Sunday's Scriptures for Community Leaders
 

You are a Christian Community leader. Thank you.
 

Commentators frequently remark that in the gospels, Jesus reserves his strongest criticism for hypocrites, the ones who talk the right talk but don't walk it. The gospels' most vivid image for hypocrites is Matthew 23:27, "Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs that look handsome on the outside, but inside are full of the bones of the dead and every kind of corruption." (NJB translation) This is about Jesus' enemies, and the evangelist's use of it helps his community deal with their own enemies and external critics. Maybe Matthew wanted to continue to discredit the scribes and Pharisees, so his community would find them less authoritative.

But Sunday's liturgical gospel reading is about hypocrites within the Christian community. Jesus calls "hypocrite" any member who, so piously, would rather remove a speck from your eye than remove a plank from his own. Luke the evangelist crafted this memory of a saying of Jesus to help members of his community be honest with each other and deal productively with the not-so-honest. So why did the community need this lesson?

Jesus' larger teaching was a challenging revision of the Judaism of his day, and it was controversial. It's not like his first followers all said "OMG! This is the reform of our religion that we've been waiting for!" Early Christianity attracted opponents, whole-hearted supporters, and lukewarm supporters. It attracted Jews and Gentiles, who brought their history of mutual wariness. It even attracted Romans, who, politically at least, were bedfellows of the Empire. And they all vied for control of the movement. Some of them were willing to misrepresent their intentions.
 

The problem of hypocrisy wasn't limited to the Jesus movement. The cause of all of it was, arguably, in the ancient culture where Jesus and his followers lived. (Sunday's reading from Sirach, a book meant for Diaspora Jews a century before Jesus, addresses a similar problem.) To my knowledge, the best popular teacher of cultural studies of the ancient Middle East was the late John J. Pilch of Georgetown University. As I mention here often, Pilch says that culture was based on clinging to one's honor and avoiding shame. Furthermore, they believed that honor was in fixed supply, so that one person's rise in honorable status was another person's fall. Looking at it from the outside (we're not really that far removed, but anyway …), it seems clearly set up and maintained by the powerful only for the benefit of the powerful. So of course people learned to dissemble; it was the only way to protect oneself, the only way to get ahead.

What a trap this all was for the "little people!" And how badly this weakened the community as a whole! No one could trust anyone else, except, maybe, in one's narrowly defined family. How far this was from the Reign of God that Jesus announced! The community in this bondage could never become more fair or more honest.

Jesus' understanding of God and of God's love for people compelled him to denounce those elements of the system. The prophets before Jesus denounced the exploitation of the powerless. The musicians who entertained the kings and priests wove appeals for the poor into their psalms. Jesus saw the picture at its biggest, and challenged it so vigorously that he had to pay with his life. So in today's passage, Jesus attacks one crippling, dehumanizing aspect of his culture, and of his future communities, the hypocrisy.

This is why we want our communities to be free of hypocrisy, and why the Good News in its fullness is our judge in this.
  What forces might tempt a community to behave hypocritically or tolerate hypocrisy? Look back a few paragraphs; we're not entirely above cultivation of our own honor and status, at the expense of the powerless, that characterized the ancient Middle East. For example:

• My own denomination famously tolerated pedophiles among its leaders because it would have been shameful to acknowledge the problem.
   
• In the Middle Ages, church leaders sometimes compromised themselves in deals with feudal lords and kings. This might have elevated the status of the church as an institution, but it silenced prophecy.
   
• In the same era, by some accounts, bishops started requiring their priests to be celibate, like monks already were, for the purpose of keeping church properties in the hands of the bishops rather than in the hands of the priests' heirs. It's complicated and only makes sense in the context of custom and law that are now unfamiliar to us. But the spiritual arguments for mandatory celibacy advanced since then conveniently ignore the decidedly material origins of the mandate.
   
• Most of us loyally live in the country whose founding document stated it was self-evident that all men are created equal. Yet that declaration was penned by a holder of slaves. It tormented his conscience, and his rough draft contained a thundering denunciation of the slave trade ("execrable commerce," he called it), but the committee scratched that in order to keep the colonies most enmeshed in slavery within the fragile union. They knew there would be no great, rich, free America without those colonies and their slaves, and so they decided to tolerate defiance of their own highest principle.
   
• And now, states in the land of the free and home of the brave are fearfully prohibiting educators from free inquiry into those contradictions, lest it discomfort their fragile children.
   
• Several years ago my diocese established a big foundation to fund Catholic education for children. It seemed noble, but in a more recent 1-year span, the diocese closed a Catholic high school and a Catholic elementary school within my parish that served predominantly non-White, students and their families, including non-Catholics. The schools did run deficits, did get heavy subsidies, did lose enrollment, and did exact hefty tuition from families. It really may all have been unsupportable, even for the foundation. And the decisions may have been made with real regret. But it could also betray a series of private decisions, by lay Catholics who could donate more and church leaders who could solicit them more, to just direct resources elsewhere. We used to say we educate them not because they're Catholic but because we're Catholic. Let us not lightly resume saying so, lest we be hypocrites.
   
• And there's the widespread hypocrisy of those who claim the rights of members of a free society, but don't accept the responsibilities. The most famous examples are those who, in a survey, they answered "yes" to both of two questions:
  
  "If accused of a crime, would you want a jury trial?"
  and
  "Have you ever connived to get out of serving on a jury?"

My own local faith community walks its talk, in part, by refusing to walk out of its historic neighborhood. We're doing our best to become relevant to a demographic around us that's not what we're used to. We're also lobbying the higher-ups so we don't get closed, or restricted in the future by new leaders with different agendas. I started this message-series to help my community's leaders ask the right questions. Pray for us, please.

Questions for community leaders

• What hypocrisy have you detected and tried to correct in yourself?
• What's a hypocrisy that bugs you?
• How could your community correct a hypocrisy?
• Is there any hypocrisy in your social-media persona?