But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face. The positive instruction for fasting: maintain your normal appearance. Anointing the head and washing the face were daily grooming practices in the ancient world — the instruction is to do exactly what you would do on any other day, so that your fasting is invisible to the people around you. The discipline is real and demanding, but its reality is concealed. This is perhaps the most counter-intuitive of the three piety disciplines: while the culture values visible suffering as evidence of serious religious commitment, Jesus commands invisible suffering as the condition of genuine fasting.

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