Daily Manna · Day 352 · December 18
Secret Prayer, Open Reward
“But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”
You did something good last month and nobody found out, and if you are honest there was a small ache in that, and a temptation to work it into a conversation lightly, so it would sound like an accident.
Jesus is speaking to people who had made prayer into performance, standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets to be seen, and the word he chooses for where to go instead is not a spiritual word at all. Closet renders a term for the storeroom: the pantry, the inner room where a household kept its goods. In most houses of that time it was the only room with a door that locked, which is precisely why he names it. He is not describing a chapel. He is telling them to go and pray among the grain jars, because it is the one place in the building where nobody can see in. Then the reason, which has nothing to do with secrecy being more virtuous. Thy Father which seeth in secret. The audience is not removed, it is reduced to one, and he was the only one who counted from the beginning. The reward comes from him, on his timing, which is exactly why it can never be arranged or hurried by you. Which is the quiet freedom in this: an unwitnessed life is not an unrecorded one. The ache you feel when the good thing goes unnoticed is the ache of appealing to the wrong audience, and it does not get fixed by a bigger one.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 352 is When They Said (Psalm 122:1).