Religious Play-Acting

Religious Play-Acting

The Sermon on the Mount opens with blessing and ends with a choice: sand or rock, appearance or obedience.

Between those two poles, Matthew 6 sits like a quiet heart—Jesus’ exposition of motive. Here the Lord shifts from what disciples do to why they do it. He moves from behavior to intention, from outer ritual to inner reality.

The setting matters. Jesus had just spoken of righteousness that must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 5:20). To His listeners, that sounded impossible.

The Pharisees were the professional righteous. They had turned devotion into a public performance with measurable success—fasting schedules, tithing ledgers, prayer times, visible badges of holiness. In first-century Galilee, spirituality was theater.

The Greek word Matthew chooses for “to be seen” in Matthew 6:1 is theathenai—from which we get our word theater. Jesus could not have chosen a sharper image.

He was describing an age of religious acting—people doing sacred things for audience approval. The same disease thrives in us. We move through stages, microphones, screens, likes, metrics, applause. The Lord’s warning pierces centuries of progress and lands squarely in our digital age.

> “Take heed that you do not your alms before men, to be seen of them; otherwise you have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:1)

That verse is the thesis of the entire chapter. From it flow three illustrations—giving, praying, fasting. Each is not merely a discipline but a mirror; each reveals what drives the heart. And each is introduced by a presumption of practice: When you give, when you pray, when you fast. Jesus assumes devotion; He questions motivation. His concern is not that piety exists but that it breathes.

>>The hidden Father

Throughout the passage, one phrase repeats like a heartbeat: “Your Father who sees in secret.” Six times Jesus names the Father in these verses. The point is not secrecy for secrecy’s sake; it’s relationship. The Father is the unseen audience of genuine worship. To live before Him is the essence of holiness. Hebrews 4:13 says, “All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” The unseen life is the true life.

To the Pharisee, the world was full of observers—neighbors, fellow rabbis, reputation. To the disciple, the world is full of One: the Father who sees. He is not hidden because He is distant but because intimacy always hides itself from spectacle. Lovers whisper, they do not shout. Prayer, giving, fasting—these are love songs, not auditions.

When Jesus said, “Enter into your closet” (Matthew 6:6), the Greek tamieion meant a storeroom, the innermost room of a house without windows. It is the same word used for the secret chamber where treasures were kept. Jesus was saying, “Meet your Father where treasures are hidden.” The soul’s wealth grows in that dark room.

>>The reward language

Another recurring word is reward—Greek misthos, meaning wages, payment. The irony is deliberate. Those who perform for applause receive their wage immediately—public approval. But the spiritual economy of heaven runs on different currency. God’s reward is never applause but transformation. He pays in peace, depth, and likeness to Himself.

The contrast is total: public religion ends in exhaustion; secret worship ends in rest. Jesus is not condemning visibility; He is condemning vanity. Deeds seen by others can still honor God—if the intention is revelation, not exhibition. “Let your light so shine before men” (Matthew 5:16) is not contradiction but completion. The same light that must shine must also come from a lamp tended in private.

>>The anatomy of hypocrisy

The Greek hypokrites originally meant an actor who wore a mask. Over time it came to mean anyone pretending to virtue. Jesus’ use of the term is not insult but diagnosis. The disease of hypocrisy begins whenever devotion loses dialogue and becomes display. The heart starts asking, How do I look? instead of Whom do I love?

The human soul was created for God’s gaze alone. The moment another audience enters, tension fractures the spirit. One eye on heaven, one on the crowd—sooner or later the pupils split. The Pharisee’s tragedy was not that he prayed or fasted, but that he no longer knew to whom he was praying or why he was fasting.

Behind every act of hypocrisy lies fear—the fear that grace is not enough, that we must supplement it with performance. So we decorate faith. Yet every addition subtracts. The more polish, the less power. Jesus strips the surface so the substance can breathe again.

>>The theology of giving

The first example Jesus chooses is giving. Charity (alms, eleemosyne) was central to Jewish piety. It reflected God’s own mercy (eleos). But by the first century it had become a badge of honor. Trumpets literally sounded in temple courts when major donors approached the treasury boxes. The clang of coins against brass echoed through the marble halls. The spectacle proved generosity. Jesus calls it theater: “Do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do.”