Wearing Christ's Mask

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Pentecost 12, Year B – Track 1

8/11/24

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

I’d like to tell you a story today. It was written in 1897 and the title of the story is The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men, which I think is a hilarious title. The story goes like this. There was a man named George Hell (which is also very funny) and George was a selfish man of many appetites. He was a gambler, a flirt, and he loved nothing more than a raucous all-night party. Then one day he met an incredible woman named Jenny and became enraptured with her. Now Jenny was everything that George was not. She was selfless and kind, generous and humble, and she loved God far more than any worldly delight. Hopelessly smitten by her goodness, the scoundrel George confessed his love and asked for Jenny’s hand in marriage, but Jenny playfully replied that she would only marry a man with the face of a saint.

Knowing that there was nothing saintlike about himself, George was heartbroken. Yet as he was walking home, he passed a mask shop and a devilish idea popped into his head. He went in and asked the mask maker to make for him the most convincing mask of a saint that he could. Then, while wearing the mask, George would spend the next year acting as saintly as possible in the hope that he could win Jenny’s heart.

While wearing the mask George began to slowly undo all of his selfish habits. He returned money that he had won from trickery, he supported charities and community efforts, and he even moved into a modest cottage in the woods where he lived humbly and prayerfully, treating those whom he encountered with the same kindness and compassion he saw modeled in Jenny.

While George’s project was difficult at first and required exercising moral muscles that had grown weak from years of self-centeredness, he eventually found it easier and easier to be compassionate, sometimes even forgetting that his newfound altruism was part of his trick to win Jenny’s heart. But eventually he did catch Jenny’s eye, and we she saw his saintly face and saintly life, she was overjoyed to take him as her husband. They were married and George signed his name on the wedding registry as “George Heaven.” However, George’s happiness was short lived because as the happy couple was going home, an old friend recognized George and demanded that he take off his mask and reveal his true face. George knew that he was caught and prepared to take off his mask, knowing that it would cost him his true love. Yet as he removed the mask, he was astonished to find that his face had taken on the appearance of the saint whom he pretended to be. And at this sight, Jenny recognized the transformation that had taken place within him and fell all the more in love with George, and the two live happily ever after.

Now this is a fairy tale of course but I think it well-illustrates a spiritual practice and truth that is at heart of the Christian life. Something which St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians today calls the imitation of Christ – something that we are all called to do. One of the most common concerns that I hear from people who are new or returning to Christianity is that they feel that they are unable to do what it takes to live what they perceive as a holy life. They desire to do so, but have this perception that Christians are somehow naturally more pious, more prayerful, or more compassionate than the average person and that perception keeps them away from participating in the life of faith.

However, St. Paul, in his letter to the church in Ephesus, assures us that that is not actually the case. He does not say explicitly that Christians are naturally better or worse people than anyone else, however he does call on the Ephesian Christians to put away falsehood and sin, to work honestly with their own hands, to share with the needy, and to build one another up in Christ (Ephesians 4:25ff). And I’ll let you in on a secret of Biblical interpretation, if St. Paul ever tells a community something specific that they should be doing, you can best believe that the opposite of that thing is likely happening, or else he wouldn’t have had reason to write those words in the first place.

So St. Paul’s exhortation to the Ephesians to live a godly, righteous, and sober life is evidence that us Christians, from the very start, are the same as flawed human beings anywhere. The difference being that we are called to live a new and holy life modeled on the one who loves us and the one whom we have fallen in love with, like George’s Jenny. And if we feel overwhelmed by the burden of holiness, then Paul offers a helpful suggestion: begin by imitating Christ, begin by putting on the mask of Christ. Even if our hearts don’t always feel like they’re in the right place, we always have the choice to act as if they are. And through that repeated action; that repeated moral and spiritual exercise, we can actually become the thing that we were practicing to be.

And of course like any exercise, the exercise of imitating Christ does not yield results overnight. It requires patience, dedication, and feeding ourselves with a steady diet of things that are good for us so that this goodness can do its work within us. In the Gospel, Jesus continues on the theme of feeding, this time making an explicit move from the importance of feeding bodies to the importance of feeding our souls. Jesus offers us the bread of life for our souls through his own body and blood each week, and our practice of receiving it is central to our practice of imitating the one whose life is offered for us. St. Augustine famously wrote that “if we receive the Eucharist worthily, then we become what we receive” (Easter Sermon, 277). Not only do we receive Jesus in the Eucharist, we become more like Him through our receiving.

So today we all are given the chance to make a new start in our imitation of Christ. We begin by receiving Christ and continue by making those small changes towards a life that proclaims Christ. And eventually, just like our friend George, we just might find that what started out as imitation has become the true witness of our lives. Amen.