulation and this is something that Christ does for his disciples, he takes the tribulation upon himself so that they can be released. These are extreme situations where our faith will be tested to breaking point, and so we pray to be delivered from those things and from the evil one. Some manuscripts conclude the prayer with a doxology,

as do many of the ways in which we pray it within the life of the church. We can see an example of such a doxology in First Chronicles chapter 29, verse, 11. Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty. For all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom of Lord and you are exalted as

head above all. This is the sort of statement with which you might end a prayer. Jesus concludes this section by teaching concerning fasting. There's a sort of ironic reversal here where Jesus teaches us to anoint our head and wash our face so that

we might be seen by others to be in really good health and radiant and happy, whereas in fact, we're fasting in relationship to our God who is in secret, and he will see us and reward us. The reversal is the hypocrites were very concerned to put on a mask to be seen by others, to be very pious, to be those who engage in fasting, arms giving, etc., etc. Whereas in some sense, we're engaged as a different sort of hypocrite. We're wearing a mask, but our mask is designed to cover up the fact that we are fasting. We will always do our actions toward an audience, but we are really concerned that the actions that we do are towards the right audience, and that audience must be God himself. The more that we do our actions in a way that's seen by other people, the more we will find the gravity of that audience drawing us away from the audience to whom we should truly be acting, God himself.

A question to consider. In this section, Jesus pays a lot of attention to concrete practice and context, to things like where we pray, to how we look when we fast, to the words that we use when we say our prayers, and to things such as the context in which we exercise our charity. What are some of the contexts in our lives that we may need to step away from as they draw us into the the activity of performing to others rather than performing to God. Where do we find the secret place where we can address God in secret? What are some of the ways in which we can anoint our heads and wash our faces so that we do not appear to be fasting to men? How can we perform a righteousness that is driven by the desire to please God above all others?