In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls us to a deeper righteousness, one that goes beyond a shallow, pious rule following. Part of that deeper righteousness is practicing it in ways that don’t draw attention to oneself. “Beware of practicing your righteousness in order to be seen by others, for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven (Matthew 6:1).”
That way lies hypocrisy. “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by others.” (6:5) Hypocrite is another word for pretender or actor, someone putting on a show. Jesus despises hypocrisy and regularly calls it out. He has a soft spot for broken, hurting, flawed people, but not for those who pretend they’re not broken in the first place, those who see faith and righteousness as something to be performed for the consumption and approval of onlookers.
He’s calling us out for our drugs of choice, the ones in which we don’t even notice we’re indulging. Anger, unrestrained desire, hatred, and revenge fantasies – those greatest hits from Matthew 5 – are all drugs. They intoxicate us. The need to be seen, the need to receive external validation, is a drug, too. We’re often content to settle for the shallow reward of putting on a pious show and receiving someone else’s approval. If that’s the reward we’re willing to settle for, Jesus says, it’s the only reward we’ll get.
So learn the spiritual discipline of secrecy, Jesus tells us. Secrecy is usually seen as a bad thing, but not in Matthew 6. When you give to the needy, when you pray, when you fast – do it in secret, “and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (6:4, 6, 18)” This is the kind of God and Father he is. He doesn’t need us to perform our faith. He doesn’t need us to appear more spiritual than we really are. He doesn’t need us to have an impressive reputation among the community. He just wants to have a real encounter with us, meeting us as we are, not as someone else expects us to be. But in order to do that, he’s going to have to take us by the hand and lead us to a place where the false self (constantly hungry for someone’s approval) cannot follow. He’s taking us to a place where no one will pat us on the back. He’s bringing us into the unseen, because that’s where he is.
As the preacher Bob Dylan once said – “You’re invisible now, with no secrets left to conceal. How does it feel?”
That’s a good question. How does it feel? How does it feel to be invisible? To exist in a place beyond the watchful gaze of all who might judge us or might approve of us? To enter into the quiet, secret place where no one else exists, where someone else’s presence and perception and validation no longer even occur to us. There is just the Father. His presence and his goodness. We don’t need anything else. We don’t desire or think about anything else.
Could it be that this is the Father’s reward for secrecy? Not a pat on the back. Not a series of outcomes that now bounce in your favor like good luck. But a liberation from the need to be seen by anyone else. Freedom from the need to get what we want. How does that feel?