Hypocrisy, as we know from our own bitter experience, is also an “occupational hazard” of all committed Christians, no matter how well-meaning. Quite simply, the Word of God is always greater than our capacity to live it. The bar of virtue is raised too high for us by Jesus’ radical teachings. And yet, is not Unconditional Love always necessarily radical?
Recently, for instance, we have heard from the Lord’s lips commands such as “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” “Be merciful as your Father is merciful,” and “Love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you”. Here, the little word as means that we are to be perfect and merciful in the same way and to the same extent that God is! Who can live up to these sublime standards all the time, except God himself? The solution lies in taking seriously the name “Father” which Jesus habitually gives the eternal God. If Jesus and we are indeed this God’s true offspring, it follows that we possess the divine DNA that puts perfect love and mercy within our mortal reach. However, we can be reborn as such a Father’s daughters and sons only by first dying with Christ to our old illusory selves, and then rising to new life in him.
This process of interior death and rebirth is very gradual, though, and requires endless patience both of God and of ourselves, and this is why we must observe Lent again every year. So let us not be disheartened by our slips into the many hypocrisies of our old, false self. Our very awareness of it is a hopeful sign of good progress in humility and truth, in becoming slowly but surely conformed to the Heart of Christ. Growing in the likeness of Christ is so desirable a goal that it makes it worthwhile to risk the passing taint of hypocrisy. The alternative would be to give up discipleship altogether in despair, which would be tantamount to spiritual death. There is, indeed, a kind of cynical “honesty” and brutal “consistency” that destroys rather than builds up.
Let us,
rather, strive after the humility that can risk hypocrisy as part of the great
journey to union with Christ, a humility that is never surprised by its own
failings and contradictions. Such humility daily grows in divine mercifulness
toward others by first embracing God’s regenerative Mercy toward itself.
Photograph by Brother Brian. Meditation by Father Simeon.
