Halloween’s Over — Take Off the Mask

My dad posts again to round out the series of the past week. His thoughts here relate to the Legends post from earlier in the week, so we’ll call it Part 1.5. If you missed Dad’s earlier guest spot, you can pick it up here.

Meanwhile, Delilah is just dying to cut Samson’s hair, so I’ll be back in Judges 16 this week if you care to join me.

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by Paul Willingham

Rambo and Homer.  Hmmmm!  Superman and Casper Milquetoast.  Babe Ruth and Casey (at the Bat).  Sgt. York and Sgt. Bilko.  The James Gang and the Apple Dumpling Gang.  Rambo I know, having watched “First Blood” several times.  Rambo II and Rambo III fell sort of flat, as most sequels do.  I know who Homer Simpson is but have never watched even 5 minutes of “The Simpsons”.  But I digress.  My TV/movie viewing preferences are not germane here.  What you were really saying as one wag put it long ago, we want to be legends but we only end up being “legends in our own mind”.

When I was in college, an annual event was the “Speech Banquet”.  After the meal, the program consisted of speeches by several students.  The speakers (mostly male students as they were pursuing careers as preachers) on the program were selected by the Speech Professor.  I agreed to serve as toastmaster for the event and thus escaped preparing and delivering a speech.  Following years of tradition established by those who had gone before me, plus my own idea of what an emcee does, I introduced the various speakers with a short and what I hoped was a good joke (a good joke being defined as one that folks actually laugh at).

I introduced one of the students (We’ll call him Bob) as follows:  Bob had a date with his long-time girl friend.  When he arrived at the door and rang her bell, she appeared at the door and greeted him with the question that every male dreads.  “Bob, do you notice any thing different about me?”

Bob paused and then responded, “You have a new hair do”.

“No,” she replied.  “Guess again.”

Bob thought for a moment looked at her and said, “You’re wearing a new dress.”

“Wrong again,” she said.

Bob started to panic.  “New shoes?”

“Nope.”

“New necklace?”

“Uh uh.”

Finally, Bob could stand it no longer.  “I give up.  What is different about you?”

“I’m wearing a gas mask”, she replied.

Needless to say, it was a good (as defined above) joke.  But our professor of English got really tickled and started laughing so hard that pretty soon everyone was laughing at him and with him.  For three and a half minutes we laughed.  For the record, I don’t remember another thing about that banquet.

When a person walks into a room wearing a gas mask, it doesn’t look like an Easter bonnet.  There is no mistaking the fact that he or she has a mask on.  Unfortunately, the masks that we put on in the real world are not nearly so easy to discern.  And we hope that people don’t see the mask or we wouldn’t be wearing them in the first place.  Even more problematic is that we seldom live up to the image or mask that we are presenting to the world around us.

People often are just not what they seem.  It seems that hardly a week goes by without the news media reporting on yet another person who didn’t attend the college listed on their resume, or have the degrees they claimed or worked where they said they did or coached where they said the did.  Politicians of all stripes seem particularly adept at mask wearing.  Christianity isn’t immune either.  Remember Bakker, Swaggert, Haggard?  In my home town it is businessmen Tom Petters and Denny Hecker who have turned out to not be who the community thought they were.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!  You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.  In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. (Matthew 23:27-28)

What a condemnation.  Jesus was a real wordsmith.  When you think of a mask as a whitened mausoleum it is not nearly as attractive or as much fun to wear.  If you want to be caught up short about the risks of hiding behind a mask, read the first 33 verses of Matthew 23.  It brings a whole new meaning to the dangers of mask wearing.

My professor of “Harmony of the Gospels” required the class to memorize all of Chapter 23, which he simply referred to as “The Woes”.  I suspect his rationale was to keep us humble, not for any deep theological purpose.  Reading “The Woes” strips the mask off pretty quickly.  Coincidentally, the Greek word translated here as hypocrite means “actor or stage player.”  In ancient Greek theater, a mask identified the character rather than the make-up and costumes used in the theater today.

It is not easy just being ourselves because we know all of our weaknesses and shortcomings.  We know where we have failed family, friends, employers and most of all, our Lord.  We want to be who we would like to be, if that makes sense.  So we create an image of the person we would like to be and then find that we can’t live up to the image we’ve created.  Jesus doesn’t see the mask anyway, so who are we really kidding?

We just need to move out from behind the mask and recognize that we are who we are, sinners saved by grace, and get to work being the person Christ wants us to be.

Christ doesn’t need legends or super heroes, He needs real people.

He needs servants.

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About Paul: My dad is a retired CPA living in the Twin Cities with my equally amazing mom. He is granddad to three boys and five girls and is an occasional golfer, skilled carpenter, accomplished handyman and master chef. He gets together with his 101-year old dad each week to work out their latest life-enhancing contraptions and home improvement projects. It goes without saying (even though I’m saying it) that my dad and mom follow Jesus well.