By: Curtis Baker (curtisbaker@hotmail.com)
If seems like a funny scene, doesn’t it? As religious leaders of Jesus’ day prepared to make a donation in behalf of the needy, trumpets were blown to announce to everyone what had just been done. In our own time, that seems like an outrageous form of pretentiousness. And of course, we are right…it is an outrageous form of pretentiousness! We can all be thankful that this sort of showiness is not done today in regard to our giving. As we pass the offering plate at our church, no trumpets are blown to gather attention. As a matter of fact, we don’t even sing a song or have music to accompany us. The ritual is usually silent and pensive. But despite the differences between our own religious rituals and those of Jesus’ day, the human desire to have our good deeds known is no less prevalent. There is a temptation for all of us to be ‘known’ as a good person.
In this next section of the Sermon on the Mount, this impulse is one of the primary things Jesus will address. Whereas in chapter five he addressed the disconnect between the outward keeping of rules and being an inwardly good person, in the first half of chapter six, Jesus addresses the issue of seeking the reputation of being a good person, and actually ‘being’ a good person. Jesus will use three illustrations to make his point in Matthew 6:1-18, but as we have already noted, the first revolves around the issue of giving.
It is true that we no longer blow trumpets when we make a donation to our church or our favorite charitable organization, but it is equally true that we have found methods in the modern world to give in ways that improve our reputation. For example, for those with greater wealth, how easy is it to give to a local college that will build a building with your name on the front, while some of the greater needs might be for endowing the school library, which come with much less recognition. In the church, how easy is it to give your money in return for extra influence in how the business of the church is run. Or even on a smaller scale, how tempting it is to drop a subtle hint to others that you helped someone buy their groceries that month. All of these sorts of things can be examples of doing our acts of charity to be seen by others, rather than as acts of devotion to God.
Jesus’ solution to this common human fallacy is to “not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret.” (Matt 6:3-4) This is an interesting statement, isn’t it? At times I am tempting to think that Jesus has stopped his sermon to make a joke. How does one not let one hand know what the other is doing? Try it and you will find it impossible. It is sort of like telling a child not to think about monsters in their closet. As soon as you tell them that, they can’t think of anything else but monsters in the closet. But as you think about Jesus’ statement more carefully, there is a certain sense to what he says (as you might imagine!) For example, I drive a manual transmission car. This means that driving takes two hands. The left hand to control the steering wheel, and the right hand to shift the gears. When I am driving, do I consciously think of what my hands are doing? No, of course not. When I first learned to drive the answer would have been yes. It took some practice to get everything synchronized right. But now, 16 years later, I never think about what my hands are doing at all. It is something like this that Jesus is speaking of in our passage this week. Jesus doesn’t mean we should try to hide from ourselves how much we are giving; what he means is that giving becomes such a natural part of who we are, we don’t keep track of it anymore. We give because we have learned from God to be generous, not because we want people to see and be proud, including ourselves. It is people with this kind of heart that God is looking for, and who will be rewarded by him for their generosity.
(Don’t forget to join me for A Message from the Heart radio program Sunday evening at 8:00pm on KJAK 92.7FM, or streaming live at www.kjak.com)
Write to: P.O. Box 157, Slaton, TX 79364
