This sermon was preached by Rev Sue on 16 October. Here it is for you again:
When I was 18, I was a member of the Christian community at Lee Abbey in Devon. I shared a room with a slightly older girl called Penny. I remember her once saying, “Christians are hypocrites.” It stuck with me because I was slightly bewildered and unsettled by it. Looking back, I imagine she said it because she had found that community life didn’t always reflect the promises we had all made, nor did it always meet the standard of Christians loving one another.
Over the years, I’ve pondered what exactly hypocrisy is. Our word “hypocrite” comes from the Greek hypokritēs, meaning a stage actor: someone who speaks from behind a mask, someone performing for an audience. I’m going to use two novels as illustrations.
The first is Jane Eyre. Jane has been sent by her uncaring relatives to Lowood, a charity school. Its treasurer is the local clergyman, Mr Brocklehurst. He talks to the orphan girls about self-denial, and explains that keeping them cold and half-starved is a way of mortifying the flesh. In one famous scene, he orders a girl’s naturally curly hair to be cut short. Moments later, his wife and daughters sweep into the classroom, expensively dressed in velvet, silk and furs, their hair elaborately curled in the latest fashion. Mr Brocklehurst shows no awareness of the gap between his own way of life and his preaching. We are shocked when a typhus epidemic kills many of the underfed girls, but relieved that, as a result, the conditions at the school and his lack of care are exposed. A public outcry leads to reforms. Mr Brocklehurst is no longer allowed to run the school alone, but because he is wealthy and well connected, he keeps his post. This is hypocrisy, pure and simple.
A much more nuanced picture comes from John of John, the Booker-shortlisted novel set on an island in the Outer Hebrides in the 1990s. Almost everyone on the island belongs to the Free Presbyterian Church, which polices the morality of its congregation. It goes so far as to tie up the swings in the children’s playground on a Sunday.
John is the precentor: he leads the singing of the psalms each week. His son Cal has been studying on the mainland, and John tells him he is needed back on the island to care for his grandmother. Cal arrives with long dyed hair, and John demands that he cut it before church the following morning. In the argument that follows, John punches Cal repeatedly in the face. Refusing to give in, Cal bleaches his hair instead, which in John’s eyes is even worse.
We know from the beginning that Cal is gay. What Cal does not discover until the end, and what is revealed to us gradually through the novel, is that his father is gay too. John has been in love with a fellow islander since he was fourteen. Their hidden relationship torments him with guilt and with the fear that he is destined for hell. In part, John’s harshness towards Cal comes from concern for his son’s soul, although nothing can justify the violence he metes out to him.
So would you call John a hypocrite? I’m not sure I would. Although he publicly says one thing and privately does another, he is not a comfortable actor behind a mask. He is tortured because he cannot be the man he believes God requires him to be. Cal, for his part, has walked away from the church’s teaching but hasn’t yet found anything to put in its place. He longs to be loved, but his relationships are fleeting and lonely. There are no heroes in the story. Where religion becomes mostly about policing one another’s behaviour, it becomes very hard for anyone to be honest, and without honesty, goodness struggles to grow.
When Jesus condemns hypocrites, he seems to me to be talking about characters very like Mr Brocklehurst. The Pharisees in today’s gospel are rule-keepers who make sure everyone knows they take tithing so seriously that they give God a tenth even of the herbs in their garden. They live for respect and the seats of honour, and love and justice are nowhere to be found.
But hypocrisy can also grow out of fear, and that kind is much closer to John’s. Paul uses the word explicitly in Galatians 2. Peter had been eating regularly with the Gentiles, the non-Jewish believers in Antioch, until some men sent by James, the leader of the church in Jerusalem, arrived. At that point, says Paul, Peter drew back and separated himself, because he was afraid of those who insisted on circumcision. Peter, of all people, was afraid to stand up for what he believed.
In Luke 18, Jesus tells the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple. The Pharisee thanks God aloud that he is so much better than other people, and lists how he fasts and tithes. The tax collector claims no virtue. He doesn’t even name his sins. He simply says, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” And he is the one who goes home justified before God.
Jesus was always happier in the company of sinners: people who admitted their wrongdoing and were trying to work out how they could live better lives. We are all works in progress. It is not hypocrisy to preach the gospel and fail to live up to it. It is human weakness. St Paul puts it very movingly in Romans 7:19: “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” It is a great comfort to me that even he lived with this contradiction. The very next chapter begins, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Very often it is our sense of failure and guilt that keeps us in chains. By his death on the cross, Jesus has set us free from the fear that we are not good enough. That freedom gives us the courage to admit our failures and weaknesses, and so begin to break their hold over us.
The heart of the gospel is that when we come to God in penitence, he runs towards us to forgive us, just as the father ran to meet the prodigal son. When we sin repeatedly, he forgives repeatedly. The worst thing we can do is pretend that we don’t need forgiveness.
So what could I have said to Penny when she told me that Christians are hypocrites? I think I would say that some of us do get stuck behind a mask, showing the world a face that isn’t quite our own. But the Christian way is not to pretend to be perfect. It is to admit our imperfection, to come again and again to the Father for his forgiveness, and to live in the knowledge that we are loved and not condemned.
