Rebel With a Cause: Unmasking Hypocrisy

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March 15, 2015 - 4th Sunday in Lent

Matthew 23:1-14

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, ²‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; ³therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. ⁴They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. ⁵They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. ⁶They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, ⁷and to be greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have people call them rabbi. ⁸But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. ⁹And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. ¹⁰Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. ¹¹The greatest among you will be your servant. ¹²All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.  ‘But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.

Matthew 18:15-17

15 “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. 16 But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

Sermon: 

Following a sermon on Christian hospitality, a family thought they had better do something to make an impact.  So, they invited their neighbors to dinner the following Friday night. 
       
      

When it came to the meal, the parents were keen to show their neighbors their Christian faith and devotion.  So the mother asked little 5-year-old Johnny to say grace.  Little Johnny was a bit shy.  "I don't know what to say," he muttered.  There was an awkward pause, followed by a reassuring smile from the boy's mother.  "Well, darling," she said, "just say what Daddy said at breakfast this morning." 
  

     
      

Obediently, the boy repeated, "Oh God, we've got those awful people coming to dinner tonight."

We Christians don’t always make the best Christ-followers.  Perhaps Gandhi said it best: “I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians.  Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

We read our holy book about loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us, and then hold onto past grudges for dear life (or death, really).

We say that God loves everyone, but as soon as we meet someone, we try to categorize them into whatever box makes us most comfortable, to decide how close or distant we’ll be from them.

We believe that God is the source of our blessings, but then we hoard our resources, trying to win the never-ending race of security and status.  A good example of this is Christian megachurch pastor Creflo Dollar, who is asking for donations of $65 million to buy a Gulfstream G650 state-of-the-art luxury jet.  After technical trouble with his current jet (I hate when that happens!) he, “Knew it was time to begin to believe God for a new airplane…We need your help to continue reaching a lost and dying world for the Lord Jesus Christ.”  Think of how many lost and dying children could be fed or educated for that amount of money?  Would that not be a better witness to the Lord Jesus Christ than a luxury airplane?

There’s a word for all of this, and though it doesn’t have 4 letters, it’s a very dirty word indeed:  hypocrite.  It makes your skin crawl a little, that word, doesn’t it?  It’s a word thrown at the church time and time again as priests are given abusive power, as churches become exclusive clubs of homogeneity, as church financial scandals are played out on a public scale, as people use their Christian faith just to get votes for an election. 

Hypocrite.  It wasn’t any more comfortable a word in Jesus’ time.  And yet, he used that dirty word, again and again, when speaking to the scribes and Pharisees. 

These were the religious elite, who told everyone else how to follow the law perfectly.  Jesus called them out.  As you might imagine, they did not appreciate it.

“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat,” he said, acknowledging the authority due their office.  “Therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it.”  They were probably nodding along at this point, glad this rag-tag fellow and his group of friends were deferring to their greater wisdom and authority.  But that rebel Jesus didn’t stop there.

“Therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it, but…”   Uh, oh.  But.  This is one of those cases when that little word is about to contradict what was just said.  You know, like when someone starts a sentence with, “I don’t mean to be rude but…”, and you know you’re about to be insulted.

Jesus continued, “but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.  They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.  They do all their deeds to be seen by others.”

Then Jesus got really fired up.  He said that the greatest in their society were the servants, in a time when servants were seen as sub-human, inferior, unclean.  He placed servants above all of the religious elite and then, just in case they didn’t realize they were being called out, he finished by calling these leaders hypocrites. 

Not once, not twice, not three times.  In this chapter of Matthew, Jesus called the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites six times, throwing in “brood of vipers,” “snakes” and “whitewashed tombs” for good measure as well.

Jesus didn’t just insult these religious elite in indirect, passive-aggressive ways.  He openly called them names for all to hear!  And the name they did have, rabbi, he took away from them, claiming that he was the only real Teacher in the bunch.  Hypocrites, he named them instead.  That Greek word is spot-on:  it literally means “under-judging,” and was used to describe theater actors who wore a mask all the time, when that wasn’t who they really were.

Jesus ripped off their masks, and they did not thank him for it.  Ultimately, they murdered him for it.  But here comes the uncomfortable truth: we are they.

We still demand much of others in terms of understanding and compassion but are unwilling to lift a finger ourselves.  We still do good deeds in order to earn the approval of God and others.  We still like to sit in the places of honor and best seats in the house, no matter how many are enslaved by menial jobs to provide for our comfort and security. 

We still say one thing and do another.  We who follow this Jesus are still prone to hypocrisy.  And when we allow that hypocrisy to have full reign in our lives, or our communities, or our society, Jesus has no place there.  Jesus is pushed away, denied more than three times, and deemed irrelevant. 

But, here’s the good news: Jesus went to the cross for those scribes and Pharisees who sent him there, just as much as he went to the cross for the servants, the least and the outcasts.  He went to the cross for all of us, to transform the hypocritical conflict within us and within our world.  He took all of those masks of lies with him to that cross, destroying them not with might or argument, but with perfect, self-giving love. 

He knew that hypocrisy was part of the human condition of sin, and perhaps that’s why he gave new guidelines for how to deal with human conflict, something of an addendum to those earlier laws from Deuteronomy that perhaps gave priests a little too much power.

“If another church member sins against you,” he said, fully knowing it was a matter of “when” and not “if.”  “If that happens, you don’t need a sinless priest to intervene, because there’s no such thing.  You need to call them out on Twitter or Facebook!”  Wait, no, that’s not what he said! 

He said, “Be honest with that person, tell them how you feel, give them the respect of a face-to-face difficult conversation, and see if that changes things.  If it doesn’t, take just a couple of trusted people in your community, and try again.  If that doesn’t work, get the whole faith community working on reconciliation and repentance.  And, if that doesn’t work, let them go.”

Take off the masks of judging and be real, as uncomfortable as that is, and seek honesty.  Don’t ignore conflict, face it head-on, and pursue reconciliation, knowing that sometimes reconciliation looks like ending that relationship when it is too toxic. 

Yes, I think Jesus knew that we Christians would always be prone to hypocrisy, and honestly, probably more prone than most, because the standards he holds us to are so very opposite of the standards our society holds us to.  We will hurt others.  We will proclaim Jesus is Lord with our words but not with our lives.  We will close the doors to heaven because, like those scribes and Pharisees, there is just too much ego and power and money riding on admitting we might not have all the answers.  We will seek status before servanthood. 

But Jesus will not abandon us.  He might, through a trusted friend, a random stranger, in prayer or Bible study, or in a news story, call us out on our hypocrisy.  He calls us to not just say we are Christian but to show it, in ways that are as radically counter-cultural as he was.  He might upset the status quo of our lives, holding up a mirror in this season of Lent and reminding us that we have been wearing masks for far too long, so long that we’ve come to believe that’s our true face. 

But then, when he has shown us who we truly are, and who we need to become, Jesus will remind us that he went to the cross for the hypocrites, too.  And perhaps we’ll finally realize these masks of perfection and piety we’ve tried so hard to wear, never did fit very well. 

Perhaps we’ll let go of the need to prove ourselves, and instead put others first, no matter how difficult that is.  Because, you see, when we put another person’s needs, opinions, concerns and troubles before our own, we immediately become the opposite of a hypocrite.  We become servants.  And Jesus had only good things to say about them.  Amen.