Christ's Advice Getting Paid for Charity Work in the Spiritual Incubator

Mat 6:1 Take care that you do not give charity publicly, to be seen by others: otherwise you have no reward of your Father who is in heaven.

Again, Christ tells us that we are "paid" for doing good works. Christ is not teaching unselfishness but an enlightened form of self-interest. Here, he is pointing out that we don't want to get short-changed in this deal by trading temporary "social" rewards for permanent, real ones.

A lot of ideas are coming together at this point in Matthew. God is our Father and we are His Children. We are designed to "grow up" to be like God. The point of our being on earth is our perfection, that is, our maturation or completion as God's children. Earth with all its trials and pains is a kind of incubator for the eternal.

How do we mature? By emulating God as Christ emulated God. We treat the good and the evil with the same generousity. This changes us and tranforms the earth. However, it is not the act alone that changes us. It is our motivation from the act. When we are motivated by earthly rewards for our actions, we do not mature in the process no matter how noble our actions. In other words, we cannot do the right thing for the approval of society and expect to mature from it. We must do the right thing only because it is the right thing.

If the purpose of the world is our personal perfection (and through the perfection, the improvement of human society), we need the pain and suffering of this world as personal challenges. Our response to those challenges in help others is what perfects us. Our choice of the spiritual over the material and the eternal over the temporary is what counts.

Can we legislated morality or charity? Christ teaches that this would be counter-productive. It is our choices that matter. If morality and charity are compulsory, we gain nothing from them. When God created this world, he created suffering as both an illusion and as a challenge. Some suffering, such as the loss of little children to early death, is only an illusion, since, from God's perspective, death is just a transition, not an ending. Real suffering, such as pain and hunger, are a challenge, a challenge for us to act to improve the world, not through coercion, but through personal choice.