04.07 | Bad Manners

Luke 11:37-12:12

‘While Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him, so he went in and reclined at table. The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner. And the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside also?”’

Luke 11:37-40

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Yesterday we had goulash for dinner. It was unusually watery, and so all of our plates, by the end of the meal, were swimming in tomatoey sauce. Jake, our ten-year-old, asked if he could bend forward, and slurp it up.

Pre-empting our answer, he made his case:

“I wouldn’t do it if we were at someone else’s house.”

He’d nailed his argument. Our fears relieved, permission was given. And a few slurpy seconds later, his plate was clean. 

In today’s passage, you kind of feel like Jesus didn’t get the whole ‘table manners’ memo. He’s been invited as a guest to the house of a Pharisee. For most people, this was a special invitation. They’d have scrubbed up, put on their best manners, and worked hard to impress.

But Jesus isn’t playing that game.

It doesn’t start well: He doesn’t wash His hands. 

He then justifies His lack of hand-washing by pointing out the corrupted inner life of His host.

And then He goes into a lengthy critique about the host and all of his friends, critiquing their ministry and calling them collaborators in the murders of the prophets.

By any cultural metric, anywhere, it’s not good manners.

And so we’ve got to ask, why did Jesus behave this way in this environment? What was it that so irked Him that led Him to these words?

We find out really quickly. In the very next story, as the crowds regather around Jesus, He takes a moment with His disciples to tell them what the pharisaical problem is:

Hypocrisy.

It’s a word we’ve met before.¹ Literally, it means, to act, or to pretend. To be a hypocrite is to present on the outside something that you are not on the inside. 

And it’s fascinating that this is the characteristic that Jesus so ardently goes after.

Why hypocrisy? Why not lust or anger or adultery or bad language? Why not injustice or corruption or greed? What is it about hypocrisy that Jesus identifies as the root of the Pharisees problem?

As always, it’s easiest understood when we bring it closer to home. When we stop looking at hypocrisy as their problem, and consider how hypocrisy works in our lives. For me, hypocrisy works as a subtle arbiter of my actions and words. It tends to tighten my humour, and increase my anxiety. Social interactions become more governed by trying to appear impressive, rather than simply being real. Hypocrisy is ultimately narcissistic—turning our attention inwards, when we were called to live in the simple freedom of living upwards and outwards.

Within the critique lies an invitation. An invitation to a life that escapes the toxic pressure to be impressive all the time. An invitation to a life of easy truth-telling and relaxed authenticity. A truth-telling that drops the act, being willing to both be broken and brilliant, to be some things but not all things, to be real and true and messy and foolish. And to be all things in the easy grace of being, already, loved with an everlasting love.²

And I wonder that Jesus maybe went after this trait in the Pharisees, more than any other, because hypocrisy was ultimately the obstacle to their healing. 

Because the God who made them, who had purposed good for them,³ were stuck only because of their relentless hypocrisy. They were pretending their way all the way to hell. Their obsession with image management was the very obstacle to the basic humility that would accept their need for Jesus, letting go, and finding freedom.

Bad table manners, maybe.

But, within this scandalous passion of our Lord and rabbi, we spot the bursting heart of our Lord that we, too, might let go, drop the act, and learn the freedom of living real.

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Reflect:

Am I, intentionally or unintentionally, trying to pretend to others that I am something better than I actually am?⁴

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Pray:

Lord Jesus,

Were you to come to my house,

What would you find?

I fear you’d find me too often,

In the exhausting work of image management—

Sculpting a botox self

Before the eyes of a critical world.

I fear you’d find me,

So afraid of being caught out—

For my mistakes, my wounds,

My sheer averageness—

That you’d catch me, too, dressing up my outside

And hiding a heart of fear.

But Lord Jesus,

I don’t want that life.

I want to grow into the ease of honesty,

And the lightness of truth,

And the liberty of humility:

True before you, and true before others.

I want my attention to turn from the anxieties of self-absorption

Into the self-forgetfulness of love.

And so, Lord Jesus,

My Saviour and King,

I let go;

Renew this heart today,

Into the freedom of the secure

Whose stability is founded upon nothing

But the unending and inexpressible love of the Father.

In your Name, Lord Jesus,

And following your Way,

Amen

Old Testament: 

For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:

Isaiah 40-41 | Psalm 81 

1. See 8th January:

2. Jeremiah 31:3

3. Luke 7:30

4. Paraphrase of Question 1 of the Oxford Holy Club’s questions. These questions were deeply formative on the Wesley brothers, and the subsequent Methodist Revival of the 18th Century.