Hypocrisy - Deacon Ray
In today’s Gospel, Jesus warns against the perils of hypocrisy. But what is hypocrisy? In English, hypocrisy means pretending to be more virtuous or religious than we are. In Greek, hypocrisy is more generally associated with play-acting in the sense of adopting a counterfeit (or false) persona, like a stage actor. While that talent might be entertaining on a stage, it had already taken on negative connotations in public life before the time of Jesus because the better the actor, the more difficult it was to distinguish between pretense and sincerity.
The etymology of the word reveals even more: “hypo-” means under, and the remaining root means “to sift or decide.” Here, our first reading from the Book of Sirach sheds additional light. In the process of sifting wheat or other grain, the good seed (being smaller) passes through the sieve and falls under the sieve to the ground, whereas the useless (and larger) husks remain trapped above in the mesh of the sieve. Thus, hypocrisy can be understood as a useless husk pretending to be the good grain that falls under the sifting sieve wielded by God.
The Gospel casts further light also, for those who want to see. The metaphor of splinter and beam chosen by Jesus is a variation of a similar metaphor he used in Matthew’s Gospel, where he spoke of hypocrites being obsessed with straining out gnats but letting camels pass through. The message in each case is the same: stop pretending. Stop lying. Stop lying to God, stop lying to each other, stop lying to yourself. The lying tongue, it seems, is the first thing to get caught in God’s sifting sieve. To insist on the pretense that we pass under and through the sieve but that our neighbor does not requires such a wholesale distortion of the size of the aperture — or holes — in the sieve that it becomes meaningless as a measure of either truth or worth. How can the same sieve allow a camel or a huge wooden beam (meaning ourselves) pass through while stopping the gnat or the splinter that is our neighbor? Short answer: it can’t.
Nobody wants to be a hypocrite — or at least nobody wants to be called out for being a hypocrite. When we are exposed for our faults — for being less virtuous or less religious than we pretend to be — we experience shame. And our natural impulse is to cover up who we are and hide, just as our First Parents sought to cover up their nakedness and hide from God. But we can’t ever really hide from God — and by attempting to cover up our shame we only make our awareness of our guilt that much more obvious. Pretending we’ve made it, that we’ve got it all together, just halts progress toward learning and growing from our mistakes.
The truth is that good people mess up. All. The. Time. And we are more prone to reveal our worst faults under difficult times of stress, when we are especially tested. We hold fast to what we want, rather than let go to accept what God gives. We cling to our insistence on doing it my way, my will be done, rather than surrendering to God’s way, thy will be done. Or we puff ourselves up in our own eyes with an inflated ego and false sense of self. The sad truth, however, is that an inflated ego is always going to be too big to pass through God’s sifting sieve. Nor is there room enough to pass through clinging to anything else either.
No one wants to be tested. No one wants to be bounced up and down, jostled back and forth, on the journey of life. But that is how the divine process of sifting works. We can learn from it and learn to yield to God, or we can fight it and resent God for sifting us, but it does us absolutely no good to pretend.
Now if we are honest with ourselves, we might be able to claim to have made some progress whittling away the wooden beam of our sinful, bloated egos as we have grown in faith over the years, yet we would also all need to admit that we each have a long, long way to go even to achieve splinter size. But even a splinter is too big to pass through the sieve of God’s righteousness. That awareness can be feel daunting, discouraging and even fearful as we grow older. That same self-awareness, however, can also teach us humility and compassion for each other and ultimately force us to confess that we can’t do it on our own. No one can. If that sounds defeatist, I guess it is. In truth, left to our own devices we are defeated. The certainty of death is the proof of that.
But Saint Paul takes the honor today in announcing the Good News. The good news is that we are not left on our own, because God is with us. And we are not defeated because Jesus defeated sin and death. We cannot pretend our way through God’s sifting sieve as hypocrites are want to do; but because the Son of Man was sifted and found righteous, He can — and does — share His victory and His resurrected life with us. In effect, while WE CANNOT PRETEND that we are holy, in His mercy and love GOD CAN CALL us holy for Jesus’ sake. No phony fig leaf clothing that we fashion for ourselves can hide our shame from God or from ourselves, but God can clothe us in His righteousness so gloriously that one day neither He nor we will even be able to remember our shame.
So now what? Do we just sit back and wait for that day and stop trying in the meantime to whittle away our beam-sized sin? Do we pretend (prematurely) that we’ve already made it? Do we menace our neighbor with judgment in the face of God’s tender mercy? No. No. No! We still have work to do, fruit to bear, good news to announce, faith to share. The difference is that now we know that we do not need to pretend who we are, and we do not need to fear that we are worthy.
