Every human relationship asks us to entrust ourselves into the hands of somebody we can never fully know.

The Drama of Faith:

 Grow into the Part

by Mark P. Shea

Liturgy and the sacraments ask us to trust that God will bring to completion what he has promised through Christ

One vital likeness between drama and faith is—faith. The theatre asks us for a willing suspension of disbelief—in other words, an act of faith. That’s not exceptional. That’s normal: all human relationships do that. Every human relationship asks us to entrust ourselves into the hands of somebody we can never fully know. You trust that your doctor is not planning to knock you out and harvest your kidneys, that your car mechanic has not installed a bomb in your ignition, that your barista has not poisoned your cappuccino. Without faith, a civilization disintegrates because a civilization runs and is lubricated by bonds of trust.

Drama asks us to entrust ourselves into the hands of the playwright in the faith that the story he tells us will, variously, reveal the truth, show us what it means to be human, teach us what love is, help us face the darkness, give us hope, steel us to have pity even on villains and show us what happens if we refuse these things. Liturgy does the same. It asks us to trust that as the priest dresses up as Christ (and as we imitate him by outrageously playing the role of none other than the Divine Son in praying the “Our Father”), the divine Director will cause something miraculous to happen.

The Mask of Virtue

We know there were theatres in Judea in Jesus’ day, such as the one built by Herod the Great. Theatres were part of Greek imperial culture imposed on Jews by Alexander the Great and his successors. As with every culture clash, ancient occupied Judea had its collaborators, its mushy middle, and its resistance. The heirs of the resistance, who hated the imposition of Greco-Roman culture on the peoples of Judea, were called “separated ones”—in Aramaic, “Pharisees.” They sought to keep the ancestral ways uncontaminated by pollution from the Greek and, later, Roman rulers.

But here’s the irony: though it is notable that we have no evidence Jesus ever went to a theatre, we do know that Jesus uses a term borrowed from Greek theatre to arraign the scribes and Pharisees. That term is hupocritos, “stage actor.” That’s because, in his day, actors wore exaggerated masks to represent the character they played. It was an apt image to describe people who pretended to be one thing while really being another.

The Pharisees acted this way because they saw no way for holiness to triumph over evil and sin. They had learned the right lesson but drawn the wrong conclusion from the Law of Moses. Under the old Law, ritual defilement was intended as a kind of sign or shadow. It was meant to show us in our pride that we could not, by our own strength and power, keep ourselves clean from sin. The power of sin is greater than our power of sanctity under the old Law. So the Pharisees understand sanctity in only one way: separation (as their name implied). They reasoned that if the power of sin is greater than the power of sanctity, then the solution was to separate themselves from all that was unclean and even all that had touched what was unclean. So they separated themselves from the Gentiles, from touching the dead and dying, from lepers, and from menstruating women. They were right to see in these ritual prohibitions an image or sign of lifelessness. But they were wrong to conclude that by separating themselves they could avoid the sin which ritual uncleanness signifies.

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