(Back to "Sermons")

"Our Justification"
October 28, 2007: 22nd Sunday after Pentecost, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.UnitedChurchontheGreen.org

Scripture:

Luke 18:9-14

May God take these words and make from them a holy word for us today.

Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, 'God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.' But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his home justified, rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted."

Friends, God is still speaking to the world. May our hearts be open to listen and respond. Amen.

Sermon:

In Luke 18:9-14, Jesus told this parable:

"Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a pietistic prig of a Pharisee and the other a tax collector with a heart of gold. The Pharisee went forward to take a place of honor, and standing there by himself where he was quite sure the rest of the congregation could see him, and he made a great show of himself as he lifted his face and his arms, and his voice and prayed thus: "O God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, sinners all of them, of every kind. And I especially thank you that I am not like that tax collector over there—just look at him!. I am so faithful, I fast twice a week, and when that basket is passed along the pew, I contribute ten percent of my income—before taxes." And with a great flourish of his long, tasseled phylacteries, the Pharisee swept of out the sanctuary and went away home to make himself a ham sandwich when no one was looking.

"But the lowly tax collector, misery etched in every line of his face, stood far off in the corner, in the back. He was so ashamed, he refused to soil the pews where the good people sat, just as he refused to lift his face to heaven. Instead he sat in the shadows and beat his breast, praying over under his breath, "O God, though I am not worthy to ask or even to hope for mercy, sinner that I am, still I pray: out of your great mercy, God, be merciful to me." And as the tax collector prayed, the Spirit of the Lord descended on his heart. At once he was overcome with both the weight of his sin and wonder at God's extravagant love, even for him. He vowed then and there to mend his ways. He would repay the victims of his fraud and intimidation twice what he had stolen from them. He would endow a scholarship at the local yeshiva for at-risk youth. He would pet dogs and kiss babies. He left the temple with a song on his lips, and as he made his way home, he greeted passersby with such a broad smile that anyone who knew him before swore the tax-collector's heart grew three sizes that day."

Jesus told this parable. Only he didn't. Not in Luke, not anywhere. Not this way. But still this is how we hear it. The "hypocritical Pharisee" and the "repentant tax collector" have become such stock characters for us that the moment they appear on stage we put on the autopilot and coast through the rest of the parable, because we think we already know where it's going. "A Pharisee <boo, hiss> and a tax collector <our hero> went up to pray, yadda yadda yadda. Yeah, Jesus, we get it." Only we don't. And if we ever want to grow out of our stunted fourth-grade Sunday School acquaintance with scripture and into a mature, rich and fruitful relationship with the Bible and the God to whom these pages point, we need to open our ears and listen again.

So, once more unto the breach, dear friends. Jesus told this parable:

Two men went up to the temple. One was a Pharisee, a member of a sect whose dogged faithfulness was largely responsible for the survival of the Jewish faith in the face of Roman occupation and Greek cultural colonization. It was the adherence of middle class men like him to the demands of Torah, God's holy word, in every aspect of life, not just in the temple at Jerusalem, that would allow synagogue worship to flourish in diaspora communities around the world after that temple was finally destroyed by Rome at the end of the First Century. This Pharisee was a righteous man, even a hero of the faith.

Two men went up to the temple. The other was a tax collector, which meant he was a scoundrel several times over. Under the tax faming system used in those days, he bought the contract to deliver to the authorities a certain amount of money in taxes, but we was free to collect more—much more, as much as he was extract from his district—with all that excess going straight into his coffers. And since the authorities for whom he did this distasteful work were the hated Roman occupation forces, that made him not only an extortionist, but ritually unclean and a traitor as well, who would sell the livelihood of his people to their oppressors for a few pieces of silver.

Jesus tells us that both men came before God in prayer. The Pharisee offered prayers of thanksgiving to God for the faith that equipped him to resist evil and choose the good, and for the opportunity to serve God in his daily life and to share generously with the wider community, even out of his rather modest income. There is nothing in the text itself to suggest there was anything other than the best, most faithful intentions behind the Pharisee's prayers.

At the same time, there is nothing here to suggest a change of heart on the tax collector's part., either. His choice of a seat "far off" from the main body of the faithful likely has more to do with politics and personal safety than a penitent's sense of propriety. He knows exactly who he is and what he does, and he knows the rest of the congregation does, too. Sure, he prayed for mercy, and Jesus tells us he received it, but there's no evidence it ever took root in him. As far as we know, the tax collector entered the temple a scoundrel and left it the same way.

So, having muddied the waters considerably, as any good parable should, what do we think Jesus meant by all this? Where is the crux of the story, where common sense and shocking Gospel collide? It's right there, on the tip of the Pharisee's finger as the righteous man points at the unrighteous and says, "Thank God I am not like that sinner there!" With that act, the Pharisee cuts off the tax collector from the community of the children of God. In that moment, he's like a surgeon wielding a scalpel to cut out a cancer—a practical approach, even a wise one, perhaps, in the world of medicine, lest the sickness spread and the entire body wither and die.

But the in realm of the faith we share with the Pharisee, the prerogative of determining who's in and who's out and who's beyond the pale belongs to God alone. In fact, it's an essential description of God's Own Self, revealed to Moses, according to tradition. When Moses asked to see the glory of God undiluted, the Lord told him, "I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name, Yahweh, that is, I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy" (Exodus 33:19). So with that one simple gesture, that one accusing finger outstretched—no matter how justified, no matter how richly deserved—the Pharisee puts himself in the place of God. And that, we may remember from Sunday school, is a no-no.

So, in a typically diabolical parabolical twist, Jesus tells us that it was the tax collector who went away from the temple justified that day. Which makes it pretty clear that that word—justified—didn't mean for Jesus what it means for us today. And, indeed, that's true. According to Merriam-Webster, "justify" in modern usage means, "to prove or show to be just, right, reasonable" or, more specifically, "to show to have had a sufficient legal reason" for one's actions. Clearly it would be a very different Jesus who defended the tax collector's greed and predatory practices and his unfaithfulness to the covenant of God as just, right, or reasonable, no matter how legal. This seeming anomaly draws our attention in tight, standing out starkly against what we believe we know about Jesus and about our faith. Why does Jesus call the tax collector justified?

Because no matter how deeply mired he may be in his sin, no matter how slow or even unwilling he may be to change, at least the tax collector knows his place—again, not as we usually think about such things, as though he should be content simply to bow and scrape and beg for mercy at God's feet, sinner as he was. No, what the tax collector seems to understand that the Pharisee doesn't is that his life is always in God's hands and God's hands alone. "O God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" he prays. The gall of some people, right? But you see, by those very words, in that moment, the tax collector shows that he believes it is God alone who justifies God's children, who restores them—all of them—to right relationship with God and one another. He believes that his place in God's affections as a sinner is no better and no worse than that of the most faithful Pharisee. God loves all God's children not in proportion to whatever righteous deeds they may have managed to accrue to their accounts or such sins as they may have committed, but solely because it is God's good pleasure so to do.

Well, now, that's just crazy talk, Jesus! It flies in the face of everything we think we know about how the world operates, even how it should operate. If God's grace covers everybody, the sinner as well as the saint, regardless, what's to keep us from running amok completely? After all, that sort of olly-olly-in-free grace would seem to make a pretty poor deterrent to sin. Better some fire and brimstone to scare the hell out of evil-doers, perhaps, or at least some clear-cut, if-this-then-that kind of commandments to keep folks in line. But no, Jesus didn't play that way. In parable after parable—the Prodigal Son, the Laborers in the Vineyard, the Dishonest Manager, the Lost Sheep, the Wedding Banquet—Jesus works to undermine any interpretation that would make our relationship with God dependent on anything within us—our piety or lack thereof, our politics, our place in society, our gender, even basic sense of fair play—and not on God's radical, even revolutionary love for all persons.

You can see now why Jesus was crucified. It wasn't for telling saccharine sweet fables about gentle farmers reunited with their wayward sons or forgetful little old ladies sweeping the floor for lost coins. Jesus' stories were intended to sting, to get under our skin and make us itchy and antsy and uncomfortable because, dammit, he's talking about us. You've heard me use the old Southern phrase about someone who's "left off preaching and gone to meddlin'." Well, Jesus was a meddler from way back, in the best tradition of the Hebrew prophets—who also had a hard time finding much of an audience until after they were safely dead.. Jesus' stories were dangerous, Jesus was dangerous, because by what he taught and what he did and how he did it, he threatened the very foundations of the perfectly rational, perfectly legal society of his day—where scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees were good and tax collectors and prostitutes and lepers and women and children and sinners were bad, period, end of sentence.

And, friends, as much as we may draw comfort and hope from his grace-full ministry, if Jesus doesn't still scare the heck out of those unredeemed parts of ourselves, those places where we are still sinners, individually and all together, if Jesus isn't still dangerous to us today, we're just not reading him right. Think about that the next time you're feeling all righteous and Pharisaical and full of yourself and go to point your finger at someone to say, "Thank God, at least I'm not like..."—like whom? Like that Republican? that Evangelical? that general? that wild-eyed liberal? that racist? that homophobe? that terrorist? Uh-uh, not in God's house, you don't, not if we want to live up to our calling as followers in the way of Christ. Unbelievably, perhaps it's that sinful tax collector who should be our model for faith in this. Maybe, like him, we should keep our fingers to ourselves and let God be God. We do not justify ourselves by what we do or say or believe. God justifies us—all of us.

It must have driven Jesus' first disciples crazy, too, listening to him say such things and then watching him put it into practice by sharing table fellowship not only with tax collectors and prostitutes and other sinners just like them, but also with the very Pharisees and scribes who opposed his work. But, that's just too bad, because the grace of God to which Jesus bore witness, is frustratingly free, and the mercy he embodied maddeningly broad, free enough and broad enough to turn everything we thought we understood about faith upside down. I mean, can you imagine a heaven where Mother Teresa and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Gandhi are set down to dinner along with Pope Pius XII and Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush, when his time comes? Because God can. Sort of make your skin crawl, doesn't it? It's just not right. It's not fair, not just. And yet... and yet.

The words of the prophet Isaiah which so shaped Jesus' own ministry are still helpful for us to hear today as we face the temptation take a stand, like that Pharisee so long ago, and try to amputate unpleasant members from the broad body of God's people.:

The Apostle Paul put it more directly, and more satisfyingly, really, in some ways, when he wrote to the young church at Rome. They were experiencing oppression at the hands of their neighbors and the political powers of the day, but Paul urged them. "Never avenge yourselves," the extreme version of finger-pointing, "but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.'" In other words, let God do the sorting out. "No," he went on, 'if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.' Do not be overcome by evil," and, by extension, do not become the evil you abhor, either, "but overcome evil with good."

Jesus, who forgave those who persecuted him, even from the cross where they nailed him, has shown us the way. Let us follow in his footsteps toward God's broad horizon and the mysterious future that waits for us there. If we leave the driving up to God, no doubt we will be surprised to find out that where we end up is not exactly where we imagined we were going. And in the same way, we may be shocked to see just who arrives there when all is said and done—not least of all, us. And thanks be to God for both those blessings.



(Back to "Sermons")