What Makes Faith Real?

Growing up in southern Indiana, Kent's mother asked if he wanted to go when the circus came to town. He was eight or nine. He said no.

Why not?

"I don't like clowns." This was long before Stephen King wrote It, before the internet and the memes and the people in clown costumes standing near parks to scare children. He just didn't like them.

What's the problem with clowns?

And the answer an eight-year-old gave is better theology than most adults manage: "Because clowns have those big painted-on smiles. And if the smile is painted on, what's underneath it isn't a smile."

That is this passage. "When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others." They arranged their appearance so people would draw a conclusion about their souls.

A painted expression. And underneath, something else entirely.

Jesus' instruction is almost funny in its ordinariness. When you fast — anoint your head and wash your face.

In other words: look normal. Do your hair. Get ready like it is any other day. Let no one be able to tell.

Kent quoted Spurgeon, who told his preaching students that when they spoke of heaven there should be a gleam in the eye and a glow on the face — and when they spoke of hell, their ordinary face would do.

That is the register Jesus is after here. Ordinary face. Do not announce your spirituality by looking sad and grim so everyone knows how devout you are.

There is real freedom in that. If nobody can tell you are fasting, then the fasting cannot be *for* them, and you are released from an audience you were never meant to perform for.

Most of the exhausting parts of religious life are the parts done for an audience. Wash your face and the audience goes home.

Three times in this stretch of the Sermon on the Mount — on giving, on praying, on fasting — Jesus repeats the same promise. Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

The hypocrites, he keeps saying, have received their reward. Past tense. Transaction complete. They wanted to be seen and they were seen, and that is the whole of what they get.

It is not that God is stingy with them. They were paid in full, in exactly the currency they asked for.

But there is another economy running underneath this one, and it settles accounts differently. Your Father sees in secret. The prayer nobody heard. The gift nobody traced. The obedience that cost you something and won you nothing socially.

None of it disappeared. It went somewhere.

Kent said Jesus keeps doing one thing throughout this sermon: he rejects the fake, the artificial, the pretend. Keep it real. Take it inside your heart and make it real. What is real is what your Father sees, and what your Father sees is what counts.

When Samuel went to anoint a king, he took one look at Eliab — tall, impressive, obviously the guy — and God stopped him.

"Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart."

This cuts in two directions, and we usually only feel one of them.

The uncomfortable direction: your carefully managed exterior is not what God is evaluating. He is looking straight past it at something you cannot arrange.

The comforting direction, which we forget: he is also looking past everything about you that other people have used to size you up and find you insufficient. The résumé. The appearance. The failures on your record.

God is the only one in your life whose assessment is not fooled by the outside — which means he is the only one whose good opinion is worth anything at all, and he already has the full picture.

Kent gave the congregation a quick tour of the world's great religions, and his summary was that they basically all say the same thing — with one exception.

They all say: do. Perform. Achieve. Climb. Here is the standard, here is the ladder, get to work.

Christianity says: done.

"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast."

That is the exception, and it is the reason this whole week has been possible. You can stop painting on the smile because you were never being graded on your performance. You can wash your face because you have nothing left to prove. You can let your Father see in secret because his verdict on you was settled at a cross and not by your fasting.

Everything else in the Sermon on the Mount is impossibly high — and it is safe to look at honestly, because grace got there before you did.