Matthew 6:1-4 — Secret Giving

LINDA: "Don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." A skeptic hears that and says, "Come on. I can't drop twenty dollars in a plate without knowing I dropped twenty dollars in a plate. Jesus just handed out a command nobody on earth can keep." And honestly, Frank, I think that skeptic has a point.

FRANK: Impossible is the right word for it. He's right about that part. Where he goes wrong is assuming Jesus didn't know it was impossible... because I think Jesus built it impossible on purpose, and by the end of today I'd like to show you why that's actually good news.

LINDA: Good news from an impossible command. You've got your work cut out for you. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, we are so glad you're here. We're still in the Sermon on the Mount, and today it's Matthew chapter six, verses one through four, Jesus on giving.

FRANK: Four verses, and they open a door into the rest of the chapter. They're short enough to hear in one breath, so let me read them straight through.

FRANK: "Be careful not to perform your righteous acts before men to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. Truly I tell you, they already have their full reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

LINDA: A trumpet. Were people actually blowing horns before they put money in the box? Because that seems like a lot even for a show-off.

FRANK: Probably not literally. No record survives of anybody tooting a horn at the offering. But the picture comes from something real, and it's wonderful once you see it. In Herod's temple there was a large open space called the Court of the Women, which both men and women could enter, and lined up along its walls were thirteen collection chests. They were called shofarot, "trumpets," because each one was a metal box with a narrow mouth that swelled out below, shaped like a ram's horn. One was marked for the temple tax, others for wood, for incense, for gifts to the poor. Now think about what money was then. Not paper. Coins, bronze and silver. A wealthy man could tip a heavy purse into that narrow metal throat and the clatter would go on and on and turn every head in the court. The bigger the gift, the longer the noise. The box itself announced you. And a poor widow's two little coins? They hardly made a sound at all.

LINDA: Everybody in the room could count your generosity by ear, then. Fine, I get the picture. What I don't get is the problem. If the rich guy makes a racket and the poor still eat, who's hurt? Money is money.

FRANK: For the family receiving it, money works differently than Linda suggests—and Jesus never says otherwise. He doesn't even question whether his people should give. Look at the phrasing: "when you give," not "if." Giving is assumed. What he goes after is motive, and there is one controlling idea in these verses: everything turns on whose eyes you're giving for. The phrase "to be seen by them" uses a Greek verb, theathēnai. It means to be gazed at the way an audience gazes at a performance. It's the root of our word "theater." And the people doing it he calls hypokritai. We hear "hypocrite" and think "liar," but in Jesus' world that word named a stage actor, a man who put on a mask and played a part for a crowd. So the charge isn't mainly dishonesty. It's staging. A gift can be real money, feeding real people, and still be a scene played for an audience.

FRANK: Then comes the line that really stings. "They already have their full reward." The verb is apechousin, and it's the language of business. You'd find it on a receipt from the ancient world: paid, settled, account closed. Jesus is saying the applause wasn't a bonus on top of something God would add later. The applause was the payment. The crowd looked, the crowd nodded, and the bill got stamped. What does the Father owe a man who already cashed his check?

LINDA: Nothing. The reward is the glance. You wanted the room to turn its head, the room turned its head, and that's all you get.

FRANK: The glance is all you get, and it's so small. That's what makes it tragic rather than just wrong. And this is where I need to slow down, because this is the episode where we lay out a pattern the rest of the chapter depends on. These four verses on giving are only the first of three. In verse five Jesus says, "When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites." In verse sixteen: "When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do." Giving, prayer, fasting. Those were the three great pillars of Jewish devotion, the things a serious believer simply did. Almsgiving wasn't optional charity, either. It was covenant obligation, rooted in the Law's command to leave the edges of your harvest for the poor and the stranger. And Jesus takes all three and runs them through the identical shape: "when you," "don't be like the hypocrites," "they have received their reward," "your Father who sees in secret will reward you." Three times, like a bell tolling. The repetition is the sermon. Later, in chapter twenty-three, he names the disease outright: they "do all their deeds to be seen by others." So the question for every act of devotion is the same fork in the road. Which audience?

LINDA: This is what really bothers me, though. Jesus takes away one reward and holds up another one. Don't give for the crowd's applause, give for the Father's reward. Isn't that just a more patient version of the same greed? Skip the small payout now and wait for the big one later?

FRANK: It would be, if the reward worked like a wage. Look at who's giving it. Not "your employer," not "the judge." Your Father. Jesus uses that word again and again in this chapter, and it changes what kind of reward we're talking about. Hebrews puts it this way: "God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him." That isn't a paycheck. That's a father who notices what his child did when nobody else was watching, and delights in it.

LINDA: A father who notices is still keeping score, though. If I give quietly because I've been told there's a bigger payout later, I haven't gotten rid of the trumpet. I've just moved it to heaven and I'm waiting for it to go off.

FRANK: Which is exactly why he adds the left hand. If Jesus had only said "give privately," you'd be right. You could do the math and play the long game. But "don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing" makes the math impossible. You can't give while keeping one eye on your own giving and still obey it. He's after a heart so taken up with the person in front of it, and with the Father, that it forgets to admire itself. The reward isn't a separate prize you trade the gift for. It's of the same kind as the gift. Love given to the Father is answered by the Father, the way a marriage is the reward of loving your spouse. Someone who marries for the money is mercenary. Someone who marries for love and gets a marriage isn't.

LINDA: I'll give you the relationship part, I think that's real. What I'm not willing to grant is that my motives are ever that clean. I could give in total secret and still feel a little glow afterward about being the kind of person who gives in secret.

FRANK: You could. We all do. Matthew Henry saw that three hundred years ago: "It is a subtle sin; and vain-glory creeps into what we do, before we are aware." Before we're aware. You can't catch it by staring at your own hand, because the staring is the problem. Which brings us back to the skeptic at the top of the show. He's right that nobody can obey that command by effort. You can't forget something by concentrating on forgetting it. So what's left?

FRANK: What's left is to look somewhere else. The Reformers had a phrase for it, coram Deo, living before the face of God. You don't escape self-watching by watching yourself harder. You escape it when the one watching you matters so much more than you do that you stop checking the mirror. And only one person ever lived that fully hidden life of devotion, delighting in the Father with no eye on the crowd, and that's Christ. He lived it for you. On the cross he took what the hypocrite forfeits, so your smallest quiet kindness is received by God as the fruit of a love already given, not as a payment you're trying to earn.

LINDA: It's twenty to seven, the shift was supposed to end at five, and I'm rebuilding the numbers my coworker got wrong because the report goes to the director at nine tomorrow. He's going to present it. The director is going to say "great work." And I'm going to be sitting at that table with my jaw tight, deciding whether to say "actually, I fixed that."

FRANK: That jaw is the ledger. That's what this passage exposes, and it's subtler than showing off. It's the running account in your head of who owes you, who never said thanks, whose mess you cleaned up. "Your Father who sees in secret will reward you" means settling accounts is his job. And most of us have quietly been doing his job for him. Paul tells the Colossians to work "heartily, as for the Lord and not for men," because "you are serving the Lord Christ." Even your boss isn't the final audience for the late shift. And in First Corinthians Paul says the Lord "will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness." Nothing you fixed at seven p.m. is lost. It's just not yours to announce.

LINDA: What it costs is saying nothing at nine a.m. The director thanks him, he smiles, and I let it go. No pointed little comment on the way out. Not because I'm a saint, but because somebody else is keeping the books. And that still feels like losing something.

FRANK: It does feel like that. Letting go of a debt always feels like a loss while you're doing it. Except you aren't handing it to nobody. You're handing it to someone who keeps better books than you do, and who doesn't forget.

LINDA: Doesn't Jesus say the opposite one chapter earlier, though? "Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds." Now it's hide your good deeds. Which is it?

FRANK: The endings settle it. Chapter five finishes, "and glorify your Father in heaven." Chapter six says, "to be seen by them." Same visible deeds, opposite target. When the light shines, people look past you to God. When the trumpet sounds, they look at you and stop there. Some good works can't help being seen, and that's fine. The question is which way the spotlight points.

LINDA: The spotlight is the difference, then, not whether anyone ever sees it. That actually makes me feel better about the report. People will probably find out someday, and that's okay, as long as I'm not the one engineering it.

FRANK: Engineering it is the trap. And under all of this is a very old truth. Back in Genesis, Hagar is alone in the wilderness, pregnant, driven out, and God meets her there. She gives him a name no one else in Scripture gives him: El Roi, "the God who sees." Samuel is later told that man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. Jesus takes that ancient God who sees the forgotten and aims him at the hidden corners of our motives. Human eyes miss almost everything. His miss nothing, and he's glad to reward what only he saw.

LINDA: Which means the late shift nobody notices is exactly the kind of place where he shows up.

FRANK: Then as you open that Monday inbox, as you sit through the meeting you've dreaded all week, as the shift runs long and no one says thank you, may you go as someone already seen. May the Father who sees in secret be nearer to you than any room that turns its head, and may you find, in the hidden hours, that nothing you gave him was ever lost.

LINDA: Dig Deeper is the app this show lives in, and if it's new to you, you can find it in the App Store or on Google Play.