Well it’s that time of year again—time for the Adelaide Fringe festival, when people pack the city to be entertained by all kinds of artists. On the Fringe Festival website the organisers have put out a call out to local and international artists, inviting them to register and perform on Rundle Street during the weekend street closures.
“Calling Street Performers! Buskers! Street Artists!
Street performers bring life to the streets and corners of Adelaide. Adelaide Fringe offers the opportunity for local and international street performers, buskers, and entertainers to captivate and WOW audiences.”
That is, of course, the aim of street performing—to captivate and wow the audience, so that they might donate gratuities to the artist. I was interested to discover that the term ‘busker’ comes from the Spanish word buscar, with the meaning “to seek”, which evolved from the Indo-European word bhudh-skō (“to win, conquer”)[1]. Both of these relate to the aim of street performing: artists seek the favour of their audience, and work hard to ‘win them over’ so that they receive a financial reward from them. The more that they are able to win their audience over, the better their chance of receiving a generous reward. But it can be a lot of striving to win the audience over for little return in the hat or guitar case.
Of course it’s not just time for the Adelaide Fringe Festival again. It’s also Ash Wednesday—the beginning of the forty days of Lent; the time where we prepare for a particular focus on our need of Jesus’ suffering and death for our righteousness and salvation. It has customarily also been a time of examining oneself as we walk with our Lord to the Cross—to explore further the love God the Father has for us, and where, deep in our secret hearts, we must decrease, and he must increase.
This year our Lenten series is called: “Lost and found: a journey with Jesus into the Father’s arms”. From next Wednesday we explore Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son and reflect on the main characters in it, and what they might teach us about ourselves, and about our Gracious God…and where our righteousness and salvation come from. We begin that journey tonight by hearing Jesus’ words from Matthew 6: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. The works of righteousness which Jesus mentions are not a comprehensive list of spiritual practices, but examples that Jesus uses to lead his audience to examine where their hearts are in relation to him. He is not warning Christians that they should stop prayer, fasting, or charity—but he is warning his followers against practicing them with the wrong motives.
Jesus speaks to those who have come to listen to him and contrasts them with ‘the hypocrites’. A hypocrite was a play-actor in the ancient theatre who wore a mask to play a role. Jesus is saying these people who announce their giving with trumpets, pray long prayers on the street corners to be seen by others, and disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting, are putting on an external mask and they’re playing a role―an outward appearance of righteousness and elite piety.
Jesus says that the only reason they are doing these acts of piety is to be noticed by people and praised by them. When they give to the needy and announce it with trumpets, they have already received their reward in full―they want people to notice them and they have. They’ve got the honour from their audience—that’s what they’ve been seeking. When they stand in public view on the street and pray their long prayers with big words so passers-by notice them, they have the attention and admiration of the people, and so they’ve got what they were after. They have already received their reward in full. When they make it obvious that they are fasting by their appearance, they gain the attention of those around them. Like street performers, they have sought to win over those passing by, working for a reward from them. And Jesus says that they have already received their reward in full.
Jesus warns against them because they have made their religious life all about themselves and their need for attention and approval by others. That is the only reward they will receive because while outwardly they appear religious, inwardly their hearts are far from God. They are those of whom Jesus said:
“‘These people honour me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’” (Matthew 15:8-9).
Jesus warns us about living our life like that. Instead we should pray in secret, and give in secret, and fast in secret—that is, we should not seek our reward from the world, but God our Father. Jesus says, God our Father who sees and hears what is done in secret, will reward you.
That can sound somewhat uncomfortable to us—is Jesus saying that if we pray and fast and give the right way he will then bless us because of the good things that we have done?
It’s easy to think that because that is the way the world works. It says those who perform and achieve are rewarded. Those who measure up deserve the good things in life. So we are constantly tempted to think that God will bless us with more favour after our prayers than before them. That if we say the right things in the right way, we will be rewarded by God. That if we give generously that will motivate God to give generously to us. That if we fast and show great discipline in faith, it will cause God to be kind to us and bless us.
But that isn’t how God works. Which is good for us! Because we could never manipulate God into giving us more than he already has. We already have it.
As we reflect on our Lenten theme—“Lost and found: a journey with Jesus into the Father’s arms”—the good news in tonight’s readings is that we are those to who Jesus speaks. His Father in heaven is your Father in heaven. Your reward from your Father in Heaven is Jesus himself. Through faith in Jesus we receive all that he has won for us through his suffering and death. Through baptism we are joined with his resurrection and so are already seated with Christ in the heavenly realms. We receive the fulness of divine favour and blessing in Christ and our Father hears and sees us for Jesus’ sake.
That’s why our piety and worship will never make us more righteous. We are righteous already.
How? We hear in tonight’s second reading from 2 Corinthians: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Through faith in Christ, we are already the Father’s righteous people. We cannot achieve righteousness or holiness. We can’t pray our way into the kingdom or give our way into the kingdom we can’t fast our way into the kingdom. Jesus rejects the thinking that God needs some sort of extra effort on our part for our prayers to be heard. Jesus’ disciples do not need to be like the Gentiles, because our Father knows what we need before we ask him!
We don’t have to be like the street performers, seeking the favour of the crowd, trying hard to win them over. God wants us to be free from that striving, trying to impress other people and seeking affirmation from others, and to instead rest in his love and approval of us for Jesus’ sake. No amount of spiritual striving can make God love us anymore than he already does or cause him to show us any more favour than he already has in Christ, and brought to us in baptism, where you have been clothed with his very own righteousness. God sees you as if you have lived as perfectly as Jesus himself. In the meal he prepares again tonight, he welcomes you who are clothed in Christ both as unworthy sinners yet his honoured guests.
That is the good news: that we can cease from all our futile strivings to be pleasing to God and others, and come, bringing only our broken and contrite hearts, the offering that God wants most of all. As King David said in tonight’s psalm, Psalm 51:
“For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;
you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
All of those who come to God in secret with humble hearts will be rewarded with all that Christ has won for you when he went to the Cross. Tonight’s text then is a matter of where our hearts are with God. As we reflect on that through this journey, we can do so safe in the knowledge that God’s heart is for us in Christ. This is not just something we can know with our minds. It is far more than an idea or concept, but a reality, as what God the Father gave to bring us under his care, favour, grace and blessing was his own Son. We are the needy to whom our Father in Heaven has given us Christ. Christ is the One who prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane that his Father’s will be done, for you, and who still prays for you in secret in the Heavenly Sanctuary. He is the One who fasted on the Cross, offered only wine vinegar to drink.
Tonight we have an opportunity to join with the ancient church custom of having ashes applied to our forehead, to confess that we are born in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. Dust (ashes) we are and to ashes we shall return. We are completely reliant on God’s mercy. Yet the ashes are applied in the mark of the Cross, reminding you that in Christ God has shown his love to you personally, in Christ the crucified who has redeemed you. Applying the ashes in the shape of a cross proclaims to you that Christ and his righteousness is your reward from heaven—before we did anything to deserve him. Yet he took upon himself our frail and broken humanity and suffered the punishment for our sin in our place, that, although we are sinners, we might become the righteousness of God. It is because of Christ and his perfect life, and suffering and death, that his Father’s approval is on you. Amen.
Pastor Tim Ebbs
St Paul’s Lutheran Church, Glenelg
[1] ‘Street Performance’: Wikipedia contributors: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 4 January 2025 22:12 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Street_performance&oldid=1267386278 last accessed 4 March, 2025 8:37pm]
