Keeping Up Appearances

Homily for Wednesday of the 11th Week in Ordinary Time

In the 1990s there was a TV show from Britain called “Keeping Up Appearances.” The series is about a lady called Hyacinth Bucket, whose whole purpose in life seems to be to impress everyone else how posh she is. She is always out to impress those people from the upper echelons of society, and shuns those who she thinks are beneath her. Her surname is Bucket – but she pronounces it “Bouquet.” Her neighbors, who Hyacinth is always trying to impress, live in constant fear of being invited to one of Hyacinth’s candlelight suppers. Hyacinth Bucket – I should say, Bouquet - lives in delusion. She lives her life constantly keeping up appearances. Trying to look good to everyone else, the reality is often far different.

Today in our passage of Scripture, Jesus has a go at those who do a similar thing in their spiritual lives. People whose real righteousness is not that great, but try to keep up spiritual appearances by doing spiritual looking things so that other people will think they are pretty good. And in our passage Jesus looks at three aspects of spirituality, which are good things in and of themselves. They are: giving to the needy, prayer, and fasting. And each time Jesus has much the same thing to say about them, which is summed up in Mt. 6.1:

Matthew 6:1 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.”

In chapter five of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus told his disciples: “I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” The Scribes and the Pharisees were the spiritual Hyacinth Buckets of the day. They wanted everyone else to know how righteous they were. They were only concerned with how they looked to others, so they concentrated on the externals, not the internals.

Still writing about the generosity of the Macedonians, St. Paul sums it up very nicely: “God loves a cheerful giver.” That simply means that we exercise charity toward others without making a big deal of it.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator