Hypocrisy and the proper motive for all our actions

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

IN a number of instances, Christ lamented over the hypocrisy of some of the leading Jews of his time. At one point, he said: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You lock the Kingdom of heaven before men. You do not enter yourselves, nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter.” (Mt 22,13) And more “Woe to you’s” followed after that.

What in the end Christ was trying to tell us in these instances was that if our motive for all our actions is not love for God which will always involve love for everybody else, we cannot avoid falling into self-indulgence and all other forms of selfishness and egoism which we try to hide. In short, we cannot avoid playing the game of hypocrisy.

We need to realize deeply that all honor, praise and recognition should be given to God alone since he is the source of all good things. If we would just pursue our own idea of what is good, we can only go so far before we end up doing crazy things which we would try to hide or rationalize.

We have to familiarize ourselves with this Latin expression, “Deo omnis gloria” (To God be all glory) because that is how we should articulate our motive for all our actions. We actually are nothing without God. Without God the only thing we can do is evil.

Thus, St. Augustine once said that there is a fundamental choice we have to make in all our actions. It’s always a choice between loving God and loving ourselves in a way that excludes God. We have to make sure that we make the right choice of loving God always.

For that, we have to make some conscious effort to really offer everything we do to God as our way of giving glory to him which, in the end, is what should characterize our relation with God. To be blunt about it, we have been created by God to give him glory, that is, to love him, to follow his will, which is what would make us God’s image and likeness as he wants us to be.

But given our wounded condition due to our sins, we really need to ask for God’s grace and to exert our all-out effort. Perhaps, a prayer we can make in this regard would be the following: “Incline my heart according to your will, O God.”

It’s a passage that is drawn from a psalm (119,36) that expresses a plea for God to guide our heart, our will, affections and desires towards God’s will and away from worldly temptations.

It’s a plea that would certainly help us lead to the ideal unity and consistency of life, one that is lived with God always as it should be. That’s because as God’s creature, we are meant to belong to God. But also, as a rational and spiritual creature, we are not meant to belong to God in a merely physical way. We have to belong to God knowingly and willingly, to the point of sharing his life and very nature.

Thus, when we are not doing things with God and for God, we are contradicting the proper relation we have with God who is our Creator, Father and Redeemer. We would just be living and doing things purely on our own that has no other end but to be in the wrong side.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com