The fearless children of a fearsome God
“Beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.” Luke 12.1
Beware the leaven, Jesus says.
Leaven illustrations in the Bible refer to either its way of working into everything over time, or its ability to change the structure of a thing, like bread, or both. Here Jesus is concerned by both its power to infiltrate and its power to deform. Jesus calls that leaven hypocrisy. There's nothing we hate more than the idea that someone is not who they say they are: it's the fuel for every true crime series (they seemed like a normal, happy, family). The word that we translate "hypocrite" in Luke 12 describes a masked life. To wear one identity, while living a contradictory life beneath. Jesus warns of the pharisaical practice of cultivating outward piety while harboring unlawful hearts. In my own personal experience, and in my experience as a minister, the hidden life leavening in secret eventually deforms to such a degree that it requires an outward, disfigured, increasingly desperate outer life. In fact the more powerful and confident the outward lie, the more cover it provides for the inward truth.
This is in many ways the chief cultural battle we face. So much emphasis is placed on external virtues: we fight for tribal identities (political, sociological) while denying the imperative of inner virtues like humility, teachableness, hospitality, prayer, meekness. As the dissonance between inner and outer lives grow, as the pressure to manufacture external virtue increases, our masks become louder, more insistent, more declarative, more tribal, and even more piously religious. The Korean tal masks of the Hahoetal were worn, in part, to frighten away the spirits of fearful things. Certainly our hypocrisies do the same: whistling in the dark, hardly containing our terror that we might not be able to hide our inner deformity through outer acts of performative righteousness. Jesus points to the crowd, trampling one another: their masks beginning to slip under the distress beneath. The leaven has leavened.
“The hidden life leavening in secret eventually deforms to such a degree that it requires an outward, disfigured, increasingly desperate outer life. In fact the more powerful and confident the outward lie, the more cover it provides for the inward truth. ”
What Jesus tells us is that the pathway out of this mess is to confess together the truth. And what truth exactly? Melville’s truth in Moby Dick as he wrestles with the pagan Queequeg's unhidden, genuine, piety, "Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending." And the truth that the God who is to be feared, who can cast both body and soul into hell -- both outer and inner persons -- is also the God who counts hairs. How are we to pretend when Jesus says that the hairs of our heads are numbered? God's knowledge of us is exhaustive. He misses nothing. So there is no reason to hide, because there is no place to hide. We need not live for outer virtues and the crowds who demand them.
“Piety, Jesus tells us here, isn’t to hide or deny the face beneath, but to bear both in light of all their contradictions.”
The only cure for hypocrisy is to fearlessly allow both faces to be seen, the one you wish to be true, and the one that is. Piety, Jesus tells us here, isn't to hide or deny the face beneath, but to bear both in light of all their contradictions. To fearlessly make our confession together, to proclaim Jesus before men, is to proclaim our hypocrisy, and by doing so, rob it of its power. It is the confessing together that helps us avoid the leaven of the Pharisees. Confessing what? That in a world of hypocrites, which is all of us at least some of the time, it is Jesus who is the lone unveiled face. A fearsome face full of mercy, patience, poetry, righteous fire, glory, grief, joy, and love.