Ash Wednesday 2026

Matthew 6.1-6; 16-21

When you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. 

Nowadays, it is a criticism—usually of organisations—to say that their left hand doesn’t know what their right hand is doing. It means that there is poor communication between people or departments within the organisation. Sometimes, in Britain, we talk about the lack of “joined-up thinking”. We hear this of political parties very often; and large complex national institutions too, like the NHS and, indeed, the Church of England. We owe this sense of the phrase to an anonymous 18th-century novel about the Jacobite Rebellion, of all things. As far as I can tell, outside of quite devout and biblically literate folk, this is the only meaning of the phrase that most people know. 

Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. the divergence between the Christian and the secular understanding and evaluation of this phrase is itself telling, itself a parable of Christianity as a countercultural force in modern society. These days, people don’t do anything that isn’t immediately commodified and publicised. When social media site first became mainstream, we made fun of people who couldn’t have a meal without photographing it and sharing it with the world. But this is just a symptom of our more pervasive obsession with image, with optics, with what is now perceptively called our “personal brand”. 

But we are also, simultaneously and paradoxically, obsessed with privacy: or, more accurately, with privatisation—the privatisation of beliefs and values, and more concretely, of our possessions. We demand the attention of others, but will also not let them in, not let ourselves be truly vulnerable with them, appear before them unvarnished.

None of this works in Christian terms. The injunction to conceal from our left hand what our right hand is doing begins as an exhortation towards humanity in our generosity—but it is a part of a broader view of how we are to relate to others. It is a refusal to curate our image, and an emphatic denial that it matters what other people think of us. Certainly, that should not be a factor in how we live our lives: not in how we participate in charity, nor in how we pray, nor in how we fast—nor, indeed, in any other important aspect of our lives. 

But this refusal to capitulate to social pressure and cultural expectations is not, contra the gospel of the contemporary secular West, license to live on our own terms, determined by our whim and fancy. Christianity has no concept of being “true to ourselves” that is not entirely about being true to God, who made us and loves us and redeems us for a truer kind of life than the double narcissism of reputation management and the “my way or the highway” mentality in which so many of us seem to be stuck. 

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Lent is our annual exercise in shedding both our own egos and the inherited superego foisted upon us by our cultural surroundings. It is our re-attempt to essay for ourselves and each other what it means for us to live, to be truly alive in Christ, neither weighed down by whatever baggage we happen to bring from our own histories nor buffeted in the vicious winds of cultural and social fashion. 

God sees us, hears us, knows us—more clearly and better we know ourselves. Lent is our time to ask that we might be revealed to ourselves, so that we may truly live as ourselves.