The Audience of One

Where we are (6:1)

Matthew 6 is the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, the first and longest of the five great blocks of teaching in Matthew's Gospel (chapters 5–7). Jesus is seated on a Galilean hillside, teaching his disciples with the crowds listening in. In chapter 5 he pressed familiar commandments past the hand and into the heart, and asked for a righteousness like his Father's own. Chapter 6 asks a different question of that same righteousness: who is it for?

It moves in three steps. Three acts of devotion, each examined for its motive (6:1–18). Two treasures, two kinds of sight, two masters (6:19–24). Then the thing that most quietly gives away whom we actually serve — our worry (6:25–34).

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them” (6:1).

Translators have struggled with that first phrase. The NIV once put “acts of righteousness” in quotation marks, the RSV chose “piety,” and the New English Bible went with “make a show of your religion.” D. A. Carson, the New Testament scholar whose commentary on Matthew is one of the standard works, says plainly that they are “overstepping the evidence.” The word is the same dikaiosynē Jesus required in 5:20. He is not naming a second-rate kind of religion; he is asking about the motive underneath the first-rate kind. Which also answers the obvious objection, that in chapter 5 he told us to let our light shine before others. Carson resolves it in a sentence: “Righteous conduct under kingdom norms must be visible so that God may be glorified. Yet it must never be visible in order to win human acclaim.”^*

So the question is never whether anyone sees. It is who the seeing is for.

Three acts, one pattern (6:2–18)

Giving, praying, fasting. These were the three great acts of Jewish devotion, and Jesus takes them in order. Each time the structure is identical: a warning, a verdict on the performers, an instruction to do it hidden, and a promise about the Father who sees.

Notice what he assumes. Not if you give, but “when you give.” Not if you fast, but “when you fast.” He is not loosening any of it. He is moving the audience.

“Do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do” (6:2).

Here Carson corrects a reading the church has repeated for centuries, and John Calvin, the Geneva reformer, held it too. No Jewish source shows almsgivers blowing trumpets on the way to the temple, or confirms the collection-trumpet so many commentaries describe. The likeliest setting is simpler and worse. Public fasts were announced by trumpet, prayers for rain were said in the streets on those days, and almsgiving was widely thought to make the fast work. So the trumpet gathered the crowd, and the crowd was the opportunity.

The word for these people is hypokritēs, which in older Greek meant an actor. But Carson presses further than the mask image usually allows. By the first century the word described those “who play roles and see the world as their stage” — and there are kinds of hypocrisy. One knows it is lying. Another “is carried away by his own acting and deceives himself.”^* That second kind is the one to fear, because it cannot be confessed. The man does not know he is performing.

Calvin saw the danger as universal rather than Pharisaic. “In all virtues the entrance of ambition is to be dreaded,” he wrote, and no work is so good that ambition cannot corrupt it. He also noted where the word came from: profane writers used it for “those who personated assumed characters in plays and on the stage.”^*

Then the verdict, three times over: “they have received their reward.” The verb is apechousin, the word stamped on a paid invoice. Paid in full. Carson's line on the fasters is as blunt as the Greek: “They wanted the plaudits of men and got them. And that's all they got.”^*

John Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, turned that into an argument rather than a scolding. You want spectators? Then look at who is already watching: “not angels, nor archangels, but the God of all.” He asks why a man hungry for glory would walk out of that theater into a smaller one.^*

Tim Keller, who pastored Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan, named how that works while preaching on money from Luke 18 rather than on this chapter: “you never fool other people without fooling yourself.”^* Which is why Jesus prescribes secrecy rather than sincerity. Secrecy can be checked. Sincerity is the one thing a performer cannot audit.

On fasting, Jesus says to wash and put oil on your head. Chrysostom noticed that the three acts are not policed alike. With almsgiving Jesus adds the qualifier “to be seen of them,” and with prayer and fasting he does not, because “for almsgiving to be altogether concealed is impossible, but for prayer and fasting, it is possible.” He had also met the last refinement of the disease: people “neglecting to fast, and yet wearing the masks of them that fast.”^*

One caution on the oil, because the verse is often over-read. It is not a code for joy. Carson notes it is ordinary body care, and nothing at all should advertise the fast: “Jesus desires reticence, not deception.”^*

The prayer he gave us (6:9–15)

Between the warning about showy prayer and the warning about piling up words, Jesus hands over a prayer, and it is startlingly short. Tertullian, the North African writer who produced the first Christian exposition of it, said it had gathered up “almost every discourse of the Lord,” so that “in the Prayer is comprised an epitome of the whole Gospel.”^*

Note what the introduction says. “Pray like this” — not “pray these words.” The Greek says how, not what, so, in Carson's words, “The emphasis is on paradigm or model, not liturgical form.” He also points out how new the first word is. The fatherhood of God is not a central Old Testament theme, and where “father” appears it is usually by analogy rather than direct address; of the Aramaic Abba he says “there is no evidence of anyone before Jesus using this term to address God.”^* To his opponents it sounded presumptuous. To his followers it sounded like being let inside.

Chrysostom could hardly get past that word. In the single title “Father,” he said, a man confesses “remission of sins, and taking away of punishment, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, and adoption, and inheritance, and brotherhood with the Only-Begotten.”^* The whole gospel is folded into one word, spoken before a single request is made.

Then the shape. Three petitions face God — your name, your kingdom, your will. Three face us — bread, pardon, rescue. Calvin put the ordering firmly: no one prays rightly unless “his lips and heart shall be directed by the Heavenly Master.”^*

He also guarded the shut door against a wooden reading: “He speaks comparatively, and means, that we ought rather to seek retirement than desire a crowd of men to see us praying.”^* The closet is a test of the motive, not a rule about architecture.

“Give us today our daily bread.” The word behind “daily” is epiousios, and it is nearly unique to this prayer. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin in the fourth century, made it “supersubstantial” bread in Matthew and “daily” in Luke, and some of the earliest readers heard the Lord's Supper in it. Calvin called that “exceedingly absurd.” Carson agrees: “There is no linguistic justification for this translation.” The word most likely comes from the participle epiousa, “immediately following,” so the petition asks for the bread of the coming day. It is a prayer for one day's food, prayed by people paid one day at a time, for whom a week of illness could be ruin: “The prayer is for our needs, not our greeds.”^*

“Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” This is the one petition Jesus comes back to explain (6:14–15), and the explanation has frightened people. Does our forgiving earn God's?

Carson answers with a distinction he takes from the Cambridge New Testament scholar C. F. D. Moule: between “earning or meriting forgiveness” and “adopting an attitude which makes forgiveness possible.” Refusing to forgive does not fail to buy pardon. It makes us unable to take it. Carson adds that the repetition in 6:14–15 presses on the whole community, because a church that will not forgive cannot expect its prayers to get anywhere.^*

But the plain sound of 6:15 should not be smoothed away. It reads as a condition, and faithful readers have differed on how to hold it: some take a refusal to forgive as evidence that pardon was never received, others as a real withholding of fellowship from a child who will not act like one. The text does not settle which. It settles only that the two cannot be prised apart. Calvin reaches the same place from the other side: God “will not be ready to hear us, unless we also show ourselves ready to grant forgiveness to those who have offended us.”^*

“Bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” Three things here that English has tended to blur.

First, peirasmos in this period usually means testing rather than enticement to sin, and the letter of James says flatly that God tempts no one. So this is not a request that God stop doing something he does not do. It is nearer the old Jewish prayer “bring me not into temptation” — spare us the trial that would break us. Carson is honest about the difficulty, and says we may be forcing the petition into too rigid a mold; Jesus told his disciples to rejoice under persecution and also to pray that their flight from it would not be too severe (24:20). Second, “deliver us from evil” is probably “from the evil one” — the preposition here is normally used of persons, and Matthew's first account of temptation (4:1–11) is unmistakably about the devil. But the Greek form is the same either way, and the older rendering, asking to be kept from evil itself, is still a live reading. Third, the familiar ending, “for thine is the kingdom,” is theologically sound and contextually fitting, but the manuscript evidence is “overwhelmingly in favor of omission.”^* The church prayed something true. It simply did not come from Matthew's pen.

Treasure, sight, and service (6:19–24)

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth… but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (6:19–21).

Read the order carefully. He does not say the heart drags the treasure after it. He says the treasure pulls the heart. So our spending is a map of our love — and the heart can be moved by moving the treasure.

Carson guards this against a misuse it has often suffered. It would be “foolhardy” to absolutize the command until wealth itself is evil; Scripture elsewhere tells a man to provide for his relatives and commends sensible provision for the future. What Jesus is after is “selfishness in misplaced values.” Calvin's reason is pastoral rather than austere: those who store everything here are to be pitied, because “they are unhappy men who have their treasures laid up on the earth,” holding a happiness that is short and uncertain.

Then the eye. “If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.”

The Greek haplous means single, and it can point two ways. On one reading a single eye is an undivided loyalty, which sets up the two masters of 6:24. On the other, Jesus is using the Jewish idiom in which a “good eye” is generous and an “evil eye” is miserly, which sets up the treasure of 6:19–21. “Either way,” Carson writes, the point arrives — and he adds the sentence that makes the warning bite: “The darkness is all the more terrible for failure to recognize it for what it is.” Augustine, who gave these chapters the name we still use, had already joined the eye to the heart: “The cleansing of the heart, then, is as it were the cleansing of the eye by which God is seen; and in keeping that single, there ought to be as great care as the dignity of the object demands.”

What follows is the verdict. “No one can serve two masters… You cannot serve God and money.”

The word is mamōnas, Aramaic for wealth, standing here as a rival lord. Carson sharpens what kind of rival. God and Money are pictured not as two employers but as two slave owners, since “single ownership and full-time service are of the essence of slavery.” So this is not a difficult balance. It is a contradiction. “Either God is served with a single-eyed devotion, or he is not served at all.”^*

Calvin says it in nine words: “where riches hold the dominion of the heart, God has lost his authority.” Chrysostom will not let the sentence pass without flinching. “Let us shudder to think what we have brought Christ to say; with the name of God, to put that of gold.” Then he opens the door again: Job was rich, “but he served not mammon, but possessed it and ruled over it, and was a master, not a slave.”

Consider the birds (6:25–34)

Now the tenderest passage in the sermon, aimed at the quietest symptom. “Do not be anxious about your life.”

He does not merely forbid the fear. He argues us out of it, twice.

Look up. “Look at the birds of the air… your heavenly Father feeds them.” Carson notes the limit of the illustration: “birds do not simply wait for God to drop food into their beaks,” so this is no license for idleness. The point is that they do not fret. And underneath it is a claim about the world: God is so sovereign “that even the feeding of a wren falls within his concern.” Chrysostom had made the same distinction centuries earlier about the lilies: in saying they do not sow, “it was not the sowing that He did away with, but the anxious thought.”

Look down. “Consider the lilies of the field… even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” The God who tailors a wildflower that blooms for a day and ends as fuel in an oven is not about to lose interest in his children.

Then the diagnosis, in Jesus' own word: oligopistoi, you of little faith. Carson puts it in five words: “The root of anxiety is unbelief.”^* That is not a scolding. It names where the cure has to be applied.

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (6:33).

This is the sentence the chapter has been building toward. The cure for a divided heart is not to care about less. It is to want one thing first, so that everything else falls in behind it. Both halves matter: the kingdom sought is the saving reign already begun in Jesus, and the righteousness sought is the life of chapters 5 and 6 rather than a status to be earned. Then Jesus ends gently, almost playfully — “do not be anxious about tomorrow… Each day has enough trouble of its own” — which Carson hears as a man who knows his hearers are still unsettled, setting the high motives aside to appeal to common sense. He adds the line that makes the verse livable: “If tomorrow does bring new trouble, there will be new grace to meet it.”^*

Keller located the chapter's center of gravity in the hidden room. “The secret prayer is the only thing you do just for God, just for Him,” he said, because everything else can be done for show. And he refused to let prayer shrink into a technique for getting things: it is “to experience the friendship of God and experience the Lordship of God out of a realization of our sonship with God.”^*

Where chapter six leaves us

So the chapter hands us an Audience who sees in secret. A prayer that begins with a Father's name and asks for one day's bread. A treasure that drags the heart wherever it is stored. Two masters we cannot both serve. And a God who dresses the grass and feeds the birds.

Under all of it, one demand and one comfort: the heart must be single, and the Father can be trusted.

But no divided heart has ever met that demand. Which is where the chapter stops being a standard and becomes good news.

There has been exactly one man whose eye was wholly single. He stored his treasure in heaven. He served God and not money. He carried no anxiety, because he trusted his Father all the way down.

And Matthew shows him praying his own prayer. In Gethsemane he says “my Father” and then the third petition itself — “your will be done” (26:39, 42) — in the one place where obeying it costs him everything. Luke records him praying its center from the cross, for the men driving the nails.

Then look again at the first word he taught us. Our. He does not say it alongside us. When sins are in view he says “your Father” and leaves himself out (6:14–15); of his own sonship he says “my Father” and leaves us out. So the prayer is ours by gift, not by nature. Paul names the gift: we received “the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15). The word was his first, and he handed it over.

So the single heart is not something we manufacture to make God willing. It is what he grows in people he has already brought inside — watched, not from the gallery, but from the room.