The passage: Nothing is covered that will not be revealed, and nothing hidden that will not be known (Matthew x. 26; Luke xii. 2).
God is not a God who hides but one who reveals. All his work with his creatures is revelation: giving them truth and showing himself, so that they may know him, draw nearer, and become more and more his companions. If we are in the dark about something, it is never because he hides it, but because we are not yet able to receive it.
We may say without irreverence that God could not do at once what he takes time to do. His will cannot finally be thwarted, and where it is thwarted for a time, that serves a higher part of it. He gave man the power to thwart him so that man might in the end do his will in a higher way than otherwise possible: God sacrifices his will to man, and lets him do wrong, so that man may become like God, give all to the truth, and choose and love righteousness.
The Lord puts the fact that all things are slowly coming into the light of human knowledge, so far as creatures can know, to three uses. One we leave aside (Mark iv. 22; Luke viii. 16): it presses those who have light to let it shine and help bring everything out. In Luke xii. 2 he turns it against hypocrisy, to show its futility; in Matthew x. 25 he uses it to urge fearlessness about our words and actions being misread.
However the Lord means it to be worked out, he gives us to understand, as a fixed principle of the universe, that whatever the unrighteous want hidden, and whatever pains the righteous to have hidden, will come out into the light.
‘Beware of hypocrisy,’ says the Lord, ‘for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be known.’ What is hypocrisy? Wanting to look better than you are, hiding what you do because you would be ashamed to have it known. The doing is foul; hiding it to seem better is fouler. Whoever does not live in his own consciousness as under the open sky is a hypocrite, and for most of us the question is whether we are growing less of one or more: ashamed of our lack of openness, and fighting the temptation. The Lord has nothing to be ashamed of before God and the universe, and will not rest until he has us in the same freedom. To encourage us he says that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will be filled, as righteous as the spirit of the Father and Son in them can make them desire.
The Lord says also: ‘If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more will they call his household that! So do not fear them, for nothing is covered that will not be revealed.’ For anyone who loves righteousness and his fellow men, being misunderstood is always painful, and unavoidable when he acts on principles beyond those around him: half-hearted Christians, who think themselves lawgivers of righteousness, accuse him of the very things his life aims to destroy. The Lord himself was called a drunkard and a keeper of bad company, and might be so judged today by not a few who bear his name and preach temperance and virtue. He lived on a spiritual height they cannot see from where they stand. He bore their slander unshaken, and comforts his messengers, who must fare as he did. While people count themselves Christians on any ground other than being slaves of Jesus Christ, children of God, free from themselves, they will treat his servants badly. ‘Do not hesitate to speak the truth that is in you,’ he says. ‘Never mind what they call you; proclaim it from the housetops; fear nobody.’
He spoke these words to those he counted on first to spread the news of the kingdom, but they apply to all who obey him. Few who have tried to do their duty escape being annoyed, disappointed, even enraged by the hostility, misunderstanding and misrepresentation they meet, mostly from people they have helped by being neighbours to all, and from those people’s friends. Tales of heartlessness and ingratitude show how low humanity can sink without willed effort after righteousness. Judgments from imagined superiority are hard to bear too: the rich man who squeezes his workmen to the last penny lectures his poor relation on extravagance over some tiny generosity! If someone trying to live more truly merely lives differently from his neighbours, odd motives will be invented for it. The honest soul can take comfort that the truth will one day be known, and no one will believe what dull heads and hearts reported of him. More satisfying still will be the unveiling for a man misunderstood by those who ought to know him better, who, not even grasping the issue, assume he is about to do wrong while he is crying for courage to heed only the Lord. How many accept ‘Be not conformed to this world’ without seeing that what they call Society, and bow to as supreme, is the World itself, and that those who care what people say are conformed to it, taking its shape! The true man owes Society no deference as judge or lawgiver: the law of Jesus Christ frees him from the law of the World. Let him do right and ignore worthless opinion; the less he heeds tongues, the easier it is to love people. He will not carry the brand of ignorant or malicious judgment through eternity; he will find his peers and be judged by them.
But you who look to the light to vindicate you: are you ready for the exposure the general unveiling must bring, and willing to have the truth whatever it is? I do not mean: is your conscience so clear that you fear no exposure to men and angels? God knows it all already. I mean: do you so love the truth and the right that you would welcome, or at least willingly accept, the exposure of what in you is still unknown to yourself, even if it shames and humbles you and so serves the truth? You may have been wrong about the people whose wrongs to you you wait for God’s judgment to right. Would you welcome any discovery that made you more true by showing what in you was false, even if it excused them? If you can face the revelation of hidden things like that, you are of the truth and need not be afraid; whatever comes can only make you more true, humble and pure.
Does the Lord mean that everything anyone has ever done or thought will be laid bare to the universe?
As far as is needed for those who have known him, or have reason to know him, to understand him. From then on, a true man will be transparent to everyone able to read him. He may not be understood by those below him, then any more than now, but everything will work toward revelation, nothing toward concealment or misunderstanding. A man will hold his door open to anyone who wants to walk in, because his house is a temple of the living God, with things worth seeing and nothing to hide. In the true world nothing needs covering, and there will always be more to uncover. Everyone’s light will shine for his neighbour’s good and glory.
‘Will all my weaknesses, evil habits, pettiness, the wrong thoughts I cannot help—will all of it be set out before the universe?’
Yes, if they dominate you so far that they are you. But if you have come out of the darkness and are honestly fighting to walk in the light, you may hope in God your father that what he has cured, is curing and has forgiven will be heard of no more, since it is no longer part of you. If some of your evil must still be seen, it will be seen for what it is: things you are at war with, not things you cherish. God will be fair to you—so fair!—with a father’s fairness: he wants you clean, and will neither spare you any shame you need nor expose you to any you don’t. What we have risen above is dead and forgotten, or if remembered, God is there to comfort us: ‘If any man sin, we have a comforter with the Father.’ We can trust God with our past as with our future: it will not hurt us as long as we do not try to hide things and are ready to bow our heads in honest shame where we should. To be ashamed is a holy and blessed thing. Shame shames only those who want to appear good, not those who want to be. In God’s name let us have nothing to be ashamed of, and meet any shame on its way, for to be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of the truth.
I need not speak of the revelation of God’s ways, which he has always made, and always will, to his prophet and his child. But let me say a word about another kind: the revelation of their own evil to the evil.
The only truly terrible revelation is that of a man to himself. What a horror for a vile man—above all one whose pleasure has been heightened by others’ suffering, whom decent people would shun but who has never seen what he is—when his eyes open and he sees himself as the pure see him, as God sees him! Imagine him waking all at once to the eyes of the universe fixed on him in loathing astonishment, and seeing himself as they see him: what a waking, into the full glare of fact and awareness, of truth and its violation!
To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself!
Or think what it must be for a man who counts himself religious, orthodox and exemplary to see suddenly that he had no religion, only love of self; no love of the right, only love of being in the right. He was simply a hypocrite, loving to appear and not to be. If I understand the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the sharpest reversals will come among the rich. Who has not seen the rich treat the poor with appalling, insolent meanness while counting themselves among the elect? Mammon, the most contemptible of gods, is the most worshipped, in church and out, and for many religious rich people the damning revelation will be how they treated the poor they thought themselves so kind to. ‘He flatters himself in his own eyes until his iniquity is found to be hateful.’ A man may loathe a thing in the abstract for years and find he has been guilty of it all along. Many a man might agree with this who cages a carrion bird in his own chest, never knowing it for what it is because its plumage differs a little from the bird he calls by an ugly name.
The worst off among those who will one day stand in dismay, aware that their very existence is a shame, will be those who knowingly betrayed their fellows, pretending friendship to use their neighbours for their own ends, and especially those who divided friends. Dante put such people in the lowest hell. If God hates one thing, it must be treachery. Do not imagine Judas is the only man of whom the Lord would say, ‘Better were it for that man if he had never been born!’ Did he speak in anger at his apostle’s treachery to him, or in pity and horror at what it is to be such a man? What is more pitiful than to know you yourself are that false one? ‘O God,’ we think, ‘how terrible if it were I!’ It is just as terrible that it should be Judas. And have I not done things with the same germ in them, which brought to its evil perfection would be treachery? Unless I love my neighbour as myself, I may one day betray him! Let us be compassionate and humble, and hope for every man.
A man can sink so slowly that long after he is a devil he may still pass for a good churchman or dissenter, and think himself a good Christian. Sin repeated against even the faintest conscience must bring a dreadful awakening. Some never wake to how wicked they are until a self-righteous crowd is staring at them, one doing similar things itself but not yet found out, sinning in another style and so judging hardest, hoping to escape judgment by condemning. What if the only way to wake the treacherous, money-loving Judas to himself was to let it run to the end, and his kiss betray the Master? He did not hate the Master when he kissed him; but not being a true man, his very love betrayed him.
The good man, aware of his own evil and wanting no refuge but the purifying light, will chiefly rejoice that exposing evil serves the victory of the truth, the kingdom of God and his Christ. In the unmasking of the hypocrite he sees God stepping in, for him and for everyone, between them and the lie.
The only triumph the truth can ever have is its recognition by the heart of the liar. Its victory is in the man who, not content with saying ‘I was blind and now I see,’ cries: ‘Lord God, just and true, let me perish, but you endure! Let me live because you live, because you save me from the death in myself, the untruth I have fed and even called righteousness! Hallowed be your name, for you alone are true, loving, holy, humble and unselfish, seeking never your own but the good of your children! Father, be true, and every man a liar!’
The injured can have no satisfaction of revenge. The severest punishment a wrongdoer can suffer is simply to be made to know what he is, because his nature is from God and the deepest thing in him is divine. Nothing less than the sinner’s seeing the enormity of his injury can satisfy the injured. While he admits no wrong, mocks amends, or rejoices in the wrong he admits, no suffering could satisfy revenge, far less justice. So satisfied justice is bound to come, and satisfied revenge is impossible for ever. The moment the only adequate punishment, a vision of himself, begins to work on the sinner, he has begun to grow righteous, and the brother he wronged has no choice but to take him to his heart, the more tenderly because he is repentant, was lost and is found. Here the divine extremes meet, the extreme of punishment and the embrace of heaven. I venture to think a created soul can know no agony like seeing itself vile by its own choice, and no delight, short of oneness with the Father, like seeing the heaven of forgiveness open, with its shining stair to the natural home where the Father has waited all along for his child’s return.
So, friends, however angry we may be, however justly, no revenge is possible for us in the Father’s universe. I may say to myself, ‘I would love to make that man see what a wretch he is, and what every honest person thinks of him!’ But when the moment comes he will loathe himself ten times more than anyone else could, and my heart will bury his sin, swamped by an ocean of pity from its divine source. Let us try to forgive in advance. Does anyone dare suppose Jesus wants him to hate the traitor through whom he came to the cross? Has he been pleased, through all these ages, with how his nation has been treated, and still is, by those who bear his name? We have not yet sounded the depths of forgiveness required of his disciples!
Our friends will know us then. Will their hearts sink at our real likeness, or will they be glad to find us less to blame than they thought in this or that which troubled them?
Let us remember, though, that not only evil will be unveiled: many a misunderstanding will turn out to hide a face radiant with the loveliness of the truth. Whatever disappointments come, every true heart has one sufficient joy: it stands on the border of the kingdom, about to enter ever fuller possession of the inheritance of the saints in light.