P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

FACE PAINT FOREVER

I don’t want to get into a big radio brouhaha – especially here in March – about the rightness or wrongness of Halloween. Every October 31st, the kids are out there, and you either go with the flow and hand out some candy, or shut out the lights and make like the Sugar Pop Scrooge.

But here’s my question: when you open the door, and there’s a little pint-sized Dracula standing there, or a three-foot apparition wearing a fright wig – these used to be Lon Cheney; now they’re DICK Cheney – are you frightened? Does your heart skip a beat and your palms get clammy? And of course the answer’s no; we realize the kids are just pretending. They’re not actually monsters . . . most of the time.

I mention masks and wigs and costumes for a reason, because just as children love to put on these nocturnal accouterments and pretend to be what they are not, the same is true in the kingdom of Christian grace. Doesn’t God – in letting the holiness of Jesus count on our behalf – do much the same thing? Isn’t He pretending we are good when we’re not?

There’s a very colorful parable told by Jesus in the book of Matthew, chapter 22. And the way the story goes, it’s nothing but “let’s pretend” and a huge game of Charades from start to finish. It’s entitled “The Wedding Banquet,” and early on, the King offered to host a huge feast for His Son, the Bridegroom. You can figure out those two players easily enough, I’m sure. But all the people on the good guest list – the “A List,” we would say – spurned the invitation. “Aaah, I’m too busy.” “I have to work late that night.” “I can’t come during The Bachelor.” Things like that. So in Part Two of the story, the King says, “All right, go get anybody you can. Comb the homeless shelters. Put up posters in the bus depot. Go down to Harrah’s and bring in the gamblers and the slot machine addicts. Everybody.” So all at once, there are all sorts of people enjoying a wedding banquet they really shouldn’t have been invited to. This strange King is pretending they’re royalty!

In his book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis has a chapter he actually entitles “Let’s Pretend.” And reminds us of the classic Beauty and the Beast story, where a girl who kisses the beast, wishing it were a handsome man, finds that – Hey! What do you know? – he actually turns INTO a man! Or how about the “mask” story – not the Jim Carrey kind – where an unsightly man who wears a handsome mask his entire life slowly but imperceptibly has a face that grows into the outward beauty? The facade becomes reality.

Now, what’s this got to do with grace? Simply this. When you or I decide to become a Christian, when we fall down on our knees and pray a prayer of repentance – maybe the Lord’s Prayer, Lewis suggests – what is the first thing we say? “Our Father.” But of course, God is not REALLY our Father. Is He?

“YOU are a bundle of self-centered fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit,” Lewis writes, and he’s looking in his own mirror as he does so. “All doomed to death.”

And now we say “Our Father.” What we’re really doing is placing ourselves in the place of His Son. We’re kind of sitting in Jesus’ own chair at the banquet table. Lewis puts it this way: Dressing up as Christ. Which would be horrible blasphemy, or, in Lewis’ words, “a piece of outrageous cheek.” The only reason it’s all right is because God tells us to do it!

And friend, this is grace. You stagger to the door of God’s kingdom, and because He says to, respond in amazement: “All right. Uh . . . Dad. This is Your . . . uh . . . Son. I guess. Wow. Nice chandeliers.” And just like those guests at the banquet, with their boozy breath and their poker chips still in their pocket, with call girls who still have the runs in their tacky nylons, God graciously comes along down the line and says to each one: “My son! My daughter! What a blessing to have you here in our family! Welcome! Thanks for honoring My Son by your presence.”

And friend, this is grace. God pretends we are His children. We pretend it too. But now the Halloween-in-March question is this: does the fiction become real? Is grace more than just a eternal cosmic charade?

This is where it gets interesting – and very encouraging. Because you and I want and need to be Christians our whole lives, not just on Day One when we stand at the gate. How does this “pretending” continue? How far does it go?

Childhood actually gives us an ongoing answer. Don’t little boys dress up as soldiers . . . and learn just a bit about real warfare? And develop some fighting muscles as they do? Kids will play “store” or “house,” hopefully using play money, and begin to get the idea of legitimate finance. The pretending is good preparation for the reality. If you’ve ever lived (or survived) in a house where a small child is just learning to play the violin, you may have to pretend in an Oscar-worthy manner to let on like it is beautiful music. But the pretending and the sawing away slowly turns INTO good music as your little Henry musically morphs into a Heifetz.

Now, how about for us big people who are brand new Christians, still with the costume paint on our faces? As Lewis points out:

“The moment you realize ‘Here I am, dressing up as Christ,’ it is extremely likely that you will see some way in which at that very moment the pretense could be made less of a pretense and more of a reality. You will find several things going on in your mind which would not be going on there if you were REALLY a son of God. Well, stop them. Or you may realize that, instead of saying your prayers, you ought to be downstairs writing a letter, or helping your wife to wash up. Well, go and do it.”

Does that ring a tiny bell somewhere? If we are really the sons and daughters of God, that will certainly impact a hundred, a thousand, a million big and small things in our lives. Won’t it? Which would be cause for despair if we had to rip off the masks of grace and instantly succeed in the million things in our own power. But God doesn’t ask us to do that. We don’t qualify by getting rid of the masks, but in gratitude we do want to begin living up to them.

And here’s the next point. On a daily basis, just as grace happens as we first come to Him, it also is what helps us daily in our growing up into TRUE sons and daughters. Jesus helps us here as well. In fact, without His daily assistance, we couldn’t even start! Any efforts on our own would be doomed legalism, fraught with pride. And of course, pride is always worse than the thing it replaces.

Here’s a bit more from the Mere Christianity essay:
“You see what is happening. The Christ Himself, the Son of God who is man (just like you) and God (just like His Father) is actually AT YOUR SIDE and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretense into a reality. . . . There are lots of things which your conscience might not call definitely wrong” – there is such a thing as a badly wired conscience, isn’t there? – “but which you will see at once you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to be like Christ.”

And you know, the rest of Jesus’ Matthew 22 parable here in the elegant ballroom of the Ritz Carlton goes into this part of the story as well. Because we see a man there who doesn’t have a tuxedo. He gets in trouble for not wearing the black-tie dress code of the evening. And those of us reading say: “Wait a minute! These folks just came from Skid Row! They were bused here from the bowery district, from the bars and Indian gaming reservations. Why would any of THEM have evening gowns and tuxes?” And it appears in this story that the King Himself had provided the nice clothes. Knowing these “sons” and “daughters” were pretending, were all fakes, essentially, He had His servants kindly deliver sequined gowns and handsome penguin suits to all of these down-and-outers.

Now, what does this mean? First of all, the provided gown is the righteousness of Jesus. Remember, we are still sinful and smelly and selfish. We don’t have any banquet dresses or perfume of our own. But the free wedding garment ALSO represents the ongoing cooperation with Jesus, where He daily helps us with this business of “pretending,” of growing up.

And it appears that it was only here that the one man made his mistake. The wedding garments were free, so he certainly could have had one. The righteousness of Jesus, poured out on our behalf at Calvary, is a glorious and handsome complimentary gift. But this one guest either must have had the idea, “My own righteousness is sufficient to qualify me for this feast,” or perhaps he thought, “I’m not interested in having this friendly Groom come along day by day and help me to learn to play my spiritual violin any better. I can master this thing myself, thanks anyway.”

No matter where in the spectrum, where in the story, you and I might find ourselves, it seems clear we’d better stay right close to Jesus’ generous make-up table.