The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

From Public Show to Deep Authenticity:  Mt.6:1 – 18

…⁴ your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you…⁶ your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you…¹⁷ your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. 

          Sometimes we become so internally weak that we become bitter if other people don’t express more appreciation for us.  It’s as if human praise is a form of food, and we grow faint when we lack appreciation or public recognition.  This is what often traps Christians in mediocre lives.  Why go someplace where you may not be appreciated?  Just keep serving in conspicuous ways in a comfortable, predictable church.  Why love your enemies?  Just love your friends and get thanked for it.  That’s one point of connection from the ‘love your enemies’ teaching in 5:38 – 48 and the ‘secrecy’ teaching in 6:1 – 18.  If we can receive our secret reward from God, we will be better able to love our enemies.

Harriet Tubman understood what it was like to serve God in secret.  She was born in Maryland’s Dorchester County around 1820, into the terrible life of slavery.  Around 1844 she married a free black man named John Tubman and took his last name.  (She was born Araminta Ross; she later changed her first name to Harriet, after her mother.)  In 1849, in fear that she, along with the other slaves on the plantation, was to be sold, Tubman resolved to run away.  She set out one night on foot.  

Tubman followed the North Star by night, making her way to Pennsylvania and soon after to Philadelphia, where she found work and saved her money.  The following year she returned to Maryland and escorted her sister and her sister’s two children to freedom.  She made the dangerous trip back to the South soon after to rescue her brother and two other men.  On her third return, she sought her husband, only to find he had taken another wife.  Ouch!  Undeterred, she continued, and found other slaves seeking freedom and escorted them to the North.  After the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, she had to take slaves all the way to Canada.  By 1860, Tubman had made the perilous trip to slave country 19 times by 1860, including one especially challenging journey in which she rescued her 70 year old parents.  

During the Civil War, Harriet worked for the Union Army, first as a nurse, then a scout, then as a spy working behind Confederate lines.  After the war, she retired to a small house in Auburn, New York.  She was tired and penniless, but still she devoted herself to providing shelter and care to poor blacks.  She supported herself by selling vegetables from her garden. 

In 1869, a white admirer published a book called Scenes of the Life of Harriet Tubman as a means of earning her some money.  But she gave most of that money away to people in greater need.  When the book was published, Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and former slave, wrote to her these words:  ‘Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way.  You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way…I have had the applause of the crowd…while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scared, and foot-sore bondsmen and women, who you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt ‘God bless you’ has been your only reward.’  (distilled from Robert Ellsberg, All Saints, p.135-6; see also Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People)

Although we are meant to have a public relationship with Jesus so that other people are drawn toward him, not all our life is meant to be public.  The deepest part of our life is meant to be quite secret.  There is a deep authenticity and spiritual power that comes from this secrecy.  When we sense God’s secret pleasure over us, we won’t feel the need to be recognized for it, as if the Christian life were just another popularity contest, or a competition between Christians over who produces the most results.  When we are internally present to our Father alone, we will be empowered to continue in the most difficult tasks, in loving the most challenging people, asking for nothing more in reward than what the Father gives.

There’s an art to receiving a thanks or a compliment, too.  But there is a more substantive banquet the Father has for us.  Let’s not settle for light snacks.