Alms in Secret

In the Sermon on the Mount the Savior taught, “But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.  That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly” (Matt. 6:3-4).  We have many descriptions of events in the Savior’s life in which He did good works of healing the sick, raising the dead, causing the blind to see, etc.  He did not do these works “to be seen of men”—in fact in many cases He said something to the effect of “tell no man” to the person healed—but naturally in the course of His many miracles He was seen by people and they proclaimed the works that He did (see Mark 7:36 for example).  I think we can safely assume, though, that in general in His life He followed His own teaching; He did not do His works before men and there are countless good works that He did of which we know nothing about.  John alluded to this fact when He said, “And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book…. And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written” (John 20:31, 21:25).  We really have a description of only a handful of days in His ministry, and even in what we have we see Him helping numerous individuals; it’s likely that if we really had a record of all of the people He blessed in His mortal ministry, it would be enormous.
               In the book of John we especially see the quiet, unassuming, “left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth” kind of ministering that the Savior did.  For example, His first recorded miracle was at the wedding feast in Cana when He turned the water to wine.  It was not a flamboyant display of power; He simply instructed the servants to “fill the water pots with water,” and the miracle took place (John 2:7).  There is no record that He took credit for the miracle or that it was explained to the ruler of the feast why the wine was so good at the end.  It’s likely that only Mary really knew about the miracle, and as none of the synoptic gospel writers mentioned it, John probably found out about it solely from Mary when he took her in after Christ’s death.  In John 4 we see another example His quiet, unassuming, yet miraculous ministering as He visited one on one with the woman at the well.  With no showy display of supernatural powers, He simply told her secrets of her life that no stranger could have known: “For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband” (John 4:18).  He was there to teach her and call her to repentance and was in no way seeking to bring attention to Himself.  We see this personal, quiet, one on one ministry again in the next chapter, saying to the impotent man, “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk” (John 5:8).  He healed the man miraculously, but He was not there to be seen of men, and when the people questioned the man, he didn’t know where his Healer was, “for Jesus had conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that place” (John 5:13).  A similar thing happened when the Savior healed the man who had been born blind.  Jesus didn’t stick around to be interviewed for the miracle; when the man healed was questioned about Jesus’s whereabouts, he responded, “I know not” (John 9:12).  Jesus did of course perform miracles that were more widely visible to the people—such as feeding the 5,000—and yet often, as in these stories in John, He went quietly one by one to individuals to bless their lives personally and privately.  He humbly sought indeed to bless others without letting His left hand know what His right hand was doing.