Jesus could not stomach religious people who self-righteously judged others. He called them hypocrites. The word used in the Gospels is the Greek word hypokrites, which is transliterated directly into the English language as hypocrite. The word refers to “an actor” or “a stage player” in Greek theatre. The Greek word is a compound noun made up of two smaller Greek words, which literally translate as “an interpreter from underneath.”
That is a reference to actors in ancient Greek theater who wore large masks to portray the character they were playing. They interpreted the story from underneath their masks. The Latin equivalent is persona, which means literally to “sound through” also referring to an actor speaking through a mask used on the Roman stage.
Jesus’ condemnation of hypocrisy is much more fundamental to his message then just exposing religious people for being two-faced. Hypocrisy is what we might call the original sin, which is why Jesus stressed it so much. The original sin of the human race is not being our real selves. Covering ourselves up and hiding from God, which is exactly what Adam and Eve did in the Genesis story after eating of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – the Tree of Duality.
All of us are actors. We are actors unaware that we are actors, which makes the deception doubly hard to uncover. We play a role and hide our true identity from others and ourselves. We call it the ego or a personality, which comes from that Latin word persona, meaning actor. In spiritual lingo what I am describing is usually described as the difference between our two selves – our false self, often called the ego, or in my example today “the actor,” and our True Self, which is what we really are underneath all the masks and roles we play.
The spiritual life is about recognizing that we are not the roles we play. It is to turn our attention 180 degrees and lift the mask to glimpse our True Selves. When we do we are troubled at the emptiness and yet amazed at the fullness. As Jesus says in the opening verse of the Gospel of Thomas, “Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."
It is indeed troubling to see that we are not who we thought we were. To see that what we thought we were is nothing more than a mask, a role that we have written for ourselves, or have allowed the world to write for us and which we play unwittingly. What we really are astonishes us. We see that beneath all the masks that all of us play we are nothing – literally no thing. We are the one Player playing all the roles. The World Soul. The one we call God who rules over all.
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