Help us to be witness to the light

Today's gospel reading from Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18 is the same that we heard on Ash Wednesday. It describes the Lenten observance, fasting, almsgiving and prayer. In the time of Jesus, Pharisees prided themselves on fasting twice a week. Today however we know that millions of people are starving to death because of wars, droughts and other disasters caused by climate change. As TV shows us scores of trucks waiting to take loads of food into Gaza, we see that almsgiving has become an international task. What will it mean for us in Aotearoa if school children are deprived of their only nutritious meal a day? Almsgiving may take on a different meaning from the time of Jesus. When Jesus spoke of avoiding hypocrisy in prayer, he was living at a time when public prayer was widely practiced as he said, ''in the synogogues and on the street corners.'' But public prayer has practically disappeared from our society today. While the advice of Jesus to pray in our private room is always valuable, perhaps today he would call upon us to witness to our faith in a more public way. We don't have to knock on doors or preach on the street corner but as one writer put it, ''We draw people to Christ by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want to know the source of it,'' That light is the joyful life of faith that we have received. Help us, Lord to witness to it in our daily life.