Ye Hypocrites!
A post on Mark Shea’s blog got me thinking about hypocrisy. To think more deeply about something, I find it helpful to start with etymology, so I looked up “hypocrisy”. It’s from the Greek hypokrisis, the “act of playing a part on the stage.”
In that sense, hypocrisy is an essential part of the Christian life. We must all pretend to be better than we are, if we want to progress in the Christian life. Asking yourself, “How would I behave if I weren’t so [uncharitable, prideful, lustful, etc.]?” is the key to figuring out how you ought to behave when your stubborn self doesn’t want to cooperate. We are all indeed actors on a stage; but after a while, we become the part. (I think Lewis made a similar, if not identical, point in his writings.)
It’s true, then, when the world hurls the charge of “hypocrisy” at Christians. Militant secularists find exquisite joy in faithful people’s shortcomings. Sometimes the sinners are Protestants (Falwell, Swaggert), sometimes they are Catholics (too many examples to list), but you can always expect to hear cackles of joy when someone espousing “family values” is found cheating on his spouse. Or embezzling, or lying, or whatever.
Surely, though, true hypocrisy doesn’t consist of “saying one thing and doing another.” Using that definition, if you aren’t a hypocrite sometimes — if you always meet your own moral standards — then either you’re a living saint, or your standards aren’t high enough. Our Lord didn’t call the Pharisees “hypocrites” because they fell short of the Law, it was because they proudly held themselves up as exemplars, or icons, if you will, without admitting their own sinfulness. Jesus did not even point to himself as an example of righteousness, though he could have (Mt 19:17).
True hypocrisy must therefore begin with pride, like so many other sins. Permitting the world to accuse us of hypocrisy is perhaps God’s way of keeping us more honest than we might be otherwise. It is sometimes easy to ignore the wrath of God when it feels so distant from us, but the ridicule of men is immediate and stinging, and often obstructs our worldly preoccupations. So even if we’re called hypocrites and it’s not true from a Christian perspective, it would still be a good time to think about the ways in which we fail God in front of others.