"The Virtue of Hypocrisy"

Dr. Stephen K. Nash

Tellico Village Community Church

August 13, 2000

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

Hypocrisy is one of those evils everyone loves to hate. We are more ready to excuse almost any evil or vice before we will excuse the hypocrite. Philosopher Hannah Arendt represents the thinking of many when she claims that “hypo-crisy is the vice of vices,” and that hypocrites are “rotten to the core.” And most of us on an emotional level probably agree with her.

For many people, it seems, the greatest virtue is found in simply not being a hypocrite. “I’m a scoundrel, but that’s all I claim to be, so I’m bet-ter than you hypocritical religious types,” is the litany that is often heard. As if being honest in one’s vice is ethically superior to being im-perfect in the pursuit of virtue. Well, maybe, maybe not.

Hypocrisy has always had its share of detrac-tors. I, however, am here this morning to say a few good words on behalf of hypocrisy, as un-orthodox and provocative as that may sound.

How can anyone say anything good or positive about hypocrisy?

Didn’t Jesus issue his hardest, harshest, and most stinging words against hypocrisy?

Didn’t Jesus roundly denounce religious leaders in his day as “white-washed tombs,” who on the outside appeared clean and pure but on the in-side were full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness?

How can a minister stand in a pulpit and have anything good to say about such a vice that Jesus so vehemently denounced? I’m glad you asked. What we need to recognize is a subtle difference between what Jesus condemned, and what we normally, in modern parlance, refer to as “hypocrisy.”

In the Bible, “hypocrisy” does not refer to conscious insincerity—that is, someone pretending to be godly when in fact that person is ungodly. That is not what Jesus denounced. What he was denouncing was self-righteous behavior—an arrogant and smug piety and religiosity. The religious leaders that Jesus denounced were not pretending to be something they were not. They were quite sincere in their beliefs. He wasn’t challenging them for pretend-ing to be good in public while in private they lived by entirely different standards. That’s not it at all. He pronounced woe on them because they were in fact self-righteously convinced of their own goodness and purity, which made them blind to God’s inclusive and compassion-ate grace.

Do you remember Jesus parable about the prayer of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector as recorded in Luke 18? The Pharisee prayed about how good he was and how thankful he was that he wasn’t like other people, including the tax collector who was standing nearby. The despised tax collector simply and humbly prayed, “Lord have mercy on me, the sinner.” Jesus declared him righteous, but The Pharisee’s prayer stands as a model of the kind of hypocrisy that Jesus denounced.

Those religious leaders of Jesus’ time were not trying to deceive anyone with an insincere public relations kind of goodness. They were genuine in their pursuit of what they thought was true, holy, religious and ethical practice. Their definition of holiness and the imitation of God was purity, separation and right belief. And they practiced what they preached.

But they didn’t comprehend that, in fact, God’s definition of holiness is not purity, separation, and right belief, but rather compassion, love and justice.

And they would not face up to the truth that the Russian writer and social prophet Alexander Solzenitzin put so well when he wrote, “The line between good and evil is not drawn between us and them; rather, it cuts through the heart of each one of us.” Failure to acknowledge that there is both good and evil in all of us may be the greatest evil of all. As my Dad used to say, “There is so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us, that it doesn’t become any of us, to talk about the rest of us!”

By the very nature of the beast, we can see evil in others more readily than we see it in our-selves. We project out onto others and see in them the worst qualities that we can’t face up to in our own hearts. Modern psychology calls it “projection.” Jesus talked about it long before the advent of psychology when he said that we should take care of the log in our own eye before we try to remove the speck from our neighbor’s.

When we cling to gross misconceptions of ourselves, when we can’t be brutally honest about ourselves, we block the possibility of growing. The popular writer/psychiatarist Scott Peck talks about the important principle of “dedication to reality.” It is a mark of maturity and requires humility, openness, grace, and courage. There is an old Yiddish saying that goes: “Everything in one box nobody’s got.”

One of the most tragic things to me is to see someone who thinks that they already possess the truth about everything—who thinks they’ve got all the answers locked up in a box, whether politically, socially, personally, religiously. They are the settlers whose favorite song is “I shall not be moved,” rather than pilgrims and pioneers and adventurers and discoverers.

What Jesus condemned in the religious elite of his day was their closed-ness. The problem wasn’t that they were play-acting, what we usually think of when we speak of hypocrisy. Because they weren’t pretending. The problem was self-righteousness. Spiritual arrogance. A smug narrow-mindedness. A “defender of the one true faith” mentality. A satisfaction with who they were and what they thought they knew and possessed and looking down their nose on all who stood outside of the holy circle that they had drawn.

My, is there a lot of that afoot today. And that is something that I think we would want to stand with Jesus in denouncing and agree with Hannah Arendt’s assessment that that kind of hypocrisy is indeed the vice of vices!

It is, however, a hypocrisy of a different sort that I think deserves a good word!

You probably know already that the Greek word for hypocrite originally referred to the actors of the Greek theater. They would literally put on masks and adopt identities that were not their own. Consequently--the masks of comedy and tragedy that are symbolic of the theater arts. The word hypocrite literally denotes a person who wears a mask on stage. Now there was nothing deceptive or insincere about that. Actors had no intention of denying that under the masks they were different persons from the one’s they were pretending to be. The audience was fully aware of that fact also, just like when we watch television we realize that we’re watching fiction, with the exception of some soap opera fans who sometimes tend to confuse reality with fantasy.

So you see, there was nothing dubious or evil about being a hypocrite. The actors, literally, “hypocrites,” were playing a role . . . they were not being themselves . . . and yet they were sincere and honest about it. It was intentional.

Now we come to the thesis of this sermon to-day. This is it. Don’t be shocked. The truth is: In the life of Christian discipleship, we are called to be sincere hypocrites.

That is, we are to play a role that sometimes does not yet fit who we are and what we will someday become. We are to act out a part that isn’t fully our own.

Isn’t that what the Scripture text this morning urges us to do? What was the imperative that was read? “Be imitators of God, as beloved children.”

Now the very notion that we are capable of im-itating God is absurd. We’re not up to the part! It’s more than a little bit difficult to act out the role of God. We’re not even up to the basics. Have you ever tried to create a world? I have a hard enough time trying to keep an office plant alive. Well clearly its outlandish to suggest that we can imitate God’s power in that sense, although there is a sense in which we do share in the divine creativity. But in reality, the call of this text is to be imitators of God’s goodness, and that’s more than enough for us to handle.

It doesn’t really seem to come naturally to us does it? Weeds grow rather naturally in the garden, but the good plants have to be cultivated, and watered, and weeded and tended and pruned and nurtured. Being compassionate and forgiving isn’t our automatic and natural response to those who have stepped on our toes, much less those who have seriously hurt us.

Our natural, reflexive response to our offenders is precisely the very thing our text tells us to get rid of: “bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling and slander, together with all malice.” Those reactions need to be fought back and dealt with in some other way rather than fully unleashing and expressing them. Instead of “being ourselves,” we are called to be “like God.”

Isn’t that being insincere and hypocritical when we do that? When we struggle against our na-tural tendencies and instead try to imitate God in love? Isn’t there an ethics of authenticity? Shouldn’t we say what we really think and act the way we really feel? Isn’t that more honest? Isn’t it psychologically healthier as well?

It is true that we should seek to be authentic persons, integrated persons, whose outer life is largely a reflection of our inner life. That’s one of the tasks of adult development that some people regrettably never accomplish. And it’s true that we should never simply swallow and repress our feelings. That is spiritually and psychologically dangerous. But we can’t be controlled completely by our impulses and emotions either. It’s important to have a soul-friend, or someone to whom we can confess and express our feelings and attitudes that are less than lofty, even the horrible ones, knowing that that person, like God, will accept us for who we are and love us unconditionally. That is so important to emotional and spiritual health.

But in our everyday dealings, it’s not always best to be ourselves, if the self we are being is unloving. Let me repeat that: It is not always best to be ourselves, if the self we are being is unloving.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a hard time when I hear someone make the statement, “Just be yourself.” Is that a problem for you? It’s a problem for everyone, necessarily, because our “self” is not a simple entity that should be either totally valued or totally denied. Remember the Bible tells us both that we need to love ourselves and deny ourselves. How can both be true? Because our “self” is a complex thing of both good and evil, glory and shame.

What we are by virtue of being created in the image of God, we need to affirm and love and nurture and celebrate: our rationality and sens-tivity, our sense of ethical obligation, our sex-uality, our aesthetic sense--appreciation of beauty and artistic creativity, our imagination, our unique personality and giftedness, our sense of humor, our stewardship of the fruitful earth, our hunger for love and community, our savoring of pleasure, our spirit of adventure, our questioning minds, our sense of the tran-scendent mystery of God and our inbuilt urge to grow and learn and experience and worship. All of these are a part of our humanness and are good. They may at times be tainted, twisted, distorted, imperfect, or misdirected, yet God seeks to redeem those dimensions of who we are, never calling for us to deny them!

But there are other elements of who we are. There is our irrationality, our moral perversity, our fascination with the ugly, our lazy refusal to develop divine gifts, our selfish pollution and spoiling of the environment, our prejudice and racism, classism, sexism, our selfishness, malice, our desire for revenge, and our extreme individualism which is destroys human com-munity. Our proud autonomy, our idolatrous refusal to worship God beyond our own images of God. Christ came not to redeem these aspects of human nature, but to purge them for our sake.

So there’s a great need for discernment and humility in our self-understanding isn’t there? Who am I? What is my “self”? The answer is, for all of us: I am a Jekyll and Hyde, a mixed-up kid. I have both dignity because I am created in the Divine image, and yet I possess a dark side as well. I am both noble and ignoble, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, upright and twisted, image of God, and pawn of evil.

So when someone says, “be yourself” I have to ask, “Am I to be my best self, or my worst self? My desire is to be true to my true, best, higher self, and to be false to my false, worst, lower self. In this life, we always struggle with that tension between the spiritual heights to which we aspire and the lower impulses that often control us. And we simply have to embrace that tension. The great cathedrals of Europe aptly illustrate that tension. Their steeples stretch to the sky, seeming to strain to the glories of heaven. But tucked away on the structures are the ugly, grinning gargoyles, which peer down upon the earth. So it is with each of us. What’s the conclusion then? What is the point we’re trying to make? What’s the “take home” lesson for today? Here it is:

Many of the great moral thinkers of the past and present have discovered that in order for the good to be imprinted on our lives, we have to persist in doing the good even when we don’t feel like it or it doesn’t seem natural to us—even when it seems contrived and artificial. Yes, even when it seems . . . “hypocritical.” These moral teachers and doctors of the soul know that it is easier to act our way into a new way of feeling than it is to feel our way into a new way of acting. That’s another sentence that bears repeating. It is easier to act our way into a new way of feeling than to feel our way into a new way of acting.

Moral philosophers know that we need to do the good in a way that it will become habitual and natural to us, so that eventually it will flow from the inside out and become authentic. In other words, if we will deliberately pretend to be god-like (not in the pharisaic definition, but in the Jesus definition) and try to imitate that kind of love, justice, and compassion, it will become a part of who we really are. Or to put it yet another way, sincere hypocrisy can produce virtue.

In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis observes:

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, “If you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.” I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowing turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature; either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is Heaven: that is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche wrote, “The hypocrite who always plays one and the same role finally ceases to be a hypocrite.”

Friday night late I was watching C-Span which carried an interview of President Clinton by Bill Hybels, who along with Gordon McDonald and Tony Campolo has been one of the president’s spiritual counselors over the last two years. Hybels is pastor of the Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago. The nearly two hour interview, from which you might have seen sound bites on network news, took place at a large pastor’s leadership conference sponsored by the Willow Creek Church. Hybels observed to the president the fact that some people charge that his and the first lady’s church attendance is just an “act.” The president deadpanned, “Well, if it is, at least it is a consistent act.” And then he tagged that with the statement, “And I believe I’ve given evidence of needing to be in church.”

Haven’t we all, Mr. President. Haven’t we all.

Max Beerbohn’s play, “The Happy Hypocrite” deals with a wealthy aristocrat named Lord George Hell, a self-indulgent and morally corrupt man who falls in love with a saintly girl. In order to win her heart, he covers his own face, which shows the signs of his debauchery, with the mask of a saint. The girl is deceived and she marries him.

Together they live in happiness until an evil woman from Lord George Hell’s immoral past enters the scene to reveal his true identity as a scoundrel. She challenges him to take off his mask. Reluctantly and sadly he removes it, and lo and behold, beneath the saint’s mask is the face of the saint he had been transformed into by wearing it in love. What began as pretense became real through practice.

If we believe we are genuinely good then we deceive ourselves, as did those Jesus chal-lenged so often. Let’s rather acknowledge that the line between good and evil never is drawn between them and us, but that it cuts through the heart of each one of us. That realization brings us up short whenever we start to criticize or stand in judgment of anyone else. And let’s set ourselves to the task of imitating the goodness of God knowing that in that we will all have to be sincere hypocrites. And then, by the grace of God, the good that we pretend to have will one day at last become real.

Let us pray:

All of us, beginning with myself, O God, are convicted by Jesus’ insight into who and what we are. We thank you that you love us with a love that is unconditional, and that you call us to those things that are higher and deeper and more powerful and more profound than we can know. We probably need to do something about what you’ve said to us. Enable us each individually, and all of us collectively, to discover what that might be. Amen.