Piety in Secret and the Treasure Problem (7 of 9)

Three practices, one structure, one warning repeated three times.

Give in secret. Pray in secret. Fast in secret. And in each case, the same observation about people who do the opposite.

What Is the Repeated Warning?

That they have received their reward in full.

The phrasing is commercial. The word behind it is the one used for a receipt, a debt discharged, an account settled. The transaction is complete and nothing further is owed.

Which is the point. Public piety is not condemned as ineffective. It is described as effective, at exactly what it was aiming at. A man who gives in order to be seen giving is seen giving. He got it.

The warning is not that it fails. It is that it works, and that what it delivers is all it will ever deliver.

Why Does the Audience Decide the Nature of the Act?

Because the same action changes character depending on who it is for.

Giving to the poor is good. Giving to the poor with a trumpet is a performance that happens to transfer money. Praying is good. Praying on a street corner where the timing requires an audience is a performance that happens to use religious words.

Nothing about the outward act tells you which one you are watching. The sermon has been doing this since the antitheses: relocating the question from the deed to the person doing it.

Is All Public Prayer Ruled Out?

No, and the sermon has already said the opposite.

A few paragraphs earlier the instruction was to let your light shine before others so they see your good works. That cannot be reconciled with a blanket ban on visible religion, and the tension is not accidental.

The difference is the destination of the attention. Light shining before others so they glorify the Father is aimed outward and upward. The trumpet is aimed at the giver.

Same visibility, opposite direction.

What Is the Treasure Argument?

That the heart follows the investment rather than the other way round.

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. That is a claim about causation and it runs in the direction people do not expect. It does not say put your treasure where your heart already is. It says the heart arrives at whatever you have funded.

Which makes it a practical instruction rather than a sentiment. Move the money and the affection follows.

Then the eye as lamp, and the impossibility of two masters. The section is building a single argument: there is no arrangement in which you serve God and money at once, because the second reorganises the first.

What Is the Answer to Anxiety?

Look at what is already being fed.

Birds do not sow or reap and are fed. Lilies do not labour and outdress Solomon. The argument is not that work is unnecessary, since the birds are busy all day. It is that the anxiety is not doing the work you think it is.

Then the sentence that carries it. Which of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life.

And the closing instruction, seek first the kingdom, is what makes the section cohere with everything before it. The anxiety problem and the treasure problem are the same problem, and the answer to both is what you are actually pursuing.

Tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own, which is realism rather than optimism.

Part of a series on the Sermon on the Mount. See also the Lord’s Prayer, which sits inside this section.

Footnotes2

1. That the Lord's Prayer sits in the middle of this section is easy to lose when it is taught alone. It arrives as the example of praying in secret, immediately after the warning about street corners and immediately before the instruction not to heap up words. Its brevity is part of the argument around it.
2. The treasure claim runs against the usual assumption and it is worth testing against experience. Most people believe they fund what they already care about. The sermon says the caring follows the funding, which if true makes a budget a more reliable statement of belief than a confession.

Sources

N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-15 (SPCK, 2002), on Matt 6:1-6 and following. Supports the reading of the repeated warning and the structure of the three practices. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 5:16, Matt 6:1-34.

Where the sourcing stops: the commercial sense of the word behind received their reward is standard lexical background rather than a claim the passage makes explicitly. The relationship between Matt 5:16 and Matt 6:1 is a real tension and this post describes it rather than dissolving it.