Thought for the Day-All the World's a Stage?

Actor’s Mask, Paul Klee, 1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

A Thought for the Day offered at a lunchtime service of Holy Communion at St Giles-in-the-Fields on Wednesday 27th August 2025 based on the text of Matthew 23.27-32

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

The start of Jaques famous monologue in As You Like It; portraying the whole of human existence as a cycle of role plays, concluding as we shuffle off behind the curtain into the darkness of oblivion.

It is from the Greek word for actor or ‘stage player’ that we get the word hypocrite. Actors in Greek theatre wore masks to identify which character they were playing. By the time the King James Bible was produced, the word had come to mean a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs; and it is the word the translators use for Jesus’s repeated accusation against the scribes and Pharisees in our gospel reading today. A passage which concludes not seven ages – but seven ‘woes’; in which Jesus calls out the religious elite for their hypocrisy. He speaks these words just days before his crucifixion—through which he offers a world-changing alternative to Jaques’s fatalistic assessment of the human life-cycle. The curtain is torn in two, and we are shown the way to the light of eternal life.

Jesus likens the scribes and Pharisees to whitewashed tombs – referring perhaps to a practice in which gravestones were painted before major festivals, to prevent people travelling to Jerusalem from becoming ritually unclean according to Jewish law, by touching the graves accidentally.

Jesus compares this set dressing of the holy city to the way that the scribes and Pharisees approach their faith; outwardly righteous but inwardly corrupt; placing greater weight on the letter than the spirit of the law.

The accusation of hypocrisy has echoed through Christian history—used by the early church to distinguish itself from Judaism, by Protestants in the Reformation to distinguish themselves from Catholics, and by parts of the church today as ammunition in battles over who is more righteous in matters of morality and ethics.

But God sees through the masks of Christians in every age. Jesus’s words challenge us to stop stage-playing and align our inner and outer lives with God’s will.

Image : Actor’s Mask, Paul Klee, 1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Links : A reflection on Psalm 12