Don Friesen
A Sunday School teacher, exasperated by her students' rowdy behaviour and lack of attention, finally blurted out: "Will you please shut up while I teach you about the love of God!" Her colleague, teaching in the next room and wanting to impress upon his students the importance of Christian living, asked the class, "Why do people call me a Christian?" After a moment one of the students answered, "Maybe it's because they don't know you."
Sunday School teachers don't get the respect they deserve. I'm not sure why Sunday School teachers are the butt of jokes more often than others, but I've also noticed that when a person has been charged with a heinous crime, and they happened to have taught Sunday School, if only for a month or two, it's inevitably mentioned in the salacious news story that follows, if not in the headline itself.1 I don't think Sunday School teachers are any more vulnerable to hypocrisy than anyone else, but because teaching children the Christian faith is a high calling, it serves as a very recognizable contrast between what one teaches and what one practises.
Jesus Had a Sharp Eye
The conventional wisdom is that everyone loves to hate a hypocrite, and if you do you're in good company. Jesus was scathing in his assessment of hypocrisy. He told his disciples and others, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat," meaning they speak with the authority of Moses; "therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach." (Matthew 23:2-3)
I would love to know with what tone Jesus said this. Did he say this with disgust, or as dry analysis, or with a John Stewart-like eye for people who have a tendency to shoot themselves in their own clay foot. I prefer to think it was the latter. The Pharisees made their hypocrisy all too obvious in their behaviour. See for yourselves, Jesus seemed to suggest:
If at first Jesus was just letting the inconsistencies of the scribes and Pharisees speak for themselves, by verse 13 he's warming up:
If you prefer a Jesus meek and mild, then this Gospel passage may disappoint you, but remember that Jesus was also a prophet, and if you compare his words to our reading from Micah, it's well within prophetic character. Micah was also upset with religious frauds, pointing, for example to counterfeit prophets "who ...proclaim ‘peace' if they have something to eat, but prepare to wage war against anyone who refuses to feed them." (Micah 3:5, NIV)
Like Jesus, Micah had the courage to call a spade a spade, even to those in power, saying, "Hear this, you leaders of Jacob, you rulers of Israel, who despise justice and distort all that is right; who build Zion with bloodshed, and Jerusalem with wickedness. (Your) leaders judge for a bribe, (your) priests teach for a price, and (your) prophets tell fortunes for money." (Micah 3:9-11, NIV)
Micah, like other Old Testament prophets, was less a policy analyst and more a shrill fire alarm! Often our response to critics is to prompt them to suggest alternatives, but when there's a fire in a building I think it's very helpful for someone simply to yell "Fire!" Let the analysts among us then decide what size, make, and colour of hose would be most appropriate for putting out the fire.
We all Love to Hate Hypocrites
The Pharisees were poster boys for hypocrisy. They were sincere ... but ridiculous! They focussed on rules and regulations for every foreseeable situation; they had hundreds of rules and regulations, but on matters of love, mercy, and justice they were strangely silent. Someone has said that they maximized minutia and minimized mercy. They repeatedly fell short of their own ideals ... but then who doesn't? Ideals, by definition, are difficult to live up to, but better to have ideals to which we aspire than to jettison our ideals and revel in our bland and mediocre consistency.
It's not so much a matter of consistency or inconsistency as a matter of pretense. Someone (Craig Watts) recalls his supervisor often saying, "I'm the sort of person who expects a lot from others because I expect a lot from myself" – but in fact he missed work far more than any of the people he supervised! He would say, "I'm the sort of person who doesn't sweat the small stuff because I'm concerned about the bigger picture" – but in fact he had a reputation for being a nit-picker who was incapable of seeing the big picture.
Self-deception may be merely amusing on occasion, but it can also be hurtful. The Greek word for hypocrisy (hypocresis) comes from the Greek word for actor, someone who can make believe with considerable skill. Someone pretending to be your friend when in reality he or she couldn't care less, is not something any of us want. When someone purports to love you, only you discover it's a farce, that is a very painful realization. Hypocrites pretend to be authentic, but it's an illusion. They're like fake jewelry, a fake diamond, a fake pearl, fool's gold!
We want the real thing! The New Testament writer James also had an eye for counterfeit believers; he wrote:
Our faith, with its high ideals of both personal and corporate morality, makes us highly alert to hypocrisy, but it also makes us vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. The New Testament suggests we examine ourselves lest our faith fail to be authentic. It's a challenge to live up to our ideals. The Apostle Paul freely admitted that he too found it difficult, saying, "My own behaviour baffles me. ...I find myself not doing what I really want to do (and) doing what I ...loathe." (Romans 7:15, PHL) "Examine yourselves," Paul suggested to the Corinthians. "Examine yourselves, to see whether you are holding to your faith." (2 Corinthians 13:5, RSV)
If you are willing to examine yourself for hypocritical lesions on your heart, let me suggest four prayers that may be helpful, and I'll convey the first one with a story. A woman at an airport bought a package of cookies to snack on while she waited for her plane. She got out her book and was soon engrossed in it, but then she noticed that the man beside her was fumbling to open the package of cookies between them. She was shocked that a stranger would presume to open her package of cookies. She wasn't sure what to do, so she took one of the cookies herself. The man didn't say anything but soon reached over and took another cookie. She wasn't going to let him eat them all, so she took another. When they were down to the last one, the man broke the cookie in half, got up and left. She couldn't believe the man's nerve, and she was still angry when she boarded. She was puzzling over it when she reached into her purse for a tissue, only to come upon her still-unopened package of cookies.2
When I told Dorothy that story she told me of the day she was perturbed about a child who came to school with his sweater inside-out! Wondering what sort of parents would let their child out the door without examining their apparel, she discovered later the same day that she was wearing her own sweater backwards!
When dealing with matters of hypocrisy, we had best be careful. We are all subject to the charge of hypocrisy, and self-examination is exactly that: examination of self. So the first prayer is: Make me cautious about making judgments of others, Lord.
The second prayer is: Make me cautious about sending mixed messages. Consider the example of a congressman addressing the House of Representatives, when he said, "Never before have I heard such ill-informed, wimpy, back-stabbing drivel as that just uttered by my respected colleague, the distinguished gentleman from Ohio." (purportedly cited by E.E. Smith in the Wall Street Journal)
We want to be cautious about mixed messages, not because we don't want people to catch us short, but because we want our speech to be congruent with our heart. We want to have integrity.
The third prayer is: Make me cautious about playing to the camera. Another story. A large crowd gathered in front of the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston to watch a peacock slowly spread his great tail and display its stunning plumage. The peacock stood erect and noble and strutted regally. Then a plain and earth-toned duck waddled over from a nearby pond, passing between the proud peacock and the admiring crowd. Enraged, the peacock drove the duck back to the pond. However, the duck, having returned to its natural habitat, was no longer clumsy and unbecoming. In the water it swam and dived gracefully, but quite unaware that many were watching. (Jerry L. Schmalenberger, When Christians Quarrel)
The religious leaders of Jesus' day liked to strut their stuff. They liked to be front and centre. They liked to play to the camera, and Jesus' response was: Enough already! Enough with the showmanship! "The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, (while) all who humble themselves will be exalted." (Matthew 23:11-12) Or as a more colourful translation puts it: "Do you want to stand out? Then step down. Be a servant. If you puff yourself up, you'll get the wind knocked out of you. But if you're content to simply be yourself, your life will count for plenty." (23:11-12, MSG) In other words, be real. Be authentic. Don't put on a performance, just be yourself – an honest pilgrim trying to grow in love and grace.
The fourth prayer is a more positive prayer: Create in me a clean heart, O God, a holy heart free of hypocrisy. This is not a prayer for caution. It is a prayer to become increasingly dedicated to the service of God. It is to pray that God will work in my life daily, transforming it into His own likeness. May this be the prayer of each one of us.
I can see myself delivering this rant, peppered with a little sarcasm, but Jesus just lays out his incisive observations – until he gets to verse 8, where he begins using the personal pronoun, "you". Maybe he had spotted some scribes and Pharisees at the periphery of the crowd, because his observations become more pointed. Regarding honorific titles, Jesus told them, "You are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are (but) students. ... Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have (but) one instructor, the Messiah." (Matthew 23:8-10)
And on and on it goes in Matthew 23, Jesus' speech increasing in intensity. He was deeply offended by the hypocrisy of the Pharisees.
"Dear friends... does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, ‘Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!" and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup – where does that get you? Isn't it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?" (James 2:14-17, MSG)
Examine me, Lord, and Create in me a Clean Heart
1 Examples:
2 Some say this story is an urban legend, but it's a great story, and while the details (cookies, biscuits, or crisps) vary from one source to another, it has been re-told by a number of people, including Jan Harold Brunvand, in The Choking Doberman, 1986; Arthur Goldstuck, in The Rabbit in the Thorn Tree, 1990; Ian McEwan, in Solar, 2010; and Douglas Adams, in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, 2009.
Quotations of Scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted.