“But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face;”
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.
Church Fathers on Matthew 6:17
The Lord having taught us what we ought not to do, now proceeds to teach us what we ought to do, saying, 'When thou fastest, anoint thy head, and wash thy face.'
A question is here wont to be raised; for none surely would literally enjoin, that, as we wash our faces from daily habit, so we should have our heads anointed when we fast; a thing which all allow to be most disgraceful.
Also if He bade us not to be of sad countenance that we might not seem to men to fast, yet if anointing of the head and washing of the face are always observed in fasting, they will become tokens of fasting.
Read all 15 entries in the readerCatena Aurea · St. Thomas Aquinas, tr. J. H. Newman · public domain
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