Day 4 | The Point of Prayer

Read: Matthew 5:43-6:4

43 “You heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you: love your enemies! Pray for people who persecute you! 45 That way, you’ll be children of your father in heaven! After all, he makes his sun rise on bad and good alike, and sends rain both on the upright and on the unjust. 46 Look at it like this: if you love those who love you, do you expect a special reward? Even tax collectors do that, don’t they? 47 And if you only greet your own family, what’s so special about that? Even Gentiles do that, don’t they? 48 Well then: you must be perfect, just as your heavenly father is perfect.”

6 “When you are practicing your piety, mind you don’t do it with an eye on the audience! Otherwise, you won’t have any reward from your father in heaven.

2 “So when you give money to the poor, don’t sound a trumpet in front of you. That’s what people do when they’re just play-acting, in the synagogues and the streets. They do it so that people will be impressed at them. I’m telling you the truth: they’ve received their reward in full. 3 No: when you give money, don’t let your left hand have any idea what your right hand is up to. 4 That way, your giving will be in secret. And your father, who sees in secret, will repay you.

Consider:

The Antitheses transition into a section on prayer through Jesus’s command to love your enemies. Matthew 5:45 provides a hint of how these two fit together. Jesus says, “That way, you’ll be children of your father in heaven.” The focus of all this behavioral instruction is so that one adopts the right, trusting posture towards God, acting with concern for what God sees rather than what the world sees.

Jesus is telling his audience that we are to be children of our Father in heaven. The voice at Jesus’s baptism declaring him God’s beloved son is not unique to him. It also extends to us, as we now share Jesus’s status by following him. Jesus’s call for “perfection” extends to us as well. “Perfect” here—the Greek word telos—carries the sense of completeness. By following Jesus and praying for God’s spirit to be at work, you can become, bit by bit, a person living at the intersection of heaven and earth, the “perfect” way God intended humans to live.

Learning to be children of our heavenly Father is about learning, through the habit of the heart, to regard God not as the demanding, bullying type but as the generous, lavish one who knows your inner being and is enabling you to be a heaven-on-earth person in a world where earthly agendas seem so powerful.

Jesus’s teaching about piety is about assuming a posture of trust and recognition. Matthew 6:1 warns of performing piety with an eye toward a human audience because if that’s the case, you’ll have taken your eye off the heavenly dimension, no longer behaving as a child of your heavenly Father. The same goes for alms, prayer, and fasting. All three practices are presumed here, so the focus is less on whether or not people perform these actions. That’s a given, even if it has become less so now. Jesus’s focus is the attitude or posture with which these actions are undertaken.

Your heavenly Father knows what’s going on in secret. One of the Jewish traditions about almsgiving speaks of the outstretched hand of the poor person as the altar of God; when you give a coin to the poor person, you're putting it on God's altar.

Again, this is not about God being a demanding spy, monitoring you for misbehavior. You not only don't need to show other people how pious you are; that spoils the whole point. It undermines any trust that you are living at the intersection of heaven and earth and that God is, at that moment, working through your secret action to bring about the joining together of all things in heaven and on earth.

Reflect:

Almsgiving, prayer, and fasting each play a central role in the Sermon on the Mount. Each is an assumed feature of the lives of Jesus’s audience. Consider your life of service or the faith community you’re a part of. Which of these three activities do you feel most comfortable with? Which do you do most often? Which do you need to give more attention to? How could you begin to better practice this week?