"Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."
Those poor hypocrites and their sons. I can imagine that some of their error might've just been due to blindly following tradition, not giving a second thought to the in-appropriateness of their prideful actions. 'This is how alms are given to the poor,' they might've thought, as the trumpeteers blasted away. How silly, but it might've been the "norm" for some misguided folks.
A couple chapters later in Matthew, we hear of horns again. There was a ruler whose daughter just died and there were professional mourners there for the crowd. Jesus told them to go away, and then He raised the girl from the dead. On His way to that house, a woman touched the edge of His garment, "claiming" her healing by faith, as it were. Apparently Jesus felt the healing power for her leaving His body. That's interesting. He later healed a couple of blind men, asking them first if they had faith that He could heal them. They did and He did. Then He told them to keep quiet about it. But they didn't. The news spread throughout the region.
I wonder why Jesus instructed them to remain quiet. Was it a good deed attempting to be done in secret? Was it so that His fame wouldn't spread to mega-star proportions and make daily life and transportation more difficult? Was there some divine order to it all that called for smaller crowds and fame? I don't know, but I do know that Jesus always spent time in prayer, and He listened to what the Father said, and that's what He did. He took His "marching orders," so to speak, and did what the Father wanted Him to do and say what the Father wanted Him to say.
I remember a great "start the day" prayer that my grandad shared with me once:
"Good morning, Father. What are you up to today? And how can be involved in it?"
Well, it's the last day of deadline. I've got 12 "pick of the litters" to write, two small news stories, the placing of ads, "pre-flighting" every page to make sure it uses only CMYK or grayscale images (no RGB), all the right fonts, and then convert each page into postscript and then into a PDF document, and "ftp" it over to our printer's server. I will try to get all of this done today, before the storm hits and before we face any power outages, etc. I have some family at my house and a friend at our office, all from Houston, riding out this storm.