We move today to a different theme, namely, the way in which we are to pay our worship to God.

Jesus' teaching is based on the three basic acts of religion expected of a devout Jew - almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. In each case, Jesus warns his disciples not to indulge in any form of ostentation so as to attract the admiration of others. He presents exaggerated images of how we should not do things in the way of ostentatious hypocrites. He speaks about people who blow trumpets in the streets to draw the attention of everyone when they give alms to the poor. He speaks about hypocrites who say their prayers in the most conspicuous places so that people will marvel at how holy they are. He speaks about people putting on gloomy and drawn looks so that everyone will know that they are fasting. All this, Jesus says, is no worship of God but a kind of self-advertisement. Such people, he says, get their reward, namely, the admiration of the onlooker but it is not the reward that comes from acts of genuine worship. When his disciples pray or fast or give alms they should do it in such a way that their actions will be directed entirely to God and not to themselves. We do remember earlier in the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus said that people should be able to see the good works of his disciples but then the purpose was not that they would be praised but that people would be led to glorify God.