My first thought on reading the parable for this morning was, man, is the Pharisee ever an annoying character. I know it’s a parable, and the point is to have the characters be a bit hyperbolic, but it seems like you’d want at least a little realism. Seriously, is there a more egotistical prayer then, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people.” Come on, who prays that way!
The Pharisee is so set up as the villain in the parable, the sort of guy you love to hate, that the lesson of this parable seems almost too easy. Jesus says, don’t be a braggadocios jerk. Ok, great, I think I can handle that.
But I went to a conference this week on reading the Bible with scriptural imagination. So I started to wonder, what had the Pharisee been feeling that led him to this prayer. And, like we talked about last week, a funny thing happens when you try to understand where someone is coming from; you start to have compassion on them. In my experience, people who feel the need to express how great they are out loud often don’t feel so great about themselves inside. This sort of excessive pride is often cover for a deeper insecurity. We see it in the youngest children. The schoolyard bully is usually not a heartless sociopath, she or he is usually a kid who feels powerless and out of control, and so seeks to find their value in power over others. As adults, we get more sophisticated in our search for power, but the motivation isn’t all that different then kids on a playground. I wondered if the Pharisee was seeking confirmation of his own value in his ruthless need to rank his rule-following over and above others.
And once I started thinking about it like this, I started to wonder if maybe the Pharisee was lonely. First off, because, seriously, who would want to be friends with this guy? But even more, is there room in this guy’s worldview for friends? There’s a really interesting spacing thing going on in this parable, that as folk not familiar with the layout of the Temple we miss, so here’s a brief architectural lesson for you. The temple was built like one of those Russian nesting dolls, a series of ever-tightening spaces. How far into the Temple one could go was dependent on how ritually clean they were, how good they did at following the law. Around the outer edge was the Court of the Gentiles. This was the place for gentile and non-law abiding Jews. I am guessing this is where the tax collector in our story would be. Tax collectors were despised because they were seen as colluding with the empire, and thus betrayers of their people. Then in from that was the Court of the Women, or the outer court. Remember, women were thought of as basically property, so they were not considered pure enough to be too close to God. Next was the Hall of the Israelites, where all good, law-abiding Israeli men could worship. Then the Hall of the Priests. The Pharisee in our story probably walked confidently through all the other levels to get here. The only thing past the Hall of the Priests was the most inner sanctum, the Holiest of Holies, where only the High Priest could go, and even he only once a year, on the most holy day, to dwell in the presence of the Most High God. So if the Pharisee was as good as he said he was, and there’s no reason to believe he wasn’t, there was quite likely no one between him and God, no one allowed even close to where he was standing. His devoutness had essentially created a barrier around him that forbade anyone else from coming near him.
At first we might wonder, if it’s just him and God, what’s so wrong with that? Don’t we want to be as close as we can be to God, isn’t that what we were created for? Yes, of course, we were created to be close to God, but we were also created to be close to each other. Think about the story of Genesis. God created Adam, and it was just Adam and God, and it was good. But God realized Adam was lonely, so God created Eve to be a companion to Adam. Love God and love your neighbor, Jesus told the rich young ruler, because God created us to be in relationship with each other.
And not just that, but throughout Luke’s Gospel, Jesus again and again went past barriers and beyond boundaries to seek out those whom society had cast as outsiders. In just a few short chapters, when Jesus is crucified, the curtain of the most holy part of the temple, the curtain which even this Pharisee has to stand outside of will be torn in two from top to bottom, as a reminder that Jesus cannot be contained within the box in which we place him. The story of Luke’s Gospel is that whenever we try to draw a line in the sand between who is in and who is out, Jesus is always on the other side of that line. The Pharisee had become so fixated on manufacturing his own salvation that he had actually walled himself off from the gift of God’s grace.
But, even though the tax collector went home justified, I don’t think the answer is to berate ourselves either. I think this parable, like so many of the other parables, calls us see ourselves in both characters, and to aim for somewhere in the middle. I can tell it’s close to Reformation Sunday, because I’m really into Martin Luther these days. One of my favorite stories about Luther comes from when he was just starting out as a monk. Luther his whole life had been plagued with doubts and fears about his own worth. And when he was first starting out as a monk, he was obsessed with confession. He used to go to confession almost every day for up to six hours at a time. He would literally wear out the confessor. In fact, one day his exhausted confessor told him, “Look here, if you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive—parricide, blasphemy, adultery—instead of all these peccadilloes.”
Luther was so concerned about God’s judgment that he was too busy beating himself up over not being worthy of it to recognize God’s grace. But once he realized the nature of grace. Once he realized that forgiveness was a gift from God, and there was nothing he could do to earn it, suddenly confession became a joy for him, because it let him hear again the promise of God’s forgiveness. Confession wasn’t some duty God was holding over him so that he could feel sufficiently bad about himself in order for God to forgive him. No, confession was the opportunity to take an honest accounting of the places in his life where he might have fallen short. He wouldn’t have to hole himself off against others like the Pharisee, wouldn’t have to hide behind this wall of self-assuredness. Instead he could relax into the truth of himself, the good and the bad, he could give the bad over to God, and he could hear again the reminder that God loved all of him. When the parable says the tax collector went home justified, that’s really what it means. To be justified is to be declared righteous by God. It means that God saw all of the tax collector, the parts of him that were good and the parts that were not so good, and God said to him, it’s ok, I love all the parts of you. That last line in the parable, those who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted, that honest accounting is what humility really is. Humility isn’t putting oneself down. In fact, when we are critical of things we know to be strengths that in itself is a form of exaltation, because it invites others to build us up. No, true humility is being honest with ourselves, our weaknesses and our strengths, so that we can build on our strengths and turn our weaknesses over to God, trusting in the way through God’s forgiveness and mercy, power is made perfect in weakness.
This is really why we start every service with confession and forgiveness. It’s not because God needs you to tell all the things you did bad every week and clean you up before you can get to close to God. No, we do confession and forgiveness every Sunday so that you can let go of anything that might be holding you back. So that you can drop the walls that might have built up around you this week through the gentle promise that God loves you for who you are, just the way you are. And when you’ve experienced love like that, love that listens to your litany of sins and mistakes, places you hurt and things you’re ashamed of, and just says, I forgive you. When that happens in our lives, we find ourselves transformed by that love. We find the rough places smoothed over, we find ourselves being more than we thought we were capable of.
So, dear friends in Christ, may you hear in the words of confession and forgiveness, the promise that God loves you just the way you are. And may that love allow you to let down any barriers that you might have constructed and live in the relaxing promise of God’s mercy. Amen.
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