This is an excerpt from my new book
Messages from Mayberry:
Spiritual Life Lessons from
My Favorite Episodes of
The Andy Griffith Show
You can click on the image on the right to learn more.
Opie’s Charity:
Messages from Mayberry:
Spiritual Life Lessons from
My Favorite Episodes of
The Andy Griffith Show
You can click on the image on the right to learn more.
Opie’s Charity:
The Problem of Pride
This
episode tells us the story of a community event that makes some people in
Mayberry face a very profound issue. The
event is The Underprivileged Children’s Charity Drive. The issue this event brings to the surface is
pride.
The
character who first embodies this spirit of pride is Annabelle Silby. Annabelle stops by the courthouse to talk to
Andy about the charity drive and the part he will play in it. Their conversation drifts into the subject of
Annabelle’s late husband, Tom. As we
will soon learn, pride has led Annabelle to do some pretty peculiar things
where her husband is concerned. The same
can happen to us. Pride leads us to
pretend instead of being real. Annabelle
isn’t really a grieving widow, as we will soon learn. Pride leads us to deny what so obviously
exists, like Annabelle’s husband Tom’s drinking problem. Pride leads us to live
for what others think. Annabelle put on
an elaborate funeral to bury an empty casket, because she couldn’t stand the
thought of people knowing Tom had run away.
Pride will use people, even the people we claim to love, to keep up good
appearances. Annabelle buried Tom, and
any effort to find him and be reconciled to him, because of what people might
think.
As the story develops a bit further, we learn even more
bad things pride can do. We meet Tom
Silby, Annabelle’s supposedly deceased husband.
He’s not dead, as Annabelle has claimed.
Tom felt so pressured and controlled by Annabelle’s pride that, on a
business trip to Charlottesville, he took off and was gone for two years. Now he returns to Mayberry, missing his wife,
and wondering how she’s doing. What Tom
doesn’t know is that his Annabelle, unable to face the public with the truth that
her husband had run away, told everyone that Tom had been killed, run over by a
street car in Charlottesville. Andy is
flabbergasted to see Tom because he hasn’t laid eyes on him, or at least his
casket, since his funeral. As Andy tries
to figure out how someone can be “back” after
being “gone,” he gets his best laugh
of all at the thought that Annabelle had to pretend that Tom was dead in order
to avoid the truth that her obsession with pride had driven her husband away.
How many Tom Silby’s have been driven away by someone
else’s pride, sacrificed on the altar of what others might think, crushed by the
pressure to be perfect?
Annabelle’s grand deception, Tom’s “last party,” as he
calls it, gives Andy a very unusual opportunity: to give a man a detailed
review of his own funeral. As we hear
Tom Silby react to what was good and not so good about his funeral, we have the
chance to do something very important for ourselves. We need to step back from our lives and ask:
What would my
funeral be like?
What would my family say?
What would my friends remember?
What am I living for?
Am I living for what I believe will
really matter when the chaff is blown away and the essence of my life is
revealed?
There is great value in, as Andy says, “paying respects to ourselves.”
Now, let’s walk out of the cemetery with Andy and Tom and
get back to the Underprivileged Children's Fund and the problem of pride. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives us a
very strong warning about giving in order to be seen and applauded by others,
(Matthew 6:1-4)"Be careful not to do your 'acts of
righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no
reward from your Father in heaven. "So when you give to the needy, do not
announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the
streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their
reward in full. But when you give to the
needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that
your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in
secret, will reward you.
If
you and I do good things in order to be seen, in order to be applauded, in
order to prop up our pride, in order to calm our fears of what others think,
then that is all that our giving will accomplish. God marks it “paid in full.” We receive no reward from Him and do little
good for others.
Andy
has no trouble laughing at Annabelle and seeing that her only problem is too
much pride and worrying about what other people think. What he cannot see is how this same
overbearing concern for public praise is damaging his relationship to
Opie.
The
moment Andy hears that the school children are giving to the Underprivileged
Children’s Fund, he asks Annabelle if Opie is among the top givers. There’s
nothing wrong with wanting Opie to share with others. But what is wrong is why Andy wants Opie to give. He wants to be sure he has bragging
rights to one of the most generous children in town.
Do
you notice that, in many ways, the more Andy loves the praise of others, the
less he loves Opie?
He jumps to conclusions about what Opie’s doing with his
money. He assumes that because he
doesn’t want to give publicly to this fund, Opie is spending his money
selfishly.
Andy doesn’t listen to Opie. The name “Charlotte” comes up several times
in the episode, but Andy never explores who this little girl is, what her life
is like or why others are making fun of her.
How ironic that, in his zeal for the Underprivileged Children's Fund, Andy
totally overlooks one of the children in need, a child and a need Opie saw so
clearly.
He even loses faith in Opie. He decides that he is just selfish and
indulgent, a “playboy,” because he wants to follow his plan to buy something
for Charlotte.
So Opie ends up in his room, banished from the supper
table and far from his father’s heart.
Such is the bitter fruit of the spirit of pride.
Aunt Bee sees what has happened and names the “spirit of Annabelle” at work in
Andy. She calls him to make a big
discovery. What he sees so well in
others, he can’t see in himself—he’s showing more love for the praise of others
than he’s showing his own son. When Andy
sees the error of his ways, he calls Opie to the table for supper. When Opie asks, “Do you like me again?” Andy begins to see how wrong he has
been.
Then comes the moment of revelation. Andy finally hears the truth about his son’s
financial priorities. Opie is saving his
money, not to take Charlotte to the movies or buy her a toy, but to buy her a
winter coat. Hers is worn out and the
other children make fun of her. What
Andy has just learned leads to a great exchange between father and son:
“Opie, you never told me what the
money was for.”
“You never asked.”
Andy didn’t ask because he wasn’t listening to Opie. He was straining his ears to hear the
applause of the town. What mattered to
Andy was the public’s perception of him and his family. Opie didn’t care about being a celebrity in
the Underprivileged Children's Fund. He
just wanted to meet the need of the one he loved, quietly buying a coat for
Charlotte.
Jesus says that there will come a day when all of us will
stand before Him as the judge of our lives.
To some he will say, “I needed
clothes and you gave them to me.” To
others he will say, “I needed clothes and
you didn’t help me.” Neither group
will realize that they ever bought a coat for Jesus. But He will say to them, as He would say to
all of us who struggle to keep the flies of pride out of the ointment of our
giving,
(Matthew 25:40, The Message) I’m
telling you the solemn truth: Whenever you did one of these things to someone
overlooked or ignored, that was me—you did it to me.
The
epilogue of this episode gives us one more powerful truth to ponder. As Andy and Tom sit on the bench in front of
the court house and whittle, Andy points out that Tom Silby talks as though he
really is buried in the town cemetery, just as Annabelle had pretended for two
years. Tom says that, in one way, he
is. The old Tom, who felt pressured by
his wife and dealt with his pain through drinking, is dead and buried. The one who’s walking around is a new
man. Paul writes to the Romans,
(Romans
6:4) We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order
that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the
Father,
we too may live a new life.
Neither
Andy nor Annabelle could overcome a spirit of pride on their own. Neither can we. We need a new beginning. We need a new way of living. We need, through the power of God’s grace, which
we know through faith in Jesus, to bury our old nature and rise to live a new
kind of life; a life that gives a coat to a little girl with no need of public
praise, a life that lives, not for the applause of people, but only for the
applause of heaven.
