Let Your Light Shine
Day 261 – 18 September
The Audience of One
But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6:3–4, KJV)
The Room With No Names
The Temple that Jesus walked through had a room built for a single purpose, and the rabbis who remembered it recorded its name: the chamber of secrets. The Mishnah describes it in a sentence. There were two chambers in the Temple, one the chamber of secrets and the other the chamber of utensils; those who feared sin put their gifts into the chamber of secrets in secret, and the poor of good family were maintained from it in secret. It was, by one account, a darkened room. A devout worshipper would slip in unseen and leave money; a person who had once been comfortable and had fallen on hard times would slip in unseen and take what they needed; and neither ever knew the other’s name. The arrangement did three things at once. It fed the poor. It spared the receiver the shame of being seen to need. And it spared the giver the temptation of being seen to give. The idea was so valued that the rabbis later said every town should have such a chamber, and a thousand years on Maimonides placed anonymous giving, where neither party knows the other, near the very top of his famous ladder of charity, naming the Temple’s darkened room as its model. Jesus knew that Temple well, and His hearers knew its customs. And when He turned, in the Sermon on the Mount, from the light that must be seen to the gift that must be secret, He was describing a practice they already honoured.
The Same Preacher, One Chapter Later
A puzzle waits at the start of chapter six for anyone reading the Sermon straight through. Jesus has just said, in chapter five, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works. Now He says the opposite, or seems to: “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them” (Matthew 6:1). Which is it? Are the beautiful works to be seen or hidden? The answer is that both are true, and the Greek shows exactly where the line runs. In chapter five the seeing has an outcome: that they may see, and glorify your Father. In chapter six the seeing has a motive, and the motive is the problem. The phrase is πρὸς τὸ θεαθῆναι αὐτοῖς (pros to theathēnai autois, in order to be gazed at by them), and the verb is θεάομαι (theaomai, to gaze at, to watch as a spectacle), the word from which we get theatre. Jesus is forbidding goodness done as a performance, with the watchers as the point. One old commentator says their virtue was a kind of theatre. Another drew the line exactly: what is ruled out is the show-off whose whole object is the applause of men, and what is left standing is the open kindness of the believer whose light shines so that people glorify God. So the beautiful work may be seen. It must never be staged.
Actors, Trumpets, and Receipts
Once you see the theatre in that first verse, the whole passage lights up with stage words. Jesus goes on: when you give, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. The word hypocrites is ὑποκριταί (hypokritai, actors), and in classical Greek it meant nothing worse than a stage-player, a man who spoke his lines through a large painted mask; it was Jesus who loaded it with the moral weight it carries now, and one scholar remarks that our very horror of acting for effect in religion comes from Christ’s teaching, adding drily that there are religious actors still, and they draw good houses. The trumpet is the actor’s fanfare, the noise that says a performance is beginning. And then comes the verdict, and it is a word borrowed from the counting-house, never the stage: verily I say unto you, they have their reward. The Greek is ἀπέχουσιν (apechousin, they have received in full), the very word written on a receipt when an account was settled, paid in full, nothing further owing. The actors wanted an audience; they got one; the transaction is closed, and there is nothing else to come. Set against all that is the gift in the chamber of secrets. Let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing, Jesus says, a picture of giving so free of self-regard that the giver hardly notices himself doing it; and let your ἐλεημοσύνη (eleēmosynē, mercy-deed, alms) be ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ (en tō kryptō, in the secret place). This is what makes a beautiful work beautiful, stated as sharply as it will ever be. The moment a good deed is done for an audience, it turns into acting, and acting is paid in applause and closed. The deed done where no one is watching is the one still open, still alive, still lovely, because it was never a performance at all.
The One Who Sees in Secret
But the secret deed has a witness. Jesus does more than close the theatre; He names another audience. Your Father, He says, ὁ βλέπων ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ (ho blepōn en tō kryptō, the One seeing in the secret place), sees, and will reward. This is the hinge of the whole passage and the reason the secret work is beautiful and never merely private. The actor’s tragedy is a small audience: a synagogue, a street, a few faces that smile and forget. The secret giver’s audience is one, and it is the only audience that matters, the Father Himself, present in the darkened room, present at the left hand’s ignorance, seeing every coin. Chrysostom saw the irony centuries ago: if you want spectators for your good deeds, he said, you have them, and better than angels, for the God of the universe watches. And there is a further comfort. The Greek of the reward, ἀποδώσει (apodōsei, He will repay, give back), is the counterpart of the actor’s receipt: the actor has been paid in full by his public and the account is closed, but the secret giver’s account is open with God, who repays in His own time and His own currency. The old King James adds openly, a word the earliest Greek copies lack, but the thought is sound: what was done in the dark for God alone will one day stand in the light. Peter said as much to the slandered believers, and we met it on Monday; Mark told us that nothing is hidden except to be revealed, and we met that too. The beautiful work done in secret is the safest investment in the world, because its only witness is the One who never forgets and never fails to pay.
A Coin in the Dark on a Friday
The week’s beautiful works come, on their last weekday, to the one nobody will ever know about. Choose it today. It might be a gift to someone in need, given so that they cannot trace it to you. It might be a job done for a colleague and left unclaimed, a kindness to a neighbour who will assume it was someone else, a debt settled without a word, a good word spoken for a person in a room they will never enter. Do it, and then do the harder part: tell no one. Resist the report, the hint, the humble mention that lets the story out; let the left hand stay ignorant. You will discover a strange thing when you try. The good deed with no audience is lighter, cleaner, and more joyful than any you have done for a watcher, because it was never acting, and there is no performance to sustain. And you will discover that you were watched after all, by the only eyes that count, in the darkened room where He waits to see what His children do when no one is looking. Fill the chamber of secrets once today. It is the loveliest work of the week, and it is the one the Father keeps.
Declaration
I will do one good thing today that no one will ever trace to me. I know the pull of the trumpet, the wish to be seen doing well, the mention that turns a gift into a story; and I know what that kind of goodness earns, a few smiles and a closed account. I want the other kind, the kind done in the darkened room, where the giver slips in unseen and the one in need takes what they need and neither knows the other’s name. So I will keep the gift where a gift belongs, in the dark. I will give without a receipt, help without a report, and let the credit go unclaimed for ever. And I will do it knowing I was seen, by the only eyes in the room that matter, eyes that never blink and never forget, and that have been watching my secret places with more kindness than I deserve. The applause of the street is paid and finished. What I do in the dark for the One who sees there stays open, and lovely, and kept.
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