Altered Ego

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. -- Matthew 23:27

The word hypocrite comes to us from ancient Greece.  Hypocrites were people who wore masks to portray characters in a Greek play.  In Latin, the word for mask is persona.   The development of a human personality is the development of a mask.  We simply cannot “be” without some channel for interacting and relating to others.  When I ask someone how he is doing, I generally do not want a brain dump.  I am expecting something like, “Not bad.  How about yourself?” 

I wondered as I was thinking about this if Jesus had a mask.  He did.  John 2:24-25 says, “But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.”  The Lord, of course, did not deceive anyone, but He did not fully reveal Himself to everyone, either.  He allowed people to believe about Him according to their own hearts.  No one had to tell Jesus that the world is full of people who are not what they seem. 

In a fallen world, a persona is a survival mechanism.  There are places where we can – or should be able to drop all masks.  Family is one of those places.  It isn’t always the case.  A lot of us experience stress and pain because of the necessity of always being on the defensive.  We can find no one with whom we can drop the mask and be only what we are.  This is why betrayal is such a horrible sin.  When I drop my mask, the other person is supposed to drop his or hers as well.  Betrayal says that didn’t happen, that the pretense was maintained. 

Communion is another place where we should be able to lower our shields.  We often learn the hard way that our “brothers and sisters in Christ” are as duplicitous and conniving as some of our brothers and sisters in the flesh.  The lesson can be costly on many levels.  The religious hypocrites whom Jesus addressed were like many professors of Christianity today.  Externally their lives present a beautiful and seamless façade while inwardly they are broken, disintegrated, and dead. 

We can fall into the trap of maintaining appearances even as we suffer and agonize over how to bridge the yawning gulf between who we are and who we appear to be, who we want to be.  I think we are safe so long as we recognize that masks must be discarded.  Is hell a place where our shields are stripped away?  Or is the place where those must go who have nothing to shield, who are nothing except a mask? 

The persona is something we create in order to function effectively in a world of concepts.  The mask is not needed, nor can it survive, in pure existence.  As long as we are in contact and communion with God, we will see our shell for what it is – an interface for the world.  But, if we disconnect from the Source, we risk becoming nothing except a pretty tomb.