When To Be Seen; When Not To Be Seen Series

Wednesday of 11th Week in Course 2019

A priest I know preached recently on this passage from St. Matthew’s Gospel and pointed out that this part of the Sermon on the Mount appears to contradict the earlier passage that tells us not to hide the good that we do under a basket. So do we let our good deeds shine out or do we do them in secret? Is Jesus talking out of both sides of His mouth here?

Well, the short answer is “no,” of course. Jesus is teaching us how to live in the kingdom at the same time as he is teaching us how to bring about the kingdom of God. The form of the Sermon on the Mount puts together many teachings of Christ in a kind of Christian version of the Book of Deuteronomy. Remember that Moses brought Torah down from a mountain and spent forty years teaching this Law of God to his people. Jesus on another mountain lays out His law of Love for His people. So lots of different sayings of the Messiah are put together in a few chapters of St. Matthew’s version.

And the other thing to remember is that the context of the two sayings is quite different. Jesus is warning us here, “Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.” He then gives three specific examples. Don’t give alms in order to be seen. Do it in secret so that you won’t get a worldly reward like recognition or a plaque or a head table seat at the annual gala. Now I know that in many places the annual gala is something an organization has to put on so that the public and the supporters can see what good the organization is doing. I know a charity that helps students from poor families find scholarships and apply to colleges. At their gala one of their graduates came back to share a success story. Charities have to do things like that, and donors are expected to attend or at least support that public face. But if you as an individual give in order to get clients or get recognized, that may be the only reward you get for your good deeds.

In the previous chapter, Jesus appears to be speaking to the whole Church who is bringing about the kingdom of God on earth: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” Note that the purpose here is to create a situation in which those inside and outside the Church who see the light of the Church give glory to the Father. The whole thrust of the work is evangelistic, and the Church cannot evangelize unless people inside and outside see the goodness, truth and beauty in the Church.

This is particularly important today, and I’ll just mention some specific ways we can share the goodness, beauty and truth that God has gifted to the Church.

I’m delighted that Bishop Barron has a couple of different series of videos available that show all of this, but as for goodness, his new series on the saints and Doctors of the Church like St. Benedict and St. Augustine is a great resource. There are saints today as there have been for two thousand years. We all need to read their writings and biographies so we can share this goodness with those we meet.

The beauty in the Church can be shown with Bishop Barron’s Catholicism series, but if you know of a particularly beautiful church, you can take people to see the stained glass and the ceilings and the sculptures. Locally, our five missions, a World Heritage Site, show the beauty of the Faith. And in a rich acoustic environment, polyphony and Gregorian chant can literally be a source of changed lives.

In a world where many think there is no absolute Truth, the Church proclaims boldly the One Truth who is Jesus Christ. And, moreover, it proclaims that there is no conflict between Faith and Reason. Pope St. John Paul’s encyclical, Fides et Ratio, is a good place to start. And when some unbeliever brings up Galileo, remind him or her that Jesuit Father Roger Boscovich postulated an atomic theory a half-century before John Dalton, and it was a better one than his. Gregor Mendel, a monk, gave us genetics. And Father Georges Lemaître gave us the Big Bang theory. The Catholic Church has been a major source of beauty, goodness and truth because Our Lord is the source of all of it.

So let’s live both sides of the Gospel by making certain all our deeds give glory to God, and that people know He is the source of all of it.