Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 24, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I told you last Sunday that when I read the lectionary texts for that week there wasn’t a thing in them that I wanted to preach on. I ended up preaching on the one that I didn’t want to preach on most. So imagine my delight when last Monday I read the lectionary texts for this week and found as the Gospel reading Luke’s parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. It’s one of my favorite Gospel passages. I love it. I was very excited about having a chance to preach on it.

Now, that fact should make you very nervous. You see, there’s a corollary to the rule I told you about last week. I told you then that if you find yourself really resisting preaching on a particular text, that is perhaps the text you should preach on. The corollary to that rule is that if you find yourself being really excited about a particular text, really anxious to lay it on the people, to let them have the Gospel Truth--your Gospel truth that is--then that is probably the text on which you should not preach. When you want to run away from a text, there’s probably something in that text that you need to pay attention to. When you want to run to and embrace a text, it’s almost certain that there’s a danger in your enthusiasm. You’re almost certainly doing something wrong with that text. This week it quickly became apparent to me that that was precisely what I was doing with the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. I think, however, that there’s a valuable lesson in that thing I was doing wrong with this parable, so I decided to preach on it despite my enthusiasm for it, just as last week I decided to preach on the parable of the widow and the unjust judge despite my intense dislike of it.

The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector itself is simple enough. Luke begins by telling us that Jesus told the parable "to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt." Luke doesn’t tell us who the "some" are, and even the context of the parable within Luke’s Gospel doesn’t much help us figure out who they are. I suspect that Luke left the identity of the audience for this parable vague on purpose. It’s up to us to figure it out.

The parable presents two men praying in the Temple in Jerusalem. Thus, they were both following the practices and traditions of their faith. One was a Pharisee, a representative of the dominant sect in Judaism at the time. The Pharisees stressed meticulous compliance with the Jewish law, particularly with the purity or holiness code of Leviticus and other parts of the Torah. In Jesus’ world, Pharisees were respected, even honored as those who best kept the faith of Israel.

The other man was a tax collector. If Pharisees were the most respected men of the time, tax collectors had to be the most despised and reviled. They collaborated with the occupation of the land and the oppression of the people by the hated Gentile, pagan Romans. Their job was, obviously, to collect taxes. They made their living by exacting more from the people than the Romans required, keeping the difference. They thus had an incentive to force as much as possible out of the people; and the people, understandably, hated them for it.

Jesus tells us first about the Pharisee. He says the Pharisee was standing "by himself." The image suggests his pride. He separates himself physically from the other people in the Temple, apparently considering himself too good to mingle with hoi polloi, the common people. His prayer confirms his spiritual arrogance: "God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector." The Pharisee, supposedly praying, boasts of his spiritual superiority, which consists of obeying or even exceeding various demands of the law: "I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income," presumably to the Temple. The Pharisee is the very epitome of religious righteousness and respectability, and he knows it and is proud of it.

Jesus then gives us in the tax collector a sharply different picture. The tax collector stands "far off." The Pharisee was standing alone too, but the effect there was to highlight his arrogance, his self-proclaimed superiority over the other worshippers. The tax collector, in contrast, was standing far off because he was ashamed, as we see when the story continues. He could not even lift his eyes up to heaven. He was beating his breast, a sign of remorse and repentance. His prayer was simple and direct: "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" There is no attempt at self-justification. There is no making excuses. The man is a sinner, he knows he’s a sinner, and he simply begs for God’s forgiveness.

Jesus then does what he always does: He rejects the socially acceptable character in the parable and approves the one the society of his day would have rejected. Here, he rejects the respectable Pharisee and embraces the hated tax collector: "I tell you this man [that is the tax collector] went down to his home justified rather than the other [the righteous Pharisee]." In his final words of the parable Jesus, as always, turns the ways of the world on their head, completely reversing the world’s priorities and expectations: "All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted." The truly righteous man in the parable is the miserable, repentant tax collector, not the upright, respected Pharisee.

Now, I mentioned that Luke doesn’t tell us who the people are to whom Jesus told this parable. That’s true as far as specific people go, but it is clear that the parable is aimed at people like the Pharisee in the story, the one who trusted in himself that he was righteous and who regarded others with contempt. Since like all good parables this one is about us and not just about people two thousand years ago, the parable is inviting us to ask the question: Who’s the Pharisee? And therein lies the source of my unbridled, and dangerous, enthusiasm for this parable. You see, I love to make other people the Pharisee.

And it’s so easy. I mean, it’s so easy for me, for example, to make most of our country’s political leaders of whatever party the Pharisee. They are all so self-righteous. Heaven forbid they should ever admit that they made a mistake. Heaven forbid that they should ever concede that America has ever made a mistake, that we are anything but wholly righteous in the world. We quickly thank God that we are not like all those other people--Muslim people, African people, Asian people, even French people. Heaven forbid that we should ever think that we, the great American Empire, could actually learn anything from someone else. Yes, it’s very easy for me to make our political leaders the Pharisee.

It’s very easy for me to make certain Christians the Pharisee too. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and so many other Fundamentalist and conservative Evangelical Christians are so self-righteous, so smug, so judgmental towards virtually everyone else, that I can’t avoid making them the Pharisee.

And there’s a problem with that. The problem is not, however, that it is wrong to make all these figures the Pharisee. They are the Pharisee, and Jesus’ parable is calling down God’s judgment on their self-righteousness, their smugness, their spiritual arrogance. Jesus judged the Pharisee in the parable, and the parable is not a call to us to refrain from judging self-righteousness and spiritual arrogance when we see it. That judgment is appropriate and faithful. No, the problem is not that we recognize and name the Pharisee when we see him.

The problem is not where we see the Pharisee but where we don’t see him. The problem is who we don’t make the Pharisee in the story. You see, there is one person that it is very hard for me to make the Pharisee in the story, and that person is me. That person is me and people who generally share my political and theological views. In my mind, I’m not the Pharisee. Those who hold progressive political and theological positions that I agree with aren’t the Pharisee.

But Jesus’ parable makes me stop and say: Oh, really? After all, that was the Pharisee’s sin. Not that he saw the evil in thieves, rogues, adulterers, tax collectors, and the like. There was evil there, and Jesus isn’t saying that the Pharisee should not see and name it. No, the Pharisee’s sin wasn’t that he saw evil in others but that he failed and refused to see any in himself. He mistook his spiritual arrogance, his certainty that he was right and righteous, for a virtue. Jesus calls him on it and names that attitude as sin not virtue.

And if we’re honest, don’t we have to admit that we liberals, that is I and those of you who also self-identify as liberals, are every bit as spiritually arrogant as the most chauvinistic politician, every bit as self-righteous as the noisiest Fundamentalist Christian? That’s a very hard truth for me to admit, yet if I am honest, admit it I must. We liberals know we’re right and that the right is wrong. We give thanks to God that we are not like them. We’ve got it right, and that makes us better than them. But then, that attitude makes us, it makes me, the Pharisee, doesn’t it?

So, what are we to do? Well, I don’t think the parable means that we must stop speaking our truth. Nowhere does Jesus call on us not to speak the truth. Rather, I think we must speak our truth; but we must always remember that ultimately only God really has the truth. We must always acknowledge that our truth is only partial, that it is our best understanding of God’s truth but that we cannot finally know that it is God’s truth. We must acknowledge that we and our understanding of the truth are finite, contingent, and fallible; and we must allow that knowledge to lead us into a spirit of humility. We must never become so certain of our righteousness that we stop looking for sin and error in ourselves and seek and see them only in others.

In this parable Jesus praises not thieves, scoundrels, adulterers, and tax collectors but the attitude of self-examination, honesty, and repentance that we see in the tax collector. We can judge sin and error when we see them, but we must always remember to turn our judgmental eye on ourselves as well and to speak God’s truth as we know it not in self-righteousness and arrogance but in love. We too must acknowledge our sin, repent, and ask for God’s mercy. Only then may be go down to our home justified, like the repentant tax collector. Amen.