Render Your Heart, Not Your Garments

The rending of garments was an ancient eastern method of showing your grief, kind of releasing the grief that you were experiencing. People would grab their garment from the collar and just tear it and rip it from top to bottom. A jewish reader would hear this as god, the father rending his garments at the death of his son. It's an expression of griefb by the way, is p s ray would say, when the curtain of the temple is torn, in the gospel, when jesus dies, you have that same idea.