Our Lord’s words in Matthew point to a form of life that makes sense only in light of another life.
So many people in this world, perhaps more than ever since the modern invention of the “secular” as a space cut off from all transcendence or final meaning, live as if the only thing that exists were the here and now. Some of them are conscious materialists who understand the concept of spiritual or intellectual realities but reject them. Many, though, are either mere practical materialists—materialists out of a kind of unreflected inherited cultural default—or what we might call temporal spiritualists, which is to say that they do not reject the idea of invisible realities out of hand but associate it with nothing more than a more layered concept of this present reality. So they might be comfortable with language of spirituality or meaning only insofar as it reflects a greater awareness of reality’s complexity. The idea that any of this life has some kind of ultimate goal or purpose is simply unimaginable. If there is meaning, it is the meaningfulness of my own particular bundle of relations and feelings and efficiencies in a purely subjective sense to which no one else—by axiomatic definition—has any access.
This worldliness is not entirely new. Perhaps it is new in its intensity or its claims to universality, but when Jesus speaks to the crowds about those who gather up treasures in this life and practice excessive public piety for the sake of appearance as having “received their reward (see, e.g., Matt. 6:5), the point is that by rejecting the supernatural vocation of humanity, these individuals have received a merely natural or temporal reward. In today’s Gospel, he reminds us that all things will be known and revealed. The words are hard, even threatening in a way, for they hit people where it hurts.
So many of us avoid sin only because we don’t want to get caught. We don’t really care so much about the nature of the act itself and what it does to us or our relationship with God or other people; we just don’t like shame. To be fair, we should be ashamed. I love how St. Thomas speaks about “shamefacedness” as a “theoretical” part of the virtue of temperance. It is “theoretical” because the truly virtuous man—the person with the fullest and most perfect virtue—would simply not do anything shameful. But if he did, he would feel ashamed of it. Shame is therefore a perfectly reasonable start to the life of virtue. It’s not where we want to end up, but it’s a kind of baseline.
Jesus tells us: actually, everything will be known. I think this is one of those moments of the Lord’s preaching where he really does bring things down to the level of the crowds. No mysteries or parables here—just the cold facts. We should do good for its own sake. We should love God for his own sake. But if we’re not there yet, it’s not a bad start to do it for our own good, fearing the consequences of not doing it. This is what St. Bernard calls the first—that is, the lowest—degree of love. But the fact that Jesus gives us this clear presentation is, in a way, his endorsement of a common principle that many of us have probably heard in spiritual direction: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Yes, we are called to perfection, but getting there takes time, and feeling bad about our imperfections or our faulty motivations isn’t going to help us improve them.
I’ve always thought of this particular passage as one of the more practical exhortations to the sacrament of penance. Yes, penance is medicinal—it is a sacrament of healing. But it is also the Church’s practical response to this reality presented by Jesus himself: all will ultimately be known. In the final book of his City of God, St. Augustine gives us a vision of heaven in which the lives of all people are transparent to all. Putting aside all the spiritual good of the confessional, think about it practically: if all my sins will ultimately be known, wouldn’t I rather they be known in the context of repentance and forgiveness? It’s the difference between a scar, made beautiful by grace, and an open wound. It’s the difference between heaven and hell.
Penance is just the start. We have to live, Jesus suggests, in light of eternity if we want to live in eternity—if we want it to be everlasting life and not everlasting torment.
Elsewhere in Matthew Jesus condemns displays of piety for their own sake, but here we get the opposite vice: the relegation of religious devotion to the merely private. At least when it comes to true religion, our modern culture is much more prone to this latter temptation. In some places the only acceptable public reference to religion is mocking and satire. I’ve heard stories in the confessional about people afraid to make the sign of the cross, about people afraid to admit that they are Catholic when a friend discovers that they own a rosary. Folks, this is dangerous territory, and the Lord cannot be more clear: “Whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my heavenly Father.” Perhaps these little apostasies are indeed light compared to the big public apostasies of those who stomp on the cross of Christ. But they represent the opportunity for small and light martyrdom—the kind of opportunities that form us in one direction or another as greater or lesser friends or enemies of Jesus.
The prophet Jeremiah, in our first reading, speaks of being rejected and persecuted for his faithful witness to the kingdom of Judah. What exactly was he saying that was so controversial? For starters, he was telling people that they needed to remember the Sabbath. He also worried about Jewish complicity in horrors like the sacrifice of children to pagan gods. Sounds pretty familiar, actually. And remember this: the people persecuting him weren’t the pagans; they were his fellow Israelites, fellow members of the covenant people. That’s a sobering thought, but not a very strange one in a world where Catholic politicians and even bishops mock the faithful who stand up for the faith once delivered to the saints.
I want to end with a closely related caution. In the context of this idea that all will be revealed, Jesus suggests to us that nothing happens without God’s knowledge: “All the hairs of your head are counted,” he says (Matt. 10:30). Some people may be tempted to combine this with St. Paul’s insistence that “all things work for good” (Rom. 8:28) and distort it into “everything happens for a reason.” If by “for a reason” we mean that all things have causes, fair enough. But God’s active will is not the same as his permissive will, and the fact that he will ultimately work all things for our good does not enable to us to call evil good or to blithely assure one another that irrational things really make sense (they don’t, which is why they’re evil). God’s providential care for us does not preserve us from all suffering and evil; rather, God promises that all suffering and evil can be redeemed and fit into his greater good. This is frankly a more powerful and simultaneously difficult thing to say, because it does not require us to offer some kind of blind “hope” (which is really just human optimism) that everything is really okay (just close your eyes and trust the Universe!); instead, it proposes true Christian hope, which is the confident expectation that God will keep his promises, despite all temporal appearance to the contrary.
We will face suffering in this life. Maybe we will even face persecution, like Jeremiah, for giving witness to the truth. But, as Paul reminds us in Romans, “the gift is not like the transgression” (5:15). And, as Jesus says, we are worth more than many sparrows!
God’s promises are sure, and eternal life is real. Therefore, do not be afraid to live in this knowledge and to act in ways that may seem strange to the world, but which call the world to its true vocation in Jesus Christ.