Our friend Rachel recently posted the following spot-on comment about the agenda-driven evangelical response to the AIDS crisis:

whitewashed sepulchres filled with dead men’s bones

One of the comments to the post talked about the Talmud’s take on charity, aka Tzedakah, and the ranking system for the different levels of charity. I found a concise summary here:

Tzedakah : Charity

According to this, the Talmud categorizes giving by not just quantity but quality, in increasing order of merit as follows:

1. Giving begrudgingly
2. Giving less than you should, but giving it cheerfully
3. Giving after being asked
4. Giving before being asked
5. Giving when you do not know the recipient’s identity, but the recipient knows your identity
6. Giving when you know the recipient’s identity, but the recipient doesn’t know your identity
7. Giving when neither party knows the other’s identity
8. Enabling the recipient to become self-reliant

To this I say - Amen!

Something in me struggles against (7) and (8), and the gradually disappearing veneer of evangelical Christianity on top of my thinking tries to rationalize the struggle with the following thought: “But, if the person I give to doesn’t know I gave it to them, how can they give Jesus the glory? How can they come to know Jesus?”

I am beginning to realize now just how much reckless faith God calls me to exercise in giving in secret, especially serving in secret, to trust that God calls me to simply DO and leave worrying about His GLORY to HIM.