26-08-2026, Wednesday of Twenty First Week in Ordinary Time
ὑποκριτής (Gk) (hypokritis) (an actor, a pretender, hypocrite En) (Mt 23:27)
The Greek word hypókrisis in ordinary usage originally meant a “reply” or “answer”. Gradually, it became more restricted to the activity of actors “giving answers” to one another on the stage. The verb hypokrínomai thus came to mean “to play a part on the stage” or simply “to be an actor”. In popular usage, a hypocrite eventually came to designate a “pretender” or “dissembler” who embodied a role and represented a reality that was not really his.
In the early Christian context, the word was first used polemically against the actual Pharisees, but later on it was employed to expose “Pharisaical” behavior within the Church herself. And so hypocrite acquired a specifically religious meaning: a person who considered himself justified before God and men (and therefore morally and socially superior to the rest of mankind) simply on the basis of his meticulous, external observance of religious precepts.
“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 Jn 1:8-10). With what burning simplicity St. John here drives home the ghastly consequences the deceit of hypocrisy! Our self satisfaction makes God a liar, since he is the physician who has diagnosed our illness and is ready to heal us. Arrogant self-righteousness, in its myriad variations and disguises, is the only death of the soul because it cuts us off from our source of life in God’s mercy. Jesus image of whitewashed tombs here is perfect because it powerfully illustrates our instinctive superstition that, through religious or social or intellectual or political rituals, we can successfully put a magical barrier between our consciously constructed, exterior self and the fearsome chaos of corruption raging within us and threatening to engulf us.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a great Cistercian monk and abbot, gives us a working definition of hypocrisy: “Hypocrisy derives from ambition and dwells in the darkness. Indeed, it hides what is and deceives with what is not. It is forever bargaining, keeping an appearance of piety in order to conceal itself, but selling piety’s virtue cheaply in exchange for honors.”
What about you and me? Do we struggle with hypocrisy? Let us ask the divine physician to heal us from our sickness and restore us to integrity and honesty.