Hey, did you all have to do that class in high school or college or maybe grad school where you learn research methods and it was really dry and it was really tough to get through? And it's usually a class that is meant to complement other stuff, and they teach you a few different, I don't know what you call it, systems formats, formats for how to do notation and citation and your research work depending on what kind of discipline you were into. I know in my discipline there were a couple of different formats that people used. And what happened when I actually got into a class setting is the professor would usually be like, Look, I want you to basically use this format, but I understand that that's always evolving and that people have different preferences and that maybe you learned a different system. Here's what I want from you just be consistent. Whatever it looks like is fine. But if you put a comma after the name of a book or you put the name of a book or an essay in italics every time, just do it every time because then I can tell what's going on. I kind of know what to expect from you as we're working on this stuff. I was like, oh, that's great. Yeah, just be consistent in my formatting. Okay, and I've tried to do that since. I don't know, I've probably been knocked for it a few times and probably deservedly so. But here's the thing: there was a time not so long ago where consistency, I think, was very, very highly valued, not just in academic paperwork, but I mean in general, that ethic that my professors were communicating is something that we all went for. And I feel like there was kind of this shared cultural agreement where we said, look, you can be into stuff that's a little different or weird or have opinions that I'm not really into. But I can respect a person who is consistent within their set of opinions. And I think everybody kind of strived to be that. The last thing that you would want to be called was a hypocrite. But you know what's weird? I don't think we care about that as much anymore. I feel like there's this weird shift happening where we're like, yeah, I'm not really worried about character or consistency or sleeping at night. I'm worried about power and winning. And I think that's a really unfortunate casualty of the way we've decided to interact with each other and order our society in the last, I don't know, say 20 years or so. I feel like it honestly kind of got weird in that disputed election of 2000, maybe the Clinton impeachment. Somewhere in there, it seemed like we kind of went toward all in on the power thing with each other, where the bottom line of truth is win. And let me tell you, wow, the inconsistency is shocking. Do I use examples here? I might use examples here. No, I'm gonna go with not use examples here. Now I'm now I'm just doing it. Let's make everybody mad. Let's make this as weird as it can possibly be. There are people on the right who I think used to really care about consistency, and their big thing was like, well, you know, we're on the right. So uh small government, limited taxation, all of that stuff. Except that then when they have presidents in power and they're in charge or anything gets the slightest bit weird, maximum government immediately. It's okay if we do it. Well, that's hypocritical. I don't know, it's kind of off-putting and gross. And of course, not everybody on the right is like that. Blah, blah, blah, disclaimer, disclaimer. Everybody's different. Individuals think for themselves, I like everybody, I'm inconsistent too. Okay, blah, blah, blah. The left, oh my goodness, do you remember the whole believe all women thing like two years ago? Like, if there's any accusation, you got to believe that. It's a big deal. There's some merit to that. Like it's some really ugly stuff that can happen. And it's not hard for me to imagine what it would be like to feel like there's no justice for that kind of suffering or difficulty. But oh my goodness, left, come on. When it's your own people, you're like, well, don't believe that woman. Gross! And I know there are all kinds of exceptions, and everybody's different. I don't know, everybody's an individual, and I have inconsistencies myself, and I totally get it. Look, if that hit a little close to home and that was a little bit weird about one of your two tribes, I'm sorry. I'm not saying that you're awful or bad. What I'm saying is that's the kind of stuff that just collectively would have grossed us out, and we would have been like, I just, I just don't want to be that. Even if it hurts my team and I don't get power for this, I just don't want to be inconsistent. And I feel like that is shifting, and I feel like that makes it all the more relevant that Jesus is introducing this word, and Matthew is clearly choosing to bring this word, this one word, to the forefront as we get into Matthew chapter six. And the word, I mentioned it earlier, is most certainly not a compliment, and that word is hypocrite. The way Jesus' teaching is presented, the way the text is presented, there's no ambiguity about whether or not hypocrite might be good. None. It's just bad. It's really, really bad. No description of what hypocrite means needs to be offered by Jesus. The word alone was so gross and deplorable to that audience that nobody would want to be it. And it's weird because we still don't like to be called it, even though increasingly it's becoming societally completely acceptable. So when he introduces this term hypocrite, it's obviously the thing you don't want to be. But conversely, there's a thing that you really do want to be. And well, I don't know if there's one neat smoking gun term that he uses here, but we've used words like kingdom citizen. We might use a word like consistent. Uh, we might use a term like not hypocrite and flawed but honest about it. I don't know. You can just pick anything. You can picture what the opposite of hypocrite is. Interesting thing about the word hypocrite in the text. Now, I suspect that Jesus was teaching at this point in Aramaic, but I certainly know that the text of Matthew that got circulated, that at least caught on and that people would have been reading this in was written in Greek. And that word hypocrite or Hippocrates in Greek, and we don't normally do the Greek thing, but every now and then it really helps us get where we're driving at, would have been known to have meant an actor, and not necessarily in the most flattering of ways, kind of more like Janus, the two-faced god, the uh Sean Bain character who unsurprisingly died in Goldeneye was Janus. Two faces, he was a liar, he was a fraud, he said one thing, but he was actually a double agent. Well, that's the deal here as well. And just as a quick side note, I know it can be kind of confusing and even sometimes a little bit aloof when we do the Greek thing when we're talking about the Bible. It can be like there are two classes. There are the people who can bumble through this and then frame it up in such a way that it looks like we really knew what we were talking about without Googling heavily. And then there's this other class of people who just can't even quite tell what the Greek letters mean. And I guess you just don't get to know how the Bible works. This is dumb. You can figure out how the Greek thing works in a long afternoon if you really wanted to and get to the place where you could at least start to chip away at it. So there's nothing special about this. Anybody can do it. If you haven't got around to it yet, it's absolutely fine. If you ever get around to it, it's absolutely fine. But literally every single one of you could go and goof around with the Greek and do this stuff. Nothing special about it at all. There, that disclaimer is out there. But one of the things that I always wondered for a long time when people bring up the Greek stuff is who says that's what the word means? People will be like, well, in the original Greek, this word means, okay, I have a question though. Time for the hand raising sound. And then a little clappy sound. Question, I have a question. Got a question. Yes, yes, Whitman. Yeah, my question is, how does anybody know what those words actually mean? And do you just make that up? I'm so glad you asked, young man. The answer is there's a whole bunch of Greek literature that we can draw on to see how these words are used outside of the Bible and kind of triangulate to get to the meaning. I think we've talked about this before, but I like to clarify whenever it comes up. So in this case, and I absolutely do not know this off the top of my head, and I absolutely did have to Google to go and look this up. In this case, the word Hippocrates gets used in the writings of Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, some guy I've never heard of, and Herodian. I don't know everything about all of these authors. I've hung around with Plato quite a bit, but what I do know is that there's a decent little gap in time here, which means that this word had some staying power. So it wasn't like sweet or cherry or radical, where that word evolved quickly and then evolved into something else very quickly in the course of one lifetime. This is a word that meant the same thing for a very long time and had deep roots in the psyche of anybody who was speaking Greek. And so when Jesus says this, what he's saying is you are religious actors. You pretend to think certain things. You pretend, because it's to your benefit, to believe a certain thing. You pretend to be motivated by a certain thing, but you're not. And that word hypocrite is gonna keep coming up. And again, it's bad. So here's the thing this gets back to some of what we were talking about yesterday, right? The the level of the motives. So if I do a good thing for a bad reason, God or no, Bible or no, if I do a good thing for a bad reason, is that bad? If I do a bad thing, but for a good reason, is that good? And I think that what we're seeing in the text is frankly a little more complex than that. At the most basic level, Jesus is holding out a contrast between people who do religious drills and do religious spiritual discipline things in front of people because they want to impress people, because that's their actual God. And whether or not they believe in the real God is irrelevant. They worship something and they're throwing their lives at it. The gross part is they're saying it's all in the service of this deity, but it's not. And whether you're religious or not, we all know that is gross, particularly when people do it in the name of a lofty philosophical or political ideal, or when people do it in the name of a god or a deity or a religion. And then, of course, the contrasting point is the beauty that occurs when people humbly reject credit to do the right thing, even though they could get credit, because what that says is you might actually think there's a god because you're not getting any other credit for that thing you just did. Nobody's ever gonna find out. So strategically, if you're trying to impress people, that was stupid. But if you actually think there's a deity on the other side of this stuff, and that that deity is unlimited and sees all the way down to the level of your soul and sees what you do in secret, well then that looks like the ideal thing. So I hope this didn't come off as me taking a whole day to talk about hypocrisy as though I'm the only person who's not, and all of you are that uh wow, if it sounded like that, I'd like them all again, because that's not how things are. And I hope I've pointed out my own dumb inconsistencies enough throughout our conversations together that you get that I don't think we're any different. We all have points of hypocrisy, and we're all gonna have that because we're incomplete people and we're part of a broken system. But Jesus is holding out again the ideal of doing this for the right reasons, or at least aspiring to it. He's holding out the ideal of God wants your heart, like your external cold stuff that you do. Eh, you don't really care if it's in the name of God, if it has nothing to do with God. But the idea that the fulfillment, the way Jesus is the fulfillment of the invisible law or the practical expressions of the law, is, well, in us at least, that God wants our heart. And part of what's liberating about that is that there is a degree of honesty that happens when it's like, all right, I'm all in on the kingdom thing. I might not know everything about how this works, but we're gonna give it a go. I'm gonna try to resist my temptation to be hypocritical in the interest of weaponizing vaguely god-sounding stuff fakely for the benefit of impressing people. All of that cuts deep for me, and I think it was supposed to. So maybe we're doing it right. I don't know. You do with it what you need to. I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and we will do more of this soon.