Mt. 6:1-6; 16-18 “Beware of doing good works to be seen.”

In today’s Gospel Jesus continues to speak to us of two concrete practices of our way of living the life of faith, our life as brothers and sisters, children of God: almsgiving and fasting, and He alerts us to that tendency that sometimes lurks in our minds, to do good in order to be seen. Pope Leo XIV in his message for Lent this year spoke to us about fasting with words that can help us today: “In order for fasting to preserve its evangelical truth and avoid the temptation to allow pride to enter the heart, it must always be lived with faith and humility… I would like to invite you to a very specific and often underappreciated form of abstinence: that of refraining from using words that affect and hurt our neighbor. Let us begin to disarm language, renouncing hurtful words, immediate judgment, speaking ill of those who are absent and cannot defend themselves, slander…”