BEMA Episode Link: 97: Done in Secret
Episode Length: 36:27
Published Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2018 01:00:00 -0800
Session 3
About this episode:

Marty Solomon and Brent Billings continue the journey through the Sermon on the Mount, looking at Jesus’s teachings on generosity, prayer, and fasting.

Discussion Video for BEMA 97

Donate to Impact Campus Ministries

Sermon on the Mount #6: Prayer and Fasting sermon — YouTube

Transcript for BEMA 97

Notes

*Note: The following notes are handwritten by me, Adam, and I reserve the right to be wrong.

BEMA Episode 97: Done in Secret - Study Notes

Title & Source Summary

Episode: Episode 97 - Done in Secret
Hosts: Marty Solomon and Brent Billings Focus: Matthew 6:1-18 - Jesus’s teachings on generosity, prayer, and fasting in the Sermon on the Mount

This episode continues the journey through the Sermon on the Mount, examining Jesus’s radical teachings on three key spiritual practices: giving to the needy, prayer, and fasting. The central theme explores the critical distinction between authentic spiritual practice and performative religion, with a particular emphasis on forgiveness as the transformative heart of true righteousness. The hosts unpack the cultural context of Jesus’s audience, the meaning of “hypocrite” in first-century Judaism, and the revolutionary nature of Jesus’s invitation to participate in the forgiveness process.

Key Takeaways

  • Hypocrisy is about motivation, not consistency: The Greek word “hupocritos” means “actor” - someone who performs for an audience. Jesus critiques those who do the right things for the wrong reasons (to be seen), not those whose actions don’t align with their words.

  • Rewards are present, not just future: When Jesus speaks of rewards for authentic spiritual practices, he primarily refers to present transformation of the heart, not merely future heavenly rewards. Doing things for show yields only the reward of human recognition; doing things authentically changes who we are now.

  • Secrecy is about heart posture, not literal hiding: Jesus’s call to practice righteousness “in secret” focuses on internal motivation rather than literal invisibility. Earlier in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said “let your light shine before others” - our good deeds should be visible, but not performed for visibility’s sake.

  • The Lord’s Prayer was an everyday prayer: Jesus didn’t invent a new prayer but quoted the Amidah prayer that first-century Jews prayed daily at noon. His point was simple: “You already know how to pray - just pray authentically.”

  • Forgiveness is the revolutionary center: The only line Jesus added to the traditional Amidah prayer was “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” This invitation to participate in the forgiveness process was radically countercultural in first-century Judaism, where forgiveness was understood as God’s exclusive work.

  • The Sermon on the Mount is relational, not moral: Jesus’s entire teaching consistently points toward transformation through relationships with people - loving enemies, showing mercy, forgiving debts. This isn’t about disconnected personal righteousness but about becoming people who love God by loving others.

Main Concepts & Theories

The Meaning of “Hupocritos” (Hypocrite)

In modern usage, “hypocrite” typically means someone who says one thing but does another - a person whose actions don’t align with their words. However, in Jesus’s first-century context, the Greek word “hupocritos” simply meant “actor” - someone performing on a stage.

This distinction is crucial because Jesus wasn’t criticizing people for inconsistency between belief and behavior. In fact, the Pharisees - whom Jesus called hypocrites more than any other group - were extremely devoted to living out what they professed. They were among the most consistent people in terms of aligning their actions with their stated beliefs.

Jesus’s critique was about performance versus authenticity. The Pharisees were doing the right things, but as a show - theater for public consumption. Their religious piety wasn’t changing their hearts or leading them to genuine generosity and compassion. They were actors playing religious roles rather than people being genuinely transformed.

This means we can do exactly what we say we believe, be perfectly consistent in our religious practices, and still be hypocrites if we’re doing it all for show. The issue isn’t accuracy of behavior but authenticity of motivation.

Present Versus Future Rewards

When Jesus contrasts the rewards of performative versus authentic spiritual practice, the language suggests a present reality rather than merely future compensation:

  • For hypocrites (actors): “They have received their reward in full” - a completed, present-tense reality. If you give to be seen, pray to be noticed, or fast to be admired, the recognition you receive is the entirety of your reward. It’s immediate but shallow and temporary.

  • For authentic practice: “Your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” - while the English uses “will,” the context suggests ongoing, present transformation. The reward isn’t primarily about jewels in a heavenly crown but about being changed now, experiencing life transformation before death, not just after it.

The deeper the authenticity, the deeper the transformation. When spiritual practices come from genuine faith rather than public performance, they reshape our hearts, change our character, and alter how we experience life in the present. This transformation has eternal implications because we’re never the same again - we carry that change forward forever.

The Theater Imagery

Jesus’s teaching is saturated with theatrical language that his first-century audience would have immediately recognized:

  • “Do not announce it with trumpets”: In ancient theaters, when a famous visiting actor entered the stage (often in costume or mask), a short trumpet blast would alert the audience that the celebrity they came to see had arrived. Giving “with trumpets” meant making a show of your generosity like an actor making an entrance.

  • “Standing in synagogues and on street corners”: This describes the position of actors on stage, performing in front of an audience, positioned where they can be maximally visible.

  • “Disfigure their faces”: Actors used exaggerated makeup to display emotions that could be seen from the distant seats of large theaters. Making your face look somber while fasting is applying theatrical makeup to your spiritual life.

All three practices - giving, praying, and fasting - are couched in this theater metaphor. Jesus is saying: “Stop performing your faith like actors on a stage. Make it real.”

The Amidah Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer

The Lord’s Prayer, found in Matthew 6:9-13, wasn’t a new composition by Jesus but a version of the Amidah prayer (meaning “standing prayer”) that first-century Jews recited daily at noon in groups of ten.

The ancient first-century BC Hebrew version went: “Our Father, the one who dwells in heaven, may your name be holy. May your kingdom come as we do your will here on earth as it is done in heaven. Give us today the bread of today. And deliver us from the evil one, cursed be he.”

When Jesus’s disciples asked, “Rabbi, teach us how to pray,” Jesus responded by essentially quoting the prayer they already knew and prayed every day. His point: “You already know how to pray. Just pray. There’s no secret formula, no special magic words. We’ve been praying for thousands of years in different ways - just pray authentically.”

This democratizes prayer. There’s no elite technique to master, no sacred incantation to unlock God’s favor. Simple, honest, regular prayer is sufficient.

The Revolutionary Addition: Forgiveness

While the Lord’s Prayer closely mirrors the traditional Amidah prayer, Jesus added one line that doesn’t appear in any ancient version: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

Later versions of the Amidah (a century or two after Jesus) do include a petition for God’s forgiveness: “God, forgive us.” But no version - ancient, medieval, or modern - includes the phrase “as we forgive our debtors.”

This absence reveals the first-century Jewish understanding of forgiveness:

  • Forgiveness was God’s exclusive domain: If someone wronged you, that was between them and God. If someone wronged someone else, that was between them and God. Your role was to seek God’s forgiveness for yourself and hope God would forgive others.

  • Human-to-human forgiveness wasn’t emphasized: The concept wasn’t absent from Judaism, but in Jesus’s specific rabbinical context of the first century, the idea that people should actively forgive one another was not a central religious obligation.

  • Jesus invites us into the forgiveness process: This is one of Jesus’s most scandalous and consistently repeated themes - humans are invited to participate in forgiveness, not just receive it from God. This participation is what transforms our hearts.

Jesus emphasizes this addition immediately after teaching the prayer: “For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matthew 6:14-15).

The Chiastic Structure of the Sermon on the Mount

The Sermon on the Mount appears to follow a chiastic structure - a literary pattern where ideas are presented in sequence and then repeated in reverse order, with the central point being the climax:

  • The Beatitudes as chiasm: The hosts previously suggested the Beatitudes form a chiasm with the center point being “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” and “Blessed are the merciful.” The message: if you truly hunger for righteousness, the way you find it is by showing mercy.

  • The entire sermon as chiasm: Some scholars propose the whole Sermon on the Mount is chiastic, with:

    • First half: How to interpret Torah (the “you have heard it said, but I say to you” passages)
    • Center point: The Lord’s Prayer, specifically the forgiveness line
    • Second half: How to apply that interpretation (when you give, when you pray, when you fast)

If this structure is accurate, the entire sermon points toward forgiveness as the central mechanism of transformation. This aligns with the consistent theme throughout: don’t just avoid murder, deal with anger; don’t just avoid adultery, deal with lust; don’t just avoid false oaths, let your yes be yes; don’t hate enemies, love them.

Everything points toward heart transformation through how we relate to other people, culminating in the practice of forgiveness.

Public Visibility Versus Performance Motivation

An apparent tension exists in Jesus’s teaching:

  • Matthew 5:14-16: “You are the light of the world… Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”
  • Matthew 6:1-6: Give, pray, and fast “in secret” so your Father sees, not other people.

The resolution lies in understanding motivation versus visibility:

  • Our faith should be visible: Paul later echoes this: “Follow me as I follow Christ” and “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.” Christianity is meant to be observable, watchable, public. We need to see each other’s faith in action.

  • Our motivation should be authentic: We shouldn’t do things to be seen. We should do things because they’re true expressions of our transformed hearts. People will probably see them anyway, but that’s not why we do them.

The “prayer closet” example illustrates this perfectly. First-century Jews didn’t have closets for storing vacuums and brooms. The “prayer closet” referred to wrapping oneself in a prayer shawl (tallit), creating a private space with God. If you were standing next to someone who went into their prayer closet, it was obvious what they were doing - the practice was visible. But the prayer shawl created a psychological and spiritual space focused on God alone, not on the surrounding audience. The motivation was intimate connection with God, not public display, even though the practice was publicly observable.

Liturgy and Repetitive Prayer

When Jesus warns against “babbling like pagans” who “think they will be heard because of their many words,” he’s not condemning liturgical or repetitive prayer. The context clarifies:

  • Pagan prayer: Archaeological discoveries have uncovered examples of pagan prayers that ramble extensively, attempting to invoke favor by using as many words as possible, hoping to say the right combination to unlock divine response - like magical incantations.

  • Jewish liturgical prayer: Jesus then quotes a prayer his disciples say every single day at noon. He’s explicitly endorsing repetitive, liturgical prayer.

  • The difference: Pagan prayers treated words as magical formulas. Jesus says, “You know how to pray - just pray. Don’t treat it like magic.”

The value of repetitive prayer, like the Catholic rosary or daily recitation of creeds, depends on whether it remains authentic:

  • Stage 1 - Learning: You’re saying the words and learning their meaning.
  • Stage 2 - Lullaby effect: You know it so well you’re saying it absent-mindedly - pure performance with no heart engagement.
  • Stage 3 - Deep wells: You’ve persisted through stage 2, and now the prayer “speaks back to you” - it does deep work in your soul because it’s become real, not just rote.

The difference between people for whom liturgical traditions feel dead versus those for whom they’re deeply meaningful often comes down to whether they pushed through the performance stage to authentic engagement. Those who only experienced stage 2 received only the hypocrite’s reward - the show. Those mentored into stage 3 discovered transformation.

Examples & Applications

Fasting and Teaching

Marty shares his personal practice: when he fasts, he often talks about it with his students and disciples because most people don’t know how to fast, and teaching requires modeling. People sometimes challenge him: “You’re not supposed to talk about fasting - Jesus said do it in secret!”

His response illustrates the distinction between motivation and visibility: His fasting must be seen for it to serve a teaching function and for people to glorify God by learning the practice. However, if he were fasting to be seen - if the visibility were the point - that would be the only reward he’d receive. Because he’s fasting for “far deeper, more meaningful reasons” than hoping people notice, he experiences the transformational reward, even though the practice is visible.

This demonstrates how we can obey “let your light shine” and “practice righteousness in secret” simultaneously by focusing on heart motivation rather than external visibility.

Daily Blessings

Marty describes saying the same blessing every morning at his meal. This repetitive practice isn’t empty babbling but a spiritual discipline that “starts to talk back to me.” Over time, familiar words that could become mere routine instead become deeper wells of meaning, speaking into his life in new ways.

This illustrates the difference between performative repetition (stage 2 - lullaby effect) and authentic engagement (stage 3 - the blessing becomes a living conversation). The same words can be dead ritual or transformative practice depending on whether the heart is genuinely engaged.

Catholic Tradition

Brent shares that as a child in the Catholic Church (third to sixth grade), he misread the passage about not babbling, somehow missing the word “pagans,” and concluded that saying the Hail Mary repeatedly was the kind of babbling Jesus condemned. This contributed to his rejection of Catholic tradition.

Years later, recording the podcast, he realizes his error and recognizes that Jesus immediately follows the warning against pagan babbling by giving a prayer (the Lord’s Prayer/Our Father) that is central to Catholic liturgy.

The key insight: many who were raised Catholic and found it meaningless versus those for whom Catholicism is deeply meaningful experienced the same rituals differently. Those for whom it was “just a show” received only the hypocrite’s reward. Those who were “mentored and discipled in such a way that they were able to push through” to authentic engagement discovered “a deep well with lots of wisdom.”

The difference isn’t the tradition itself but whether it’s real and comes from “a real place” between the person and God.

The Pharisees

The Pharisees serve as the prime biblical example of the distinction between behavioral consistency and heart authenticity. They were extraordinarily devoted to doing exactly what they said they believed. They were not inconsistent or two-faced in the modern sense of hypocrisy.

However, Jesus repeatedly called them hypocrites (actors) because their “religious piety was largely a show” that wasn’t “changing their hearts” or “leading them to generosity and compassion.” They had perfect external compliance without internal transformation.

This example warns against the assumption that checking all the religious boxes equals spiritual maturity. We can be perfectly orthodox, completely consistent, and still be actors if our motivation is performance rather than authentic relationship with God and others.

Potential Areas for Further Exploration

  1. The complete structure of the Sermon on the Mount as chiasm: Detailed analysis of the proposed chiastic structure across all three chapters (Matthew 5-7) to identify how the elements mirror each other and support the central focus on forgiveness.

  2. Evolution of the Amidah prayer: Tracing how the standing prayer developed from pre-Jesus times through medieval and modern Judaism, and why forgiveness language was added post-Jesus but never included the mutual forgiveness element.

  3. First-century Jewish theology of forgiveness: Deeper study into how forgiveness was understood in various Jewish sects (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, etc.) and how Jesus’s teaching would have been received as revolutionary or countercultural.

  4. Prayer shawls (tallit) and prayer practices: Exploration of how first-century Jews used prayer shawls, the significance of the prayer closet practice, and how this physical tool facilitated authentic prayer in public settings.

  5. Theater culture in first-century Palestine: Investigation into how prevalent Greek theater was in Jesus’s world, what his audience would have known about actors and performances, and how theater imagery functioned as cultural metaphor.

  6. Comparison with Eastern Orthodox and other liturgical traditions: How do different Christian traditions navigate the tension between repetitive liturgy and authentic engagement? What practices help move from rote performance to transformative prayer?

  7. The relationship between giving, praying, and fasting: Why does Jesus group these three specific practices together? How do they function as a holistic spiritual discipline rather than isolated religious activities?

  8. Jesus’s other teachings on forgiveness: Comprehensive study of all Gospel passages where Jesus teaches forgiveness (the unforgiving servant, seventy times seven, parables, cross statements) to build a complete picture of this central theme.

  9. The connection between mercy and righteousness: Deeper exploration of how the Beatitudes’ pairing of “hungering for righteousness” with “showing mercy” relates to the forgiveness teaching in Matthew 6.

  10. Practical disciplines for authentic spiritual practice: Development of concrete practices that help maintain heart authenticity in spiritual disciplines, especially when practices become routine or public.

Comprehension Questions

  1. Explain the difference between the modern definition of “hypocrite” and the first-century meaning of “hupocritos.” How does this distinction change our understanding of Jesus’s critique of the Pharisees?

  2. How does Jesus’s teaching about doing things “in secret” relate to his earlier teaching to “let your light shine before others”? What is Jesus actually emphasizing in the Matthew 6 passage about secrecy?

  3. What was the one line Jesus added to the traditional Amidah prayer, and why was this addition revolutionary in first-century Judaism? What does this reveal about the central message of the Sermon on the Mount?

  4. Describe the difference between the “reward” received by those who practice righteousness for show versus those who practice it authentically. Is Jesus primarily talking about future heavenly rewards or something else?

  5. How can repetitive, liturgical prayer avoid being “babbling like the pagans” while still using the same words regularly? What determines whether repetition is transformative or empty?

Personal Summary

Episode 97 powerfully reframes Jesus’s most famous teachings on spiritual practice from a list of rules about religious behavior into a cohesive message about heart transformation through authentic relationship with God and others. The key insight is that hypocrisy isn’t about inconsistency between what we say and do, but about performing for an audience rather than being genuinely transformed from the inside out.

Jesus uses theater imagery throughout - announcing with trumpets, standing on street corners, disfiguring faces - to critique religious practice as performance art. The Pharisees, often misunderstood as simply two-faced, were actually extraordinarily devoted to doing exactly what they professed. Their problem was that all their correct behavior was theater, not transformation. They had the show down perfectly but weren’t experiencing heart change.

The teaching on rewards recalibrates our understanding of why we practice spiritual disciplines. Performative religion receives immediate but shallow rewards - human recognition and approval. Authentic practice receives deeper, transformative rewards - we are changed now, our hearts are made different, and that change carries forward eternally. This isn’t about accumulating heavenly merit badges but about experiencing life transformation before death, not just after it.

The Lord’s Prayer sits at the center of this teaching, and possibly at the center of the entire Sermon on the Mount. Jesus doesn’t invent a new prayer but quotes the Amidah prayer his disciples already recite daily. The message is refreshingly simple: you already know how to pray, so just pray. Don’t treat it like magic or a special formula - prayer is meant to be accessible, regular, and real.

The revolutionary heart of the prayer is the one line Jesus adds about forgiving others as we are forgiven. In first-century Judaism, forgiveness was understood as God’s exclusive work. Jesus scandalously invites people into the forgiveness process as active participants, not just recipients. This theme of forgiveness weaves through the entire Sermon on the Mount - don’t just avoid murder, deal with anger; don’t just avoid adultery, deal with lust; love your enemies; show mercy; forgive your debtors.

The consistent message is relational transformation. This isn’t about a disconnected moral code or personal righteousness between you and God alone. It’s about learning to relate to other people differently - with love, mercy, generosity, and forgiveness. The path to becoming righteous people runs directly through how we treat one another.

Finally, the teaching addresses the perennial challenge of liturgical and repetitive prayer. Jesus isn’t condemning Catholic rosaries, daily blessings, or creeds recited by memory. He’s condemning treating prayer like magical incantations while endorsing the very repetitive prayer his disciples say every day. The difference lies in whether the practice is authentic or merely performance. Repetition can be dead ritual (lullaby effect) or can become a deep well that speaks back to us, depending on whether we push through to genuine engagement.

The central invitation remains: make it real. Whether giving, praying, or fasting, whether following ancient liturgy or spontaneous expression, whether visible to others or genuinely private, the question is always the same - is this authentic? Is this changing your heart? Is this leading you to love God by loving others? Is forgiveness becoming real in your life? That’s where transformation lives.

Study Notes prepared for BEMA Discipleship Podcast - Episode 97: Done in Secret Scripture Focus: Matthew 6:1-18 For discussion guides and more resources, visit bemadiscipleship.com

Edit | Previous | Next