“I Have a Friend Who…

Thinks Christians Are Self-Righteous Hypocrites”

 

The title of this session assigned me is “I Have a Friend who thinks Christians are self-righteous hypocrites.”  You may not know that the church took a secret ballot and determined I was most qualified, based on past experience, to speak to the subject.  We will be spending the majority of our time together considering this topic as Jesus directly addressed it as recorded in Matthew chapter 23 if you would like to turn with me there.  But first I ought to respond to the suggestion posed to us, that there is some level of self-righteousness inherent in many of those that call themselves by the name “Christian.”  Further, it is implied that nearly all those that go by that name are hypocritical in the way they “walk the talk” you might say.  So, if you tell me that your friend thinks “Christians are self-righteous hypocrites” I have a simple reply.  Your friend is correct.  He’s right on.  He hit the nail on the head in that observation.  If you ask me whether Christians are self-righteous hypocrites I’ll answer with one word: Yes.

 

Perhaps you will think this is an answer that you haven’t asked the question to.  However, as with most “I have a friend who…” statements we are either masking our own question with a hypothetical third party, or we indeed have such a friend but we ourselves don’t know how to answer them, or even have some sympathies with the perspective they offer.

 

Further, you may think this is a question that you don’t want to hear the answer to.  This may be all the more the case if you are in a position of leadership.  Leaders are the number 1 target of hypocrisy accusers.  Even more, those that do the “talking” about what righteousness is are those that are most often viewed as self-righteous.  Are you in a place, however minor in your mind, of leading other people?  Are you in a role where you talk about God and your religion to other people?  If you are—and I do suspect most of you are in one way or another—then listen carefully because you at high risk of having a “friend” think these things of you.  Even more, you are at high risk of them being true of you.  Five times over this is true of me as I speak to this subject.  So let the Word open itself up to us and speak directly to this issue, so we can all be students of Jesus alone.

 

Self-righteousness and hypocrisy was the status quo as Jesus saw it for the leaders and teachers of his time.  In fact, in biblical times the “friend” who thinks leaders and teachers are self-righteous and hypocritical might be Jesus himself.  In the 23^rd chapter of Matthew we find a fiery diatribe from Jesus towards such hypocrisy.  I don’t suspect many have memorized this portion of scripture.  Few of our mauve covered devotional books use selections of this ranting passage as motivational scripture readings.  Only a spiritual sadist would be edified by this speech from Jesus.  It is a direct attack on our own self-assurance.  But Jesus prefaces the “Seven Woes”, as they have come to be called, with an instruction and a solution for the crowds and His disciples.  Let’s read them from Matthew 23.

 

Matthew 23

1 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2 "The teachers of religious law and the Pharisees are the official interpreters of the Scriptures. 3 So practice and obey whatever they say to you, but don't follow their example. For they don't practice what they teach. 4 They crush you with impossible religious demands and never lift a finger to help ease the burden. 5 "Everything they do is for show. On their arms they wear extra wide prayer boxes with Scripture verses inside, ^F126 and they wear extra long tassels on their robes. v 6 And how they love to sit at the head table at banquets and in the most prominent seats in the synagogue! 7 They enjoy the attention they get on the streets, and they enjoy being called 'Rabbi.' ^F127 v 8 Don't ever let anyone call you 'Rabbi,' for you have only one teacher, and all of you are on the same level as brothers and sisters. ^F128 9 And don't address anyone here on earth as 'Father,' for only God in heaven is your spiritual Father. 10 And don't let anyone call you 'Master,' for there is only one master, the Messiah. v 11 The greatest among you must be a servant. 12 But those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

 

An Instruction for you

 

The instruction Jesus gives here is to obey those in authority whether they are people of integrity or not (2-3).  So often our human rebellion gene rises up from our perceived place of oppression and resists the leadership of someone we deem hypocritical and self-righteous.  It is easy for us to find the hypocritical in another – particularly those in authority who might not have the chance to defend themselves or make restitution for our gossiped claims of hypocritical behavior.  Our “friend” who thinks Christians to be self-righteous hypocrites might need to ponder on these words from Jesus.  By accusing those who are Christian-in-name of hypocrisy our “friend” may think that he can escape any responsibility to follow Christ on his own.  Our culture has created this fictional “get out of hell free” card – which is imagined to be won by simply finding fault in someone else who is faking it.  As is usual – when one turns the spotlight onto themselves it gets far more difficult.

 

But while our “friend” may take some wisdom from these verses, they are not directed at him.  They are directed at us!  We are the crowds who follow Jesus.  We are His disciples today.  Who are we rebelling against?  What leader do we “write off” because of something we think they have done – or some simple difference in taste or opinion that really doesn’t add up to hypocrisy or self-righteousness on their part, but of blind pride on ours?  Jesus tip-toes around this subject of hypocrisy and then pummels us in the gut for our eagerness to find others hypocritical and self-righteous.  That eagerness itself, Jesus instructs, shows our own hypocrisy—our own self-righteous attitude.  So consider yourself warned.  The rest of these words are not meant for “someone else.”  These are not for your Catholic neighbor who never goes to church.  These are not for your old Christian Reformed minister that you never trusted.  No, instead Jesus gut-punches that eagerness out of you right here at the start.  This instruction is for you – not other people.

 

the solution is the Christ Who Serves

 

The solution Jesus offers us is the one he lives for us – humble servanthood.  Servanthood is the only reliable prescription for treating the sickness of hypocrisy in us today.  To be like Christ Who Serves is to remove even the option of self-righteousness.  For through servanthood we fully and completely depend on the Master.  We place ourselves in the position of dependence.  We have confused this issue today and forgotten the great history behind us.  What matters in the end is our position in Christ.  Do we position ourselves close to him?  Perhaps equal with him?  Do we perceive ourselves as worthy of the inner circle of God?  If so we betray our last-in-line status.  The last-first ones who serve like the Christ Who Serves are the ones in the correct position.  Walking in the light He casts rather than presuming to shine it ourselves.  Why must every generation of Christ-followers re-learn this lesson: we cannot have any righteousness by ourselves.  The Bible is crystal clear on this.  Paul’s letters smack us across the face with it.  Augustine, Luther, Wesley even—they all emphasized that, for all our efforts to be like Christ, we cannot do it in our own power.  We find our redemption by the power of His blood, not our own.  Our own West Michigan is a tragic irony in this regard.  I have ministered here for a time, going spiritually deep with many of the “natives” of our Reformed-influenced population, including my own wife whose family motto is, “if you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much.”  I have been startled to discover the deep roots of works righteousness that pervades our culture here.  When and how you do things religious seems to count more than why and for whom.  Jesus asks, “Are your works a show or a secret?”  If John Calvin were not already in heaven saved by God’s grace alone he would be rolling over in his grave right now when seeing a people who use his name as their label be so dependent on themselves for something they can only find through Christ!  One who trusts in himself for righteousness is the greatest hypocrite.  Our works do not save us.  As Thomas Fuller wrote, “A hypocrite is in himself both the archer and the mark, in all actions shooting at his own praise or profit.”[1]

But you must remember, you who have become eager to condemn.  Also I who have drifted toward condemnation in the prior words.  In the end it is our position that counts—not other people’s.  What position am I taking before God?  Before people?  Before the Church?  An attitude of humility that leads to a position of servanthood is the only solution to what ails us.

 

It is a tenuous position I find myself in now, in fact.  To speak to others about hypocrisy and self-righteousness with authority is all the tight-rope that it sounds.  While I never “get nervous” over such things, I am far more nervous about bringing this to you than previous words.  Perhaps it should be cast aside when I am done.  You can go about your lives this week and forget this.  I cannot bring myself to say “go and do likewise” before saying first, “wait, I have not done likewise myself.”

 

You see, while sitting in the Barnes and Nobles coffee shop and studying this passage I came across something in the NIV translation that made me double-take.  Perhaps you’ve already noticed it in your modern translation.  There is no verse 14!  Yes, if you ask someone with an NIV, NLT or various other translations to read Matthew 23:14 for you then there will be dead air.  The verses go from 13 to 15.  While sitting in Barnes and Noble’s preparing to communicate the issue of self-righteous hypocrisy my soul began to wander.  I wondered if the NIV translators had made a mistake.  Preposterous visions of grandeur about being the first person to find an actual typographical error in the translation began to swirl in my head.  I thought of how I might humorously break the news to my good friend Jean Syswerda, a former Bible editor from Zondervan.  I briefly crafted a joke about the people at Zondervan not being able to count to 15!

 

Then it dawned upon me – I was being tempted sin, even fully sinning in creating these thoughts.  In one moment this scripture leapt out at me and smacked me in the face again.  Woe to me!  How terrible it will be for me to teach on this issue yet be privately guilty of it.  I bawled in that Barnes and Noble coffee shop.  I was eager to point out the speck in another’s eye.  Of course, with just a smidgeon of further study I found out that I was not only sinful—I was also stupid.  You see, verse 14 of chapter 23 is not found in the earliest manuscripts that have been discovered of the gospel of Matthew.  Many of your translations even have a note about it at the bottom of the page – which doesn’t take rocket science to figure out.  So in my sinful and stupid state I confessed my human desire to seek out hypocrisy in others while not shining the spotlight on myself.

 

Now I have dealt with that – all while producing quite a scene in Barnes and Nobles weeping aloud over several commentaries and Bibles.  I’m surprised I didn’t receive a free Frappuccino for looking so distraught.

 

I’ve begun to call these 7 woes “Jesus’ 7 Rants Against Hypocrisy.”  Here is the first.

 

The First rant—heaven’s gate keepers

 

13 "How terrible it will be for you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you won't let others enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and you won't go in yourselves. ^{F129 F166}

 

Jesus calls us out for pretending holiness while being sick inside.  It is not the sickness that repulses him.  He came, as you might recall, not for the healthy, but the sick.  It is the pretence of health that he calls out—the claim that there is no sickness within.  By doing this, even though we are in a position to know better, we are drawing others down with us.  Many “friends” who see through our self-righteous hypocrisy are not only right, but in being unable to resolve that ill-fated excuse, those “friends” walk the path of eternal death unknowingly.  This makes our sin all the more distasteful for Jesus.  Since we pretend to be heaven’s gatekeepers – picking and choosing who might enter heaven – Jesus will ensure that when we close the doors, we will be outside of them.

 

One writer I’ve read comments, “If the devil ever laughs, it must be at hypocrites; they are the greatest dupes he has.  They serve him better than any others, and receive no reward; and what is more… they go to greater lengths to go to hell than the sincerest Christian ever did to go to heaven!”

 

The second rant—disciples of self

 

15 Yes, how terrible it will be for you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. For you cross land and sea to make one convert, and then you turn him into twice the son of hell as you yourselves are.

 

Jesus is so often depicted in paintings as some calmly blond librarianish gentleman holding a sleepy lamb we Westerners have trouble even computing that he said things like this.  What must it have felt like to hear him say directly that our evangelistic efforts merely turn our converts into “twice the son of hell that we are?”  Ouch!  Could it be that when we send our meager dollars and inept prayers and even our every-so-often missionaries that we are in this same vein?  Are we celebrating the crossing of land and sea more than celebrating the One whom those distant peoples are to be converted to?  If we are making people disciples of ourselves rather than Christ then we are in the same vein as these missionaries of hell that Jesus called out to repentance.

 

The third rant—splitting hairs

 

16 "Blind guides! How terrible it will be for you! For you say that it means nothing to swear 'by God's Temple' – you can break that oath. But then you say that it is binding to swear 'by the gold in the Temple.' 17 Blind fools! Which is greater, the gold, or the Temple that makes the gold sacred? 18 And you say that to take an oath 'by the altar' can be broken, but to swear 'by the gifts on the altar' is binding! 19 How blind! For which is greater, the gift on the altar, or the altar that makes the gift sacred? 20 When you swear 'by the altar,' you are swearing by it and by everything on it. 21 And when you swear 'by the Temple,' you are swearing by it and by God, who lives in it. 22 And when you swear 'by heaven,' you are swearing by the throne of God and by God, who sits on the throne.

 

Which is more sacred to us… our word or the One who is the Word?  Which is more sacred to us… the prayers we minutes we absent-mindedly pray or whether they are powerful and effective in the end?  Which is more sacred to us… the small amount we offer on the great altar of missions or the Great Commission itself which was given to all of us?  We again should go learn what it meant when God repeatedly told us “I desire mercy not sacrifice.”

 

The fourth rant—cart before the horse

 

23 "How terrible it will be for you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest part of your income, ^F130 but you ignore the important things of the law – justice, mercy, and faith. You should tithe, yes, but you should not leave undone the more important things. 24 Blind guides! You strain your water so you won't accidentally swallow a gnat; then you swallow a camel!

 

Jesus sees through these feeble attempts to appear religious.  We all deep down automatically know those things which we do religiously but which have no true spiritual motivation.  However, we must ask in return of Jesus, what are the most important things of the law?  We are apparently ignoring them with such emphasis on the non-essentials.  He answered that question in the previous chapter of Matthew in 22:37-40 when he said, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your hear, all your soul, and all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the other commandments and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”  We should go and learn what those verses mean for us.

 

Jesus wants us to get the order of things right.  He knows that we are more concerned about getting the right cart – one that will appear fast and comfortable, one that many people can fit in so that we can win friends and influence people with it.  We want our cart to be the envy of the lot.  However, sitting inside our fancy religious carts with all the options, we are going nowhere.  Jesus poignantly points out our senseless spiritual stagnation by focusing our attention on the first things first.  The first things were mentioned in the Greatest Commandment a moment ago.  Perhaps the Fruit of the sSpirit bear repeating as well as the first things we so often develop last: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  In the end the recurring difficulty a hypocrite faces is that following Christ is about positive commands, not negative judgementalism.  The sins of commission that the self-righteous love to point out in others are not so great as the sins of omission the same show they lack in the process.  Even the goats and sheep, mentioned two chapters further into Matthew, are on the one hand denied entry or on the other offered eternal access to heaven based on their attitudes and actions in servanthood, not on a list of bad things they did not do.  Get the spiritual horsepower that counts first.

 

The fifth rant—spiritual racism

 

25 "How terrible it will be for you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! You are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy – full of greed and self-indulgence! 26 Blind Pharisees! First wash the inside of the cup, and then the outside will become clean, too.

 

In Paradise Lost John Milton wrote:

“For neither man nor angel can discern
  Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
    Invisible, except to God alone,
      By his permissive will, through heaven and earth.”[2]
When we live in hypocrisy we might even be correctly called spiritual racists.  We are more concerned with appearance than integrity.  We pay more attention to things that are akin to the color of skin than the content of our character.  The color of our Bibles, carpets, smiles, suits, hair, prayer journals, WWJD bracelets, Jesus-fish car ornaments, dressing up, etc—whatever outer appearance thing we use to label and brandish our religiosity.  While none of these outer things count enough to dwell on them long, perhaps we should take a fast from these outer adornments of Christianity and worry more about the inside of our cups lest our “friend” find out about the spiritual racism we practice.  We should permanently rid ourselves of our focus upon them in the least.  Such a focus on the outside is full of the comparison game that reeks of greed and self-indulgence to Jesus.

 

The sixth rant—spiritual corpses

 

27 "How terrible it will be for you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs – beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people's bones and all sorts of impurity. 28 You try to look like upright people outwardly, but inside your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.

 

What a picture of inner death Jesus paints us into here—a corner we cannot get out of without waking the dead inside us.  We are like embalmed corpses that walk around talking and going on like everything is normal.  We look peaceful and at rest but inside we are full of the fermented formaldehyde of fruitless hypocrisy.  We feel dead inside because we so often are.  We risk being eaten from the inside out as though we were spiritually six feet under.  This bears repeating or it least it did for Jesus.  Apparently he hadn’t ranted enough on the fifth “woe” and so revisited this internal spiritual death at length again.  We should not so quickly move past this rant.  Aesop’s fables calls a man of hypocrisy one “who can blow hot and cold with the same breath.”  Perhaps we are fooling ourselves more than anyone else when it comes to this hypocritical halitosis.

 

The seventh rant—ignorant of history

 

29 "How terrible it will be for you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you build tombs for the prophets your ancestors killed and decorate the graves of the godly people your ancestors destroyed. 30 Then you say, 'We never would have joined them in killing the prophets.' 31 "In saying that, you are accusing yourselves of being the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Go ahead. Finish what they started. 33 Snakes! Sons of vipers! How will you escape the judgment of hell? 34 I will send you prophets and wise men and teachers of religious law. You will kill some by crucifixion and whip others in your synagogues, chasing them from city to city. 35 As a result, you will become guilty of murdering all the godly people from righteous Abel to Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered in the Temple between the altar and the sanctuary. 36 I assure you, all the accumulated judgment of the centuries will break upon the heads of this very generation.

 

Those that do not learn the lesson of history are doomed to repeat it.  Unfortunately, like our ancestors before us, we would just as soon imprison Jeremiah, mock Elijah, behead John the Baptist, and even crucify our Savior.  Who are we to think we would act differently in the shoes of those in the past when we trust in our own righteousness just as they did?  Perhaps even now you are still thinking that these seven rants are for someone else.  Their name or face has come to mind as we’ve gone through each of these and the temptation has been there for you to think, “ah, yes, I know who needs to hear this… too bad they aren’t here.”  Well think again.

 

37 "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones God's messengers! How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings, but you wouldn't let me. 38 And now look, your house is left to you, empty and desolate. 39 For I tell you this, you will never see me again until you say, 'Bless the one who comes in the name of the Lord!' ^F131 "[3]

 

Jesus wants to know if YOU are willing to repent for your hypocrisy, for your self-righteousness… because he longs to gather you up under his wing like he longed to do for Jerusalem.  Like he did for me in that Barnes and Noble coffee shop.  He wants us as his humble servants.  All we need do is be willing to repent and change our inner hypocrisy… our feeble trust in self-righteousness.  We who are so often spiritually prideful must be willing to repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is already here – and with such an attitude you and I are missing out it.

 

 

David Drury delivered this address at Spring Lake Wesleyan Church on 28 September 2003 for the SLU teaching event “I Have a Friend Who…”  You can reach him to discuss further via [email protected]

 

 

©2003 David Drury

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