My sermon last Sunday, 5th in Ordinary Time, Year A:
The instruction that Jesus offers in these few lines of the gospel seems at first glance to contradict the teaching he gave on other occasions, along the lines that when we pray, or fast or give alms, we should do it in secret, and God, who alone sees what we do in secret, will reward us.
Here Jesus seems concerned that our "good works" shouldn't be hidden or secret. They should almost be well-advertised, like a city on a hill-top, or a lamp on a lamp-stand.
The important element is motivation, of course. Jesus aligns himself with a strain of spiritual teaching in the Old Testament, illustrated in the first reading and the psalm today, that sees great value in setting a good example to other people - especially an example of pity and generosity towards human suffering.
"Share your bread with the hungry," says Isaiah. "...shelter the homeless poor, clothe the man you see to be naked". And the author of the psalm describes "the just man" as the person who is generous and merciful, who "takes pity and lends", and gives help to the poor "open-handed".
Jesus' idea in particular is that when we give this sort of example of responding humanely to instances of suffering, we're not drawing attention to ourselves or cultivating a virtuous image - the motive that he often accused the Pharisees of having. What we're doing is, we're inviting people to make a connection between our care and service to the poor and the devotion we have to God, which motivates our behaviour.
There have been many instances in the history of the Church when people have been persuaded to take the Christian message seriously, not by words an preaching and verbal appeals, but by the practical example that Christians have given of kindness and self-sacrifice. "Preach the gospel at all times," said St Francis. "Use words if necessary".
Jesus often echoed another strain of thinking in the Old Testament when he criticised people for having a rather showy devotion to God at the same time as turning a blind eye to people who were suffering, sometimes right under their noses. Time and again in the Bible we're told that this isn't the sort of faith or devotion God wants to see.
But it's possible that, in our circumstances today, we face the opposite problem: there are lots of examples of concern for, and action against, poverty and other types of suffering, but they're divorced from any kind of devotion to God. Big events like Comic Relief and Children in Need, which aspire to draw the whole country into their "good works", certainly mobilise people's resources of pity and generosity, but not in a way that causes people to then give praise to their Father in heaven.
So if we're anxious to put Jesus' whole teaching into practice, maybe there are a couple of principles that we should keep sight of.
One is, regarding our own spiritual life and our personal relationship with God, not to become so caught up in good works and activism - however necessary and praiseworthy - that our activism becomes a sort of substitute for God himself. Pope Paul VI put it very well when he said that we shouldn't become so preoccupied with the work of the Lord that we forget the Lord of all work.
And the second principle that's worth keeping sight of is to remember Jesus' great saying that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
There's always the temptation in a materialistic culture like ours, with a very "horizontal" notion of human welfare and happiness, to lose sight of the "vertical" aspect of human life - our vocation to live in communion with God, to detach ourselves in fact from material and worldly appetites in order to bring our our spiritual side, our appetite for God.
It used to be said about the Christian missions to very poor countries that you can't preach the Gospel to people with empty stomachs - and that's very true.
But in our modern consumer culture, with its narrow vision of material welfare and material happiness, what Christians have to point out, prophetically but delicately, is that just to have a full stomach, and a roof over our heads, and to aspire to be surrounded by the paraphernalia of material comfort, isn't enough. The human vocation is a higher vocation than that, and this is a difficult message to preach in a climate which is often blind or even hostile to the whole idea of transcendence.
Other people might now separate the expression of practical compassion from the worship of God, but we should always see them as connected, and try to find ways of making other people re-connect them. That's how we might take to heart the teaching that Jesus gives in this particular section of his Sermon on the Mount, which is of course directed at us every bit as much as the people who were sitting in front of him on the original occasion that he preached it.
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