“Being real” is something of a cultural proverb, an uncontested truth. It is often set in juxtaposition into “being a hypocrite.” And we often think that the boundary line between the two is a matter of exposure: hypocrites hide who they are, a person who “is real” is someone who bares it all, lays it all on the line, never alters or moderates their self-expression. At least, that’s often the culturally depicted difference. But perhaps these nice boundaries are mislaid, perhaps this dichotomy is not quite true, not quite the full picture. Perhaps this seemingly settled position needs to be unsettled —if only a bit— by the destabilizing force of the truth.
“Hypocrite” comes to us from the Greek word for a class of stage actor, implying someone who wears a mask. For the Greek theater the mask invoked a presence; the actor was enveloped by the persona of the mask. One wasn’t merely playing someone else, one become someone else, at least for the space of the production. In many ways this is not dissimilar from the experience of “method actors” today for whom the barrier between character and player is suspended. And in some cases that suspended barrier is hard to fully recover.
This “mask-wearing” is in many ways a normal and regulated part of all of life: I play various roles throughout my day (dad, Fr. Mark, husband, pedestrian, etc.), I wear different grammatical “masks” when speaking (I am an “I”) and when being addressed (I am a “you”), I even comport myself in different ways according to particular settings (e.g. the beach, the opera, the lo’i, the bathroom). Does such a alteration and variety make me a hypocrite? Does this make me, or you, someone who is inauthentic and duplicitous?
The belief that “all the world’s a stage” in which we are all actors, and the belief that being a hypocrite is a bad thing to be, seem to be incompatible. Which one is it? We must decide, it seems, because our current culture is in the death-throes of indecision. We simultaneously mask and manicure ourselves so as to control public perception while also praising as an ultimate good those things that pass as “just being honest” and “barring your heart” and “being authentic”.
A representative anecdote may be illustrative: The American simultaneously posts only carefully curated (and photoshopped) content on their account, perhaps different images on their multiple accounts, to project an image. And yet each post is also postured so as to supply the sense that “this is just me doing my thing #authentic #aintgotnothintoprovetonobody #whatyouseeiswhatyouget.”
How do we negotiate our various roles on this stage of life without becoming inauthentic and hypocritical? You shouldn’t be surprised to know that I think the Bible has a clue to the riddle.
The biblical condemnation of “hypocrites” by Jesus Christ (e.g. Matthew 6:2, 5; 7:5; 23:27; Mk. 7:6; Lk. 12:56; etc.) is neither his critique of ancient theater nor his endorsement of unqualified “authenticity” in the contemporary “Total War of the social sphere” kind of way. It names, rather, a relation to the Real. Hypocrite names the person who is not willing to suffer for the sake of the Real but who is rather, in all of their various roles, avoiding having to deal with the Real by repression, avoidance, artifice, palliation, addiction, etc.
The Real is a costly thing. And resistance to the Real is the resting state of the hypocrite.
This is the theme at work in Graham Greene’s cuttingly tragic The Comedians, in which a cast of characters resist the encounter with the Real, and the realest of all real things: God himself. Instead they spend their time managing an arrangement of falsehoods to avoid having to be known in any of their particular roles.
One such character wears “his ambiguity like a loud suit and seemed to be proud of it” (33). He is “like a man who says ‘You must take me as you find me’ …” but only like it. Not really. Instead even authenticity becomes a defense mechanism against being knowing and being known. Greene’s novel captures the ache of living with the various roles, masks, characters, grammars, etc., of our lives positioned defensively against the world of the Real.
Just a defense is achieved both by manicured inauthenticity as well as loud displays of postured authenticity —that thing we sometimes wear like a loud suit in order to cast the illusion “I am secure.” For the Real sometimes demands quietude, silence, and modesty. Not all that is exposed is authentic. And not all that is hidden is inauthentic.
The Bible avoids this imagined dichotomy and calls us to put-on Christ (Rom. 13:11-14), to clothe ourselves with armor (Eph. 6:10-18), to enact interdependent roles (Eph. 5:21-6:9), to play the parts we have been given (2 Samuel 10:12) in the variegated quilt of our lives in ways that move towards the Real —towards the Truth, the Good, and the Beautiful.
This willingness to play our role, to stand for what is Real in various ways according to various contexts, is at the heart of another Greek word in the New Testament: parrhesia. We find this word in John 10 when the crowds demand that Jesus “tell them the truth plainly” —to be real with them. When He is real with them, when he confronts them with the Real (in this case, that he is the Son of the Father), they pick-up stones to kill him. This readiness to kill is the truest mark of the hypocrite who, having convinced themselves of their own authenticity, demands the Real they cannot abide and, when it comes, seeks to remove its blistering presence.