Shine Your Light and Not Be Seen-Matthew 6

Shine Your Light and Not Be Seen (powerpoint).  The visibility of beauty [of Jesus and his church of disciples] in Matthew 5 always includes Telling the Truth; otherwise we live in self-deception (Gen 3:5; Jer 17:9), deceive others and are deceived by others (2 Tim 3:13). Yet the visibility that Jesus calls for (Mt 5:14-16) is qualified in Matthew 6 by condemning those who practice righteousness for others to see (Mt 6:1).

People display—even exaggerate—how excellent they are, how qualified they are, how hard they work, how much they achieved and how worthy they are of being rewarded. So they deserve a raise or promotion or a better job. It’s shameless self-propaganda; it’s called a CV. But even we Christians incline to show or tell others—often with exaggeration and embellishment—how hard we work and sacrifice to serve God, others and the church. Our ego desires other Christians’ praise. Thus, Jesus warns, “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them”  (Mt 6:1).

Forgetfulness. How do you understand Jesus telling us that our light should shine before others (Mt 5:16) and to do so in secret and not be seen (Mt 6:1-3)? To Bonhoeffer it is not a contradiction if we attend to the question from whom the visibility of discipleship is to be kept hidden–the hiddenness that should characterize the disciples’ action applies to the disciple. Disciples should “keep on following Jesus, and should keep looking forward to him who is going before them, but not at themselves and what they are doing. The righteousness of the disciples is hidden from themselves.” Bonhoeffer suggests that those who follow Jesus are characterized by a kind of “forgetfulness”–that we lose our overpowering sense of self. Such a loss often accompanies participation in any grand movement, but the kind of forgetfulness required to follow Jesus is different from those moments that are briefly exhilarating but soon lost. The forgetfulness Jesus offers is from the compelling reality and beauty of participation in him.

To guard against calling attention to ourselves through our piety suggests that it matters not only that we follow Jesus but how we do so. Virtues help to explore “how.” Virtue (not peculiar to the gospel) was first developed by Greek and Roman philosophers. Aristotle was aware that a person could not become good by simply copying the actions of a good or just person. For the just person is not one who does this or that action, but does it in the way in which a just person does them—which means that they must know what they are doing, that they must do what they do for no other reason than what they do is what a person of justice does, and that they must do what they do from who they are—from a firm and unchanging character.

Training through apprenticeship. Aristotle doesn’t think one can be made just or good through argument. They are like the sick who listen but don’t do what the doctor says. Training is needed in the habits necessary for the acquisition of the virtues. Training requires apprenticeship to a master who has gained the wisdom necessary to gage our failures and our successes, and requires membership in a community that directs us to the virtues. Through formation, virtuous persons are virtuous for no other reason than that they would not desire to be other than they are.

Only Jesus can do what we cannot. There is similarity between Jesus’ admonition to not act righteously in order to call attention to ourselves and the meaning of virtuous. Yet Christians are not called to be virtuous, but to be disciples. Those called to follow Jesus are able to follow him only because only he was able to do what we cannot do, i.e., he alone was capable of freeing us from the grip of sin through his cross. That is why Christians believe (cf. Aristotle) that we are capable of becoming his disciples even if we acquired destructive habits early or late in our lives.

Transformation and formation. Augustine insists that the virtues of the pagans are sinful unless they are transformed by the love of God. Only such a transformation can save us from the pride that cannot help but accompany the virtues that have not had God as their source and object. Thomas Aquinas, who is often thought to have had a more positive view of the pagan virtues than did Augustine, insists that the “natural virtues” must be formed by charity if they are to make us follow the one alone from who we should learn humility.

“(T)he genuine deed of love is always a deed hidden to myself” (Bonhoeffer), for Jesus is calling us not to attend to our own goodness or our loves, but rather to follow him. Not to let our left hand know what our right hand does when giving alms (Mt 6:3) is possible only by the overwhelming self-forgetfulness that comes from Jesus’ call to discipleship. We are called to righteousness as well as called to give alms; these are possible because of what we have received. That is why, for Christians, acquiring the virtues is not to be understood as what we do, but rather as what has been made possible by the gifts we have received. We can do only what we have been given.

Prayer is perfect activity because it is done for no other purpose than itself. Jesus tells us to pray to our Father “in secret” and the Father will reward us “in secret” (Mt 6:6). To so pray requires that we pray to the one whom Jesus has made known. So we learn to pray by following Jesus, who is the Father’s prayer for us. That prayer, Jesus’ prayer, is secret because it is directed to the Father. Prayer, like Jesus, makes the Father’s will known, and the Father wills that we learn to pray.

If we are to know how to pray we must be taught to pray. Jesus says that even the Gentiles pray, but they do not know how to pray, for the Gentiles think they need to impress whatever god or gods to whom they pray by the quality of their rhetoric (Mt 6:7). That the Gentiles pray is not surprising, because we believe that God created us to be animals who desire to pray, but that desire must be rightly formed. At the very least, we must know that we are to pray to our Father, but that is learned from the one alone who knows the Father. Jesus will tell us that “all things have been handed over” to him by his Father; “and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Mt 11:27).

A Father who expresses his power in the sacrifice of his Son. 1st lesson in prayer is to learn to discipline all our descriptions of God by calling him Father (Mt 6:9a). Whatever it may mean for God to be omnipotent, omnipresent, all knowing, eternal, infinite—none of these descriptions are more important or significant than Jesus teaching us to address the Father. Even though God is all powerful he expresses his power in the sacrifice of his willing Son on the cross.

God as Father challenges our presumptions about our biological fathers. Some worry that addressing God as Father depends on analogies derived from our experiences of our biological fathers. Yet Jesus’ teaching us to call God Father challenges the presumption that we know who God is from our familial experiences. We do not call God Father because we have had or have not had a positive experience of being a father’s child. Rather, all human fathers are measured and judged by the Father’s love of the Son. To pray to God as Father challenges the status quo of human fatherhood, just as calling the church our family challenges the limitations and sins of our human families. Jesus not only tells us that we must be taught to pray, he teaches us the prayer we must learn to pray. His prayer begins with “Our Father.”

Though we may pray in secret, we always pray with others. We begin by praying to “our” Father. We are never alone when we pray because we pray as children who have been taught by the Spirit of the Son to cry “Abba! Father!” (Gal 4:6). Through the Spirit our prayer is joined to Jesus’ prayer so that when we pray we pray with the whole communion of saints who surround the Father in heaven.

A sympathetic high priest. We are able to pray to the Father in heaven because “we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, [and] let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need”  (Heb 4:14–16).

“Hallowed be your name” (Mt 6:9b) is at the heart of what it means to be called to holiness. To hallow God’s name is to live lives of prayer, that we live lives that glorify God, and that we do so as those commandeered by God, sanctified, set apart, ordained, made holy. We are commissioned to live lives that make visible to the world that the holy God [the same God before whom Moses hid his face when he was told God’s name (Exo 3:6)] reigns. God the Father has redeemed his creation through his Son. God has regained his territory from the enemy. God’s newly won territory is those who pray, “Hallowed be thy name.”

Living in between. The same people pray that the disruption begun in Jesus—a disruption called the kingdom of God—continue. They pray that the kingdom come (Mt 6:10a) because they have become part of that coming. The devil left Jesus after failing to defeat him in the desert (Mt 4:11), but the struggle continues. So Jesus teaches us to pray for an end to the kingdoms of this world dominated by sin and the power of death. We are able to pray that the kingdom come because we now know we live between the times of Jesus’ initial victory and the consummation. The prayer that Jesus teaches us, this prayer most appropriately prayed during our eucharistic celebration in which we affirm that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again,” is the prayer required for the battle he has initiated.

Our will to nail Jesus to the cross became God’s will to save us. The blessed have seen in Jesus what the Father would will. And the Father wills that Jesus and his followers would pray that his will be done (Mt 6:10b). They do so as those who know that the Father’s will is not complete among them as they too must learn to pray for forgiveness. But they also pray that what the Father has willed in his Son will be done over the whole earth. To pray that God’s will be done is to pray that our wills be schooled to desire that God’s will be done. Our wills, the will of the world, will nail Jesus to the cross. But God defeated our willfulness, making it possible for us to pray that God’s will be done on earth.

Why we should not ask for more than our daily bread (Mt 6:11). Only on the basis of the work of Christ is it possible for us to ask for no more than our daily bread. Just as God supplied Israel daily with bread in the wilderness, so followers of Jesus have been given all we need in order to learn to depend on one another on a daily basis. Without the community that Jesus has called into existence, we are tempted to hoard, to store up resources, in a vain effort to insure safety and security. Our effort to live without risk not only results in injustice, but it also makes our own lives anxious, fearing that we never have enough (Mt 6:19–21). In truth, we can never have enough if what we want is the bread that the devil offered Jesus. But Jesus is good news to the poor (11:4), for he has brought into existence a people who ask for no more than their daily bread.

A community of people capable of living daily is also a community that can forgive as well as be forgiven our debts (Mt 11:12). Jesus’ proclamation of the jubilee year is unmistakably present in the prayer he is teaching us to pray. To be taught to pray is to be taught to beg. To be taught to beg requires that we recognize our status as debtors. The debts we have incurred as well as are owed us come in many shapes and sizes. The debts we owe and are owed us, if we remember Lev 25 are as real as the next meal we eat. So debts owed us, debts as real as money and property, are to be forgiven.

Do you want to pray that our debts be forgiven as we have forgiven our debtors? In truth we find it easier to forgive than to be forgiven. We do so because so much of life is spent trying to avoid acknowledging we owe anyone anything. Yet to be a follower of Jesus, to learn to pray this prayer, means that we must first learn that we are the forgiven. To learn to be forgiven is no easy lesson, desiring as we do to be our own master—if not creator. But to be a disciple of Jesus demands that we recognize that our life is a gift that requires, if we are to live in a manner appropriate to our being a creature, our willingness to accept forgiveness with joy.

The forgiveness of debts signals that nothing is quite so political as the prayer that Jesus teaches us. To have debts forgiven challenges our normal economic and political assumption. But the forgiveness of debts is also at the heart of truthful memory. No people are free from a past or present that is not constituted by injustices so horrific nothing can be done to make them right. There is, for eg., nothing that can be done to “redeem” the slavery that defined early America. Faced with the tragedy of slavery, the temptation is simply to forget that America is a country of slavery or to assume that the wound of slavery has been healed by African Americans being given the opportunity to become as well-off as white Americans. But the forgetfulness of more money cannot forever suppress the wound of slavery.

The willingness to be forgiven—requires my “enemy” tell me who I am—is the only way that reconciliation can begin. To pray to be forgiven is to become a citizen of God’s kingdom of forgiveness. There is no more fundamental political act than this. To learn to have our sins forgiven, indeed to learn that we are sinners needing forgiveness, is to become part of the kingdom of God. If we do not learn to forgive then we will not be forgiven, we will not be part of the new reality, the new people, brought into existence by Jesus. To forgive and to be forgiven is not some exchange bargain, but to participate in a political alternative that ends our attempts to secure our existence through violence.

Become part of Jesus’ struggle with the powers of this world. In the last petition of the prayer Jesus asks that we not be brought to the time of trial and that we be rescued from the evil one (Mt 6:13). In his struggle with the devil in the desert, and in the cross, Jesus alone is capable of that trial. He told us that his followers will be persecuted, but we can survive whatever trials we may face because he has already faced the trial. Those who follow Jesus, praying this prayer, will be persecuted because they must be, as Jesus is. His disciples will know how to persist in the face of persecution because they have been taught how to pray.

Fast. After Jesus gave us instructions on how to pray he also tells us how to fast (Mt 6:16-18). Prayer and fasting are related because they are disciplines necessary for learning to beg. Begging is a bodily action. We beg to live because our body requires that if we are to live we must beg. The vulnerability of our bodies tempts us to deny that our bodies are the real “us.” The real us, we think, must be the inward us. I may have, for example, many possessions, but they are not the real me. The real me is the “me” constituted by my “inner being.”

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”  (Mt 6:21). The desire to be recognized for our piety, for our fasting, is not unrelated to our wealth. We think we can be something other than what we do and own, but Jesus challenges that assumption. We are “thinking animals.” If our bodies are to learn to be free of the habits that tempt us to believe that we can secure our survival through possessions, then we must learn to fast. Fasting, however, is not a discipline only for Lent, though Lenten disciplines can be useful, but fasting is constitutive of the life of a disciple.

To a disciple of Jesus, fasting is not dismal, though it may be hard. Fasting becomes a way of life that can be called joy. To fast is to discover the gifts that make our lives livable. To fast is to learn not to despise our bodies destined even to death. A life of fasting is to learn to live without what I assumed I could not live without. True ascetics do not think their suffering to be that significant. Rather, they discover that their suffering is the source of freedom. Nothing enslaves more than that which we think we cannot live without. To be so enslaved is to be captured by the powers of this world.

Fasting involves the discovery of who we serve. We cannot serve God and wealth (Mt 6:24), but we will also cannot serve God and the emperor (Mt 22:15–22). There is a close connection between wealth and the emperor because we believe that our wealth depends on the security offered by the emperor. Emperors always claim to be our benefactors. We may be sorry what emperors do in the name of our security, but we dare not oppose them because we fear losing what we have.

To be rich and a disciple of Jesus is to have a problem. Christians deal with this problem by suggesting that it is not what we possess that is the problem but our attitude toward what we possess that is the problem. Some recommend that we learn to possess what we possess as if it is not really ours. This means we must always be ready to give out of our abundance or even be ready to lose all that we have. Christians, particularly in capitalist social orders, are told that it is not wealth or power that is the problem but rather we must be good stewards of our wealth and power. But Jesus is very clear that wealth is a problem. Capitalism is an economic system justified by the production of wealth. This is not necessarily good news for Christians. Alasdair MacIntyre observes that Christians have rightly directed criticisms toward capitalist systems for wrongs done to the poor and exploited in the name of producing wealth, but “Christianity has to view any social and economic order that treats being or becoming rich as highly desirable as doing wrong to those who must not only accept its goals, but succeed in achieving them. Riches are, from a biblical point of view, an affliction, an almost insuperable obstacle to entering the kingdom of heaven. Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize. And those Christians who have recognized it have often enough been at odds with ecclesiastical as well as political and economic authorities.” (MacIntyre 1995, xiv)

Be trained in habits from a community of trust. MacIntyre’s observations about capitalism are contentious and controversial, but they have the virtue of making clear the radical character of Jesus’ teaching on fasting (16-18), treasures(19-21), the body (22-23), and our inability to serve two masters (Mt 16:24). These teachings are but commentaries on the prayer Jesus taught. To so live is what it means to ask for no more than our daily bread (Mt 6:11). This not to encourage idleness (2 Thess 3), but that we must learn what it means to live in a community of trust. Such a community offers the hope that habits can be developed that draw us from the forms of greed given legitimacy by capitalist practices and ideologies. Almsgiving should be invisible for Jesus’ disciples (Mt 6:3). But it is not be so for those who think our social order is sustained by each person pursuing their self-interest. To be formed in the habits, the virtues, of the prayer Jesus taught means that Christians cannot help but appear as a threat to the legitimating ideologies of those who rule. Christians do not seek to be subversives; it just turns out that living according to the Sermon on the Mount cannot help but challenge the way things are.

Seeking God first is a gift not an achievement. The beautiful simplicity of the life Jesus calls his disciples is evocatively elicited by Jesus directing our attention to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field (Mt 6:26-29). Possessed by possessions, we cannot will our way free of our possessions. To be freed our attention must be grasped by that which is so true and beautiful, we discover we have been dispossessed. To seek first the righteousness of the kingdom of God (Mt 6:33)–which is a disciple’s Perfect Life Direction—is to discover that that for which we seek is given, not achieved.

Only Christ can free us of possessions and worry. It is not accidental that Jesus uses wisdom gained from human experience to argue for the radical demands of discipleship. Can we add a single hour to our span of life by worrying (Mt 6:27)? Clearly not. The temptation, however, is to assume that Jesus’s admonition not to worry (Mt 6:25, 31, 34) is some general human truth that is true whether Jesus says it or not. But as we have seen, the content of the sermon cannot be abstracted from the one who delivers the sermon. That we are now able to live freed of possession is because the one has come who alone has the power to dispossess us. Jesus’s recommendation, that we not worry about tomorrow because the trouble of today is enough (Mt 6:34), is not just good advice, but rather wisdom that reflects the character of God’s new creation manifest in Christ’s life and ministry.

The desire to be secure is self-defeating. Jesus’ use of wisdom to help us understand the character of the kingdom made present in his ministry is sometimes mistakenly used as a general policy recommendation. Jesus is not suggesting that we should not plant crops or weave cloth, but rather if we plant crops or weave cloth to “store up treasures on earth” (Mt 6:19) we can be sure that our lives will be insecure. We can perhaps know that the desire to be secure is a self-defeating project without being a disciple of Jesus. But that wisdom is transformed through the recognition of him who has come to call a people into existence capable of praying for their daily bread. They are able to do so because their lives have been transformed through the call to be a disciple, making it possible for them to live in recognition that God has given them all they need.

Abundance, not scarcity, is the mark of God’s care for creation. But our desire to live without fear cannot help but create a world of fear constituted by the assumption that there is never enough. Such a world cannot help but be a world of injustice and violence because it is assumed that under conditions of scarcity our only chance for survival is to have more. Sam Wells suggests that God has given his people not just enough, but too much. The problem is that there is too much of God that we fearfully refuse to accept. Our refusal to imagine a world of abundance is sin and, in particular, the sin of sloth:

The problem is that the human imagination is simply not large enough to take in all that God is and has to give. We are overwhelmed. God’s inexhaustible creation, limitless grace, relentless mercy, enduring purpose, fathomless love: it is just too much to contemplate, assimilate, understand. This is the language of abundance. And if humans turn away it is sometimes out of a misguided but understandable sense of self-protection, a preservation of identity in the face of a tidal wave of glory. (Wells 2006, 7)

Yet those who would follow Jesus are taught that we have time to care for one another through small acts of mercy because God’s mercy is without limit. Abundance, not scarcity, is the mark of God’s kingdom. But that abundance must be made manifest through the lives of a people who have discovered that they can trust God and one another. Such trust is not an irrational gesture against the chaos of life, but rather a witness to the very character of God’s care of creation. So it is no wonder that Jesus directs our attention to birds and lilies (Mt 6:26-32) to help us see how it is possible to live in joyful recognition that God has given us more than we need.

Reference:

1. Hauerwas, Stanley. Matthew. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 2006.
2. Hauerwas, Stanley. Cross-Shattered Christ. Meditations on the Seven Last Words. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 2004.
3. Hauerwas, Stanley; Willimon, William. Where Resident Aliens Live. Exercises for Christian Practice. Abingdon Press, Nashville, TN, 1996.