Hypocrisy [a sermon preview]
“And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’” (Mark 7:6–7)
A client calls and you know they've been unsure about whether to commit to you or some other company. When you pick up the phone are you yourself or someone more confident and slick? When your husband asks about why you've seemed distant are you honest about the emotional gulf widening between you or do you cover it in a last-minute date-night? When you walk onto campus and the eyes of classmates are on you, evaluating your fit, your place in the order of things, are you Christ's own son or daughter or do you shift to someone more acceptable to your peers? Are you authentic or are you a hypocrite? Being yourself is a cultural obsession. But what version of "being yourself" are you willing to show to the world?
When Jesus calls the Pharisees hypocrites he uses a word from the world of theatre. He says they are acting, and in the tradition of the day, actors wore masks allowing them to play several parts in one production. The Pharisees are playing the part of concerned guardians of religious life but Jesus knows their public righteousness is cover for private unrighteousness. Hypocrisy is displaying the version of ourselves which allows us to hide the true, and often opposite motives, desires, or actions of the heart. Sometimes that mask hurts others, which is why Jesus unloads on the Pharisees with both barrels. The masks also hurt the ones who wear them. John Updike famously said that there is a sort of mask a person wears that eats into their faces. While Jesus is giving the Pharisees a stern rebuke for their hypocrisy, he's also throwing them a lifeline.
Jesus' statements against hypocrisy are often embraced as a kind of sneer against morally conservative people. But there is hypocrisy for the secularist too. When the disciples get Jesus alone to ask why in the world he's upending the religious order he explains the parable then unloads a list that would scandalize the modern person. He says the things which defile us are some of the principles of high-brow Greco-Roman civilization: like the ability to love whomever one wants or to be obsessed with whatever delights our senses (sensuality). Beneath the surface these same values hide self-centered exploitation. The sensual person pursues the delight of their senses no matter where they lead, even the manipulation of others. To use our bodies however we like often collides with the right of others to not have their bodies consumed for our pleasure. The mask of personal freedom often hides a self-centeredness that oppresses. Jesus rebukes both the moralist who hides their immorality behind moral technique, and the secularist who hides their exploitation behind the pursuit of a fulfilling life. Both hearts are hypocritical. Both are self-seeking. Both are far from God.
The argument of the Scriptures is that the only way to truly unmask is to be further covered. A non-hypocritical life is not one that is more flawless. Rather Christianity embraces honesty about the human condition: wretched, wicked, broken, lost, even dead (Romans 3). But along with its radical truth-telling and unmasking it offers what no other religion or personal identity can: a real and true covering found in Christ. Christianity does not hope in an authentic and completely self-possessed person. Instead a hypocrite's only hope is to be lost in Christ, dead in Christ, crucified with Christ (Gal 2.20). Jesus' word about hypocrisy exposes one very important truth: Jesus is able to point out the falsehood because he himself is the truth that can cover us. He can declare the unwashed to be clean because he is the living, sanctifying, temple. He can tell these men from Jerusalem to take a hike because he is a living Jerusalem. To be clean is to be close to the one who makes clean. To be authentic is to be covered by the one who cannot lie.
In Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis tells the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche by reimagining the characters with greater depth. Their shallowness haunted Lewis his whole life and in this last novel which he worked on with Joy, his wife, he takes the opportunity to expose the depth of character behind the masks. Here's how he puts it:
"Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.'
A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
This is at the heart of what Jesus is doing among these backwoods and shady folk, the sick and the well-worn and the questioners from Jerusalem looking to catch him. It's a collection of people playing parts and failing to realize the damage being done beneath the mask. To these false ones Jesus tirelessly gives the truth away. Jesus gives himself so that the inner "word" Lewis describes, of real and true truth, can be dug out. That's how we no longer have masks, but faces.
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Oh Lord, blessed are those to whom you reveal yourself as the fullness of life! May you draw us to yourself this week in all of our anxious work. Blessed are those who you have covered and hidden in yourself. Blessed are those who have lived unclean lives but know that there is forgiveness in you. Blessed are those who come to you restless from living double lives and find the relief of repentance and hope in your grace. Blessed even are those who call out our hypocrisy, for they give us an opportunity to "put on Christ" and put off falsehood. Blessed are you most of all, Lord Jesus, for you are the face we most need to see clearly if we are to see our own true faces at last.