Public And Private Piety
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PIETY
MATTHEW 6:1-8
We have to be very careful never to “do our religious thing” in order to impress other people.
The “piety” (literally “righteousness”) of 6:1 covers the principal forms of religious practice—almsgiving (6:2-4), prayer (6:5-15) and fasting (6:16-18), which were largely left to the discretion of the individual. In fact, the word is sometimes used with specific reference to almsgiving (cf. Psalm 112:9, quoted in 2 Corinthians 9:9, and the close association of “practising righteousness” with “showing mercy to the oppressed” in Daniel’s advice to Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel 4:27).
The point of Jesus’ teaching is that those who do such things to gain a public reputation for piety get precisely that—and no more. Practiced with this motive, they are not truly religious acts. Let them rather be done so that God alone knows about them, and he will bestow an appropriate reward—the opportunity for the further practice of such piety (cf. 2 Corinthians 9:10f.). The KJV addition “openly” at the end of 6:4,6,18 perverts the meaning of the promise: publicity is as inappropriate in the bestowal of the reward as in the pious action.
The primacy of almsgiving among the forms of piety mentioned in these paragraphs is quite in line with Old Testament teaching: “he who is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will repay him for his deed” (Proverbs 19:17)—a text on which Dean Swift preached one of the shortest sermons on record: “If you like the security, down with the dust.”
As for prayer, there is a place for public and “synagogue” prayer, but there is something specially distasteful about praying ostensibly to God but actually in order to be heard or seen by others and so to gain the reputation of being a man of prayer. We recall the newspaper report of “the most eloquent prayer ever delivered to a Boston audience.” The Christian to whom prayer is “vital breath” and “native air” will pray when no one is around, and his (or her) public prayer will take character from habitual secret prayer. The heaping up of “empty phrases” (6:7) may refer to the Gentile practice of including all the deity’s designations so as to make sure of not omitting the appropriate one; it has its counterpart in the grandiloquent phraseology which some Christians today imagine God prefers to the simple word “Father.” We do not acquaint God with our needs when we pray (6:8); we remind ourselves of them, and adopt that dependent attitude of heart which can receive his mercy in a spirit of grateful trust.
Note “Hypocrites” (6:2; cf. 6:5-16; 7:5; 15:7; 22:18; 23:13-15) means literally “play-actors”; people who go through the motions of almsgiving and prayer “that they may be seen by men,” without any inward sense of charity or devotion, are simply acting a part which does not express their attitude of heart.