Pretending to Be Someone You're Not
Matthew's gospel sometimes is bad news before it's good news. Every time I visit Matthew’s church, I check my watch.
Now I really believe the gospel is good news—that even the hardest sayings, like this morning's parable, we meant for Good News. That hard words nevertheless carry Jesus' life in them, speaking a truth I need to hear. In the case of this morning’s parable, here’s how I heard good news.
I am deeply relieved that someone knows about this awful dream I used to have. In one version of it, I wake up from a nap and wonder if I didn’t just miss church. Or worse, it's Sunday morning and realize I don’t have a sermon. Some of you might want that to happen. Or I’m the guest preacher at some church. When it’s time to read the gospel, I find that the Bible is written in French. Or, the dream is that of failing grade eleven; it was French that did me in. So I rehearse the fear of signing up for summer school, the humiliation of telling others, but then I awaken and realize it was a dream and in fact I passed high school and excelled in College and graduate school. Whew!
People seem to have different versions of this dream, depending on their lives, but the dream always comes down to being some place where you are unprepared, waiting to be exposed for the impostor you are. As hard as you have worked to prevent it, it is finally going to happen. People are going to learn the truth about you: that you are stupid, that you have no business being here, that you don’t know the language/ don’t know which fork to use/don’t remember your host’s name--that your body really is as bad as you thought it was, that people really are looking at you and there is nothing in reach—nothing at all that you can use to cover yourself with.
Whatever else Matthew was up to in this parable, he got that part right. Everyone else at the banquet seems to have gotten a memo that the under-dressed guest has not. When the magnificent king approaches him, with anger still radiating from his royal person over his first, disastrously received effort at being generous, the under-dressed guest has no time to think, much less to go shopping for sales on banquet attire. “Friend,” the king says to him (a lousy translation; “buster” works much better). “Buster,” the king says to him, “how did you get in here without a wedding garment?” Oh, gosh! It’s one of those dreams.
Why do I think it’s a dream? Because real people don’t turn down a king’s dinner invitation, much less torture and kill the messengers who came to fetch them. Because once you have a whole ox and several fatted calves on serving platters, they won’t keep while you wage war on a whole city, kill its inhabitants, and torch the place. Because who really expects someone nabbed in the middle of painting the kitchen to have a clean wedding garment in the back of the truck?
Jesus called it a parable, which is almost the same thing as a dream. It’s not a once-and for-all story. It’s a story you can walk around in, a story that wants a response from you—hopes for a response from you—one that changes as you change, so that it is different the tenth time you hear it than it was at the first. Matthew was certainly looking for a response, but his reasons for recording the story don’t exhaust our reasons for entering it. The king, the banquet, the dress code, the failure—the exposure of the failure, the judgment, the free fall into outer darkness—you know this story, don’t you?
You even know why it’s no good to be a hypocrite. It really is deadly, to keep a double you the public you and the private you, especially if you have to keep them a great distance apart. The you, you say you are and the you, you act like, the you, you dress like and the you, you really are.
You say you’re an environmentalist but you gobble energy like a suburban mall. You say “have a blessed day” to the lady at the bank and then pull into traffic like a demon straight from hell. You tell everyone who will listen how worried you are about the public schools, about the people who are losing their homes, about the election, but you don’t do anything about them. You say you will go to the vineyard, or vote, but you don’t.
Matthew seems to think that all this two-ness is about gaining advantage over other people, but I think that’s circumstantial. When he wrote his gospel, he was dealing with religious people who were living high on widow’s mites, who were using their theological educations—their institutional privileges--to climb on top of other people. While that hypocrites' club still has plenty of members, Matthew stays so busy with them that he seems to lose sight of the people whose two-ness has less to do with their inflated sense of their own worth than with their terrible fear that they are worth nothing at all.
It’s just as deadly, this other hypocrisy. You look all pulled together but you are really a wreck. You make a good salary but you’re on welfare in your heart. You can speak three languages. You have a college degree. You know which fork to use, and still you keep waiting for someone to come and arrest you--to ask you how you got in here. You’re scared of the outer darkness but it’s no surprise, really. It is where you always feared you belonged. Based on personal experience, I would have to say that the only thing worse than the two-ness is waiting for someone to find out about it.
The only thing worse than showing up in your dream with the wrong clothes on—no clothes on?--is waiting for someone to notice. Then someone does, and while there can be real terror in that moment—especially if the noticer happens to be a really mad king--there can also be real relief in that moment—because someone finally noticed your two-ness and now you don’t have to pretend anymore. Someone was not fooled by your pretense. Someone has reached past the two you’s to tap the real you on the shoulder, and even if he calls you “Buster,” the jig is up.
Here’s the good news: because your two-ness has been exposed, your wholeness is a real possibility, perhaps for the first time. Because someone has paid attention to you long enough to notice what it was about you that didn’t fit—someone who has decided not to let you pass this time, who has the regal nerve to walk right up to you and say, “Which one’s the lie? This isn’t a Halloween party. Take off the mask.” Well. Now that that’s happened, you have a chance to be made new. When this dream comes back, you’re going to play it differently—because you can, now. When that king approaches you next time, you’re going to let him know you got the point.
Have you ever watched a movie or attended a play and felt after seeing it over maybe for the third time that nine times out of ten, you know more about these characters in the script than they know about themselves?
We were talking last week about Ordinary People and I could still feel the tension in Mary Tyler Moore’s character trying to avoid the pain of her son’s death. This family that doesn’t seem to be able to talk about truth, we watch the tension boil over, they try to dump their anxiousness on each other so The Mom doesn’t have to feel it, but it doesn’t stick; it keeps coming back to the truth.
Or there’s the play about a high-strung real estate agent, who cannot see how brittle her striving has made her, but we can. The man who can’t see how much he misses his dead mother, but we can. Why are these characters are so dense, perhaps because they do not have the luxury, of watching the movie or seeing themselves like we do.
They are in the movie, or on stage, where they are so busy with their own dramas that they don’t have much opening to think about their parts. They just keep playing their roles—acting like people we know they are not, saying things they don’t really believe, and hurting the people they want to be near.
When their lives change—if their lives change—it is because someone gets close enough to tell them what they can’t see about themselves: that they are a phony, that they are lovelier than they ever imagined, that their story does not have to turn out the same way every time unless they insist.
Since the characters are all different, so are the revelations that change their lives. There is no one-sized truth that fits all, except that the keys to their prisons are usually in other people’s pockets—someone, anyone, who will stop, look, and refuse to buy the act. When that happens, it pops their locks. It opens the door to their salvation—because someone got close enough to see past their two-ness and call them to become whole.
What if that movie analogy is true, that we can not see ourselves any better than the people on the screen could see themselves?
Who is watching our movies carefully enough to tell us what they see? Who—in a whole room full of people who could see exactly how we were dressed—who would have the nerve to come up and say, “How did you get in here?” or “Didn’t you see the garment with your name on it?” or “Would you like to dance?” I guess you never know who that person will be—a mad king, a patient lover, a scary Matthew, a sweet Jesus.
Since this is our gospel—our story, our hope of waking up to real life— then I guess that person could be you or me—dreaming God’s dream as many times as it takes to put the fiery furnace out because everyone—I mean everyone—is inside the banquet hall, dancing the night away.
