In Matthew 23:5 we read ‘‘Everything they do is done for people to see: they make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long”. Jesus was warning about the long noisy prayers of some Pharisees whose heartfelt faith he was questioning.
Several years ago, when our children were quite young, Harry Chicken gave a memorable address to the young people in Framlingham United Free Church based on tassels and phylacteries. He was emphasising the importance of what goes on inside our hearts as Christians, and how that matters more than what comes out of our mouths. I would add, ‘within reason’.
Reading an article in the newspaper recently about the often strained relationship between France and Algeria caused by events long past, I was stopped short by the comment, ‘repentance is vanity’. First I thought that statement to be arrogant, then insensitive, before moving on to thinking that ‘there is a point there’.
One of the less edifying activities of the past months has been the removal of statues from public places including universities because of historic events. It is easy to criticise the activities of the past and indeed, if ones behaviour is sufficiently noisy and woke it is possible to bury the hypocrisies of ones own lifestyle; they exist in all of us to some extent because we are human and we live where we do.
It is always right to attempt to make amends for mistakes made but that is different from repentance. Our sinful acts cause us, first and foremost, to be at variance with God’s ways for us. Our repentance is therefore, first and foremost between God and ourselves; it is about the content of our hearts not the tassels and phylacteries of our noisy pseudo-regrets. True repentance will lead to measured words and deeds.
A prayer
Lord, next time I am tempted to start to climb the moral high ground in the kingdom of ‘wokedom’, help me to pause for long enough to think about my own hypocrisy. Having paused, give me the wisdom to set about seeking to make a difference in a way that is constructive and not critical, positive and not judgemental. We ask this for the sake of Jesus Christ whose humiliation by us came about through hypocritical rejection of the truth.
Amen.