Treasure in heaven.

A Sermon for Ash Wednesday

March 5, 2025 at Holy Communion

Matthew 6:16–21

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

Many priests devote their Ash Wednesday sermon to explaining and justifying why we should fast as a spiritual practice. And I suppose I will too.

But as I have spoken with some of you this week about fasting, I realized how odd it is that we need to explain fasting at all. Most cultures have a practice of fasting. As modern North Americans, we are the odd ones out. I was speaking this week with one of our international students about her family’s observance of Ramadan, when Muslims fast during daylight hours for thirty days. Jews also fast. Hindus fast, and Buddhists fast.

In fact, fasting was so universal a practice in pre-modern society that, instead of telling us to fast, the Bible always tells us how to fast. And Jesus was no exception. In today’s Gospel reading, he begins, “When you fast, don’t look gloomy like the hypocrities” (Matthew 6:16). He assumes that his disciples will fast, because everyone in their culture fasted, so he instructs them how to fast in a way that is pleasing to God, pushing back against their cultural assumption that on fasting days you would put on a big performance of being hard-done-by and pious.

The question is, “Why?” We can’t explain fasting as a strange quirk of the Bible or the Christian tradition. Christians don’t need to make the case for fasting as if only we had a horse in that race. We just need to know why every human culture has had a common spiritual practice around abstaining from food, and why we have forgotten it. What is its value?

It has everything to do with what Jesus says in the Gospel: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (v 19–20).

When our bellies are full—I don’t even mean over-full, just full, satisfied—we feel a kind of pleasant heaviness. Think of how you feel after Thanksgiving dinner. In many cultures, the biggest meal of the day is followed not too long after by a good night’s sleep (as in our culture), or at least a long rest (as, for example, in cultures with a midday dinner and an afternoon siesta). Feeling full makes us feel lethargic.

When our bellies are empty, we feel light. Hunger is a goad: a slight discomfort or pain that drives us on through the day, pushing towards that moment when we can again get satisfaction. Hunger may bring fatigue, but it is actually easier to work while feeling fatigue than it is to work while feeling laziness. Hunger may be an irritant, but lethargy supresses our will to press forward with the demands of the day. Hunger is a state of need, but satisfaction is a state of not-needing. When we don’t feel that we need anything, we have no motivation to move towards the things that will satisfy us further.

This is what all cultures have understood: there are goods which satisfy the spirit, which physical fullness will hamper our motivation to seek. We restrain our appetites and maintain an undercurrent of hunger, choosing not to deaden the restlessness of our spirits with physical satisfactions.

When we seek our spiritual satisfaction in the ordinary goods of life—food and drink and sex and entertainments of various kinds—we are laying up for ourselves treasures on earth. These things, properly appreciated, can be real “treasures”; it’s not that these things are bad. The problem that Jesus identifies with them is that the great thief, Time, will break in and steal every one of them from us. As Shakespeare observed, the last scene of our life is “second childishness and mere oblivion; / sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (As You Like It, 2.7.165–6). You are dust, and to dust you will return.

Better by far, Jesus says, to be hungry and poor on the earth and rich in spirit, because time cannot break into the union between your soul and God. We can satisfy ourselves for an hour, or we can hungrily cry out to God with the words of Jacob: “I will not let you go unless you bless me” (Genesis 32:26). We must have God’s blessing, we must see the face of God, we must replace our spiritual poverty with the riches of the kingdom and replace our filthiness with a robe whiter than any fuller on earth could make it (Mark 9:3), because any other satisfaction would be passing.

While Jesus makes this point, he concludes by making another, and we should too. Fasting is a matter of the heart, “for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). The reason our culture has such difficulty with fasting is that we have placed our heart on the satisfactions of earth. We have spent centuries perfecting our ability to produce and distribute sensual satisfactions to fill us up at every moment: more than enough entertainment, more than enough food. We have done this because that’s where our heart is. In words we will hear on Easter Day, we have “set our minds on things of earth” (Colossians 3:2).

To be a Christian is to have a higher calling. We “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Colossians 3:1). Our heart is there. Our treasure is there. We need to become poor on the earth so that we can become rich in the things that satisfy Christ himself—rich, that is, in communion with the heavenly Father and in mercy towards our fellow human beings.