Hypocrisy (Wednesday teaching mass)

Hypocrisy

Matthew 23.27-32

Beati quorum via integra est, qui ambulant in lege Domini. Ps 119.1

Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.

I love Alan Bennett’s line in A Cream Cracker under the Settee, when Thora Heard has been visited by the Christian sect who push tracts through the door and call through the letterbox that Jesus loves her. She remarks with fine British bathos: “Shouting about Jesus and leaving the gate open - it’s hypocrisy is that!”

Jesus was against hypocrisy. He roundly condemned it, especially in the religious hierarchy, the Pharisees, scribes and lawyers.

So what is it?

It’s not hypocrisy if you are a smoker, and you warn someone else that they shouldn’t smoke.

It is if you pretend that you’re not a smoker yourself.

So when people say that Christians are hypocrites – as they often do – they usually mean that we don’t live up the standards we believe God has set for us.

That’s not being hypocritical.

It would be more correct to call us sinners – and then, when we acknowledge that we are - they don’t like that either and say we are always on about sin!

In other words, hypocrisy is not simply an inconsistency between what is advocated and what is done. Samuel Johnson made this point when he wrote about the misuse of the charge of "hypocrisy" in Rambler No. 14 in the mid 18^th century

“Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practise; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.”

Hypocrisy is the act of pretending to have beliefs, opinions, virtues, feelings, qualities, or standards that you don’t actually have. It’s a sort of lie that is often coupled with a desire to hide how you really are from others, and in its more complex forms, to hide it from yourself.

Etymology:

Hupo – under

Krinomai – sift, decide (middle voice, iquid aorist, critic, crisis)

Not an easy or certain etymology: from "separate gradually" to "answer" to "answer a fellow actor on stage" to "play a part."

So hypocrisy is in a sense play-acting

And why is Jesus so against it?

1. It can lead to self-deception – and pride. Two sides of the same coin.

2. It makes others feel bad about themselves. It loads them down, as Jesus makes clear in Matthew 23, today’s Gospel, and Luke 11 where he accuses the lawyers of this

3. It can make us physically ill.

As Boris Pasternak has Yurii say in Doctor Zhivago, "Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel; if you grovel before what you dislike... Our nervous system isn't just fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and it can't be forever violated with impunity."

So what is the remedy, the positive virtue to counteract this destructive sin?

Well it is authenticity (being yourself); integrity (being of one thing, whole).

Now this is easier said than done because we are not culturally free agents – in other words we live in a society where we cannot always be ‘authentic’.

We only have to think about the ‘gay’ issue to see that.

Living with parents, families, in society, in a church, in an office… all these place constraints upon us, so being authentic is a constant compromise.

Sometimes we rebel against the compromise, especially in our teenage years when we are trying to find the ‘authentic me’.

But also later – me with blond hair, earrings, tattoos in my 40s… This is as much me as this dog collar, the chasuble. I am something ‘whole’ – an integrity.

And this is true of all of us in the different roles we play in life.

So how do we get the balance right between conforming and asserting what we see as our authentic self?

If we look to Jesus as our guide we get some help.

In general he appears to have conformed in most ways to his Jewish culture; more so than John the Baptist.

But when he was trying to ‘set the captives free’, to liberate men and women from the burdens the religious set upon them, he was more likely to rebel:

The use of the Sabbath

The moneychangers in the temple

Pointing out hypocrisy

His attitude to women and children

In other words he did not assert his own authenticity just for the sake of it – for his own sake; he asserted it when it would be part of a liberation of others; an enabling of them to be authentic.

And this was of course at considerable cost to himself. The cost we celebrate at this mass tonight.

This is perhaps a guide for us as

we struggle to avoid hypocrisy, but not to be self-congratulatory about our authenticity;

about being ‘me’ while still respecting those around us who may be in a different space, a different place.

Stanford’s translation, wherever he got it from, (it’ not in any of Jerome’s Vulgate versions) has a deep truth in it.

Beati quorum via integra est, qui ambulant in lege Domini. Ps 119.1

Which we might paraphrase:

Happy are those who can live authentically, and yet still walk with integrity before God.