The older Christian tradition had a category for the appetite Jesus is diagnosing here, though we rarely use it today. Medieval theologians described gluttony not merely as an excessive appetite for food but as any appetite that has lost its proper measure, any desire that has slipped out of proportion to its rightful end. By that definition, the hunger for recognition, the desire to be seen as holy, devoted, and spiritually serious, is a form of gluttony. It is an appetite that has grown beyond its proper boundaries and taken over disciplines meant for an entirely different purpose.
What makes this appetite so difficult to identify is that it attaches itself to genuinely good activities. The Pharisees were actually fasting. The discipline was real. The posture was present. The suffering, at least some of it, was genuine. But underneath the genuine practice, something had gone wrong at the root. The fast that was meant to orient the heart toward God had been hijacked by a hunger for human admiration. And because the surface behavior was identical to genuine fasting, the corruption was almost invisible, at least to the one performing it.
This is what makes the appetite for recognition so dangerous. It does not announce itself. It does not show up and say, ‘I am here to corrupt your fasting.’ It shows up as a reasonable desire to be encouraged, acknowledged, or simply noticed. It shows up as a mild disappointment when service goes unrecognized, a small resentment when sacrifice is taken for granted, a quiet ache when no one says thank you. These are not dramatic sins. They are, as the sermon put it, the subtlest of the subtle. And they are, Jesus says, enough to empty a discipline entirely of its heavenly content.