I doubt many of us are tempted to stand on the street corner tooting a trumpet and calling attention to our piety. So the warnings that Jesus gives in our Gospel reading today, for the beginning of Lent (Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18), they don’t really apply to us, do they.
In terms of correcting our behavior that may indeed be true. But I doubt the disciples of Jesus at that time were much tempted in that way either. So why is he saying all this to them, and not to the scribes and Pharisees, who are typically the targets for such comments?
As so often, we need to take time to dig into Jesus’ words, to reflect on how they apply to us, even if at first hearing they are targeting someone else. There is no single way to do this. Sometimes we may simply need to say “I don’t understand this Lord”, and leave the word to grow in our hearts and minds – as it will if we don’t cut it off.
Sometimes we can gain perspective by stepping back from a particular passage and looking at the broader context that the scripture writer is giving us. This is important particularly with the Gospels because, even where an evangelist uses the same story, by setting it in a different context, he may be guiding us to a different truth or understanding. There are countless ways that God explains himself to us.
Today’s passage from Matthew’s gospel is part of a very long sequence of instruction that takes three whole chapters (Matt 5-8). It starts with the Beatitudes: “He began to teach them, saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” and ends with: “the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” Matthew has chosen to link together a wide range of instructions about how to live as a follower of Jesus.
So what might we take away from this particular instruction about not parading our virtue?
One possibility is to consider the danger of being self-satisfied – feeling that at least there is something in the long list that Matthew gives us where we can tick the box and move on.
But if we regard our piety as something that we can safely hide away so no-one need know about it, then we may simply be indulging our fear of being embarrassed. Jesus tells us “Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them”. That’s not a license to hide our faith away because it avoids awkwardness with people around us. He told us in another passage we heard just recently that we should let our light shine out (Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time).
So what’s at the core of Jesus’ teaching is not that certain actions or behaviors are right and others are wrong. What matters is what motivates our actions and behaviors. We have to be always asking ‘why am in doing (or not doing) this’? That may be a question to reflect on this Lent as we decide which works of penance we will take as our focus.