Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 24, 2010

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.

So today we have the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple, a tale with two characters. The first is a Pharisee praying to God, giving thanks that he is not like other people and boasting of his own piety, which, he is sure, is pleasing to God and justifies him in God’s sight. The other is a tax collector who can’t even look up to heaven but simply admits that he is a sinner and asks God for mercy. One of things that I always think is important to say about this parable is that we need to be very careful about identifying too quickly with the tax collector, the one of whom Jesus approves in the story. The story invites us to consider the ways in which we make ourselves superior to others and the ways in which we seek to justify ourselves before God through acts of piety, charity, and right belief. That’s important stuff, and I’ve preached on it before. It is not, however, what I want to talk about this morning.

What I want to talk about is actually something quite different, and to get at it lets take a closer look at what the parable actually says and what it doesn’t say—always a good practice when approaching Bible stories. The Gospel of Luke begins the story by saying that it is a parable told to “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” It’s a parable told to such folk, but of course it is also a parable about such folk. It is about people who consider themselves “righteous.” That means that they are convinced that they are in right relationship with God, or, to put it another way, that they are justified before God. The Pharisee in the parable is one such person. He feels superior to people who are in his eyes sinners, which he of course is not. He sees himself as righteous because of his acts of piety, his acts of spiritual discipline: “I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” (Not that I want to dismiss the idea of giving a tenth of your income, you understand.) The Pharisees of Jesus’ time believed that one made oneself right with God by one’s own acts, by one’s acts of obeying the Law of Moses and of performing proper worship in the temple. That’s certainly what this Pharisee in Luke’s parable believed.

The story contrasts with this self-righteous Pharisee a tax collector. Tax collectors were probably the most despised people in Jesus’ world. They were the worst sinners because they made themselves impure by working for the hated Roman occupiers. They collected taxes for the Romans, that is, for the enemy; and they made their own money by wringing even more from the people than the Romans required. Our tax collector is a Jew, so he knows what other Jews think of him; and he knows that according to the religious authorities of his time he was a sinner, even if he committed no sin other than being a tax collector for the Romans. We don’t know why this fellow is a tax collector. Perhaps that was the only thing open to him from which he could support himself and his family, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is just that he is a tax collector.

He knows he’s a sinner, and that self-knowledge is reflected in how he is praying. Luke’s Jesus says that he could not even look up to heaven, an indication of how guilty he feels. He’s beating his breast in a gesture of self-loathing and lament. And his prayer is the prayer of one who knows he’s a sinner and knows that there is nothing he can do to get himself right with God. He manages to force out the words “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” The shocking conclusion of the parable is that Jesus says that this one, this sinner who does nothing right and everything wrong—as the “good people” of his time thought—is the one who left the temple “justified,” the one, that is, who left the temple in right relationship with God.

Now, Luke’s Jesus gives us one interpretation of this parable. He says that it means that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” OK. That’s one meaning in the parable. I suspect however that some of us Protestant Christians see something else in this parable, or at least I do. The parable rejects the notion that we can get ourselves right with God through the good works we do and the bad things we do not do. That’s what the Pharisee of the story thought. When the parable says that the tax collector was the one justified it affirms the idea that our salvation, our being made right with God, comes only as a free gift of God’s grace. It does not depend on anything we do or refrain from doing. The tax collector didn’t deserve grace, and he knew it. God gave it to him anyway. This parable repeats the familiar Protestant teaching that we are saved by grace through faith and not by doing the works of the law. Saint Paul and Martin Luther would approve.

So the parable tells us that grace comes before we do anything to earn it, before we even try to do anything to earn it except perhaps to pray to God so that we know that the grace is there. It always was. It always is. True enough; but this parable, it seems to me, raises as many questions as it answers. It says grace comes before works, but notice what is missing from the parable, what the parable does not say.. There is no indication that the tax collector repented in any way before he made his prayer. Maybe he felt bad about the life he had chosen or was forced into by circumstances, but repentance isn’t about feeling bad. In the Bible repentance is about having a change of heart. It is about changing one’s ways, and there is no indication in this parable that the tax collector did that either before his prayer or after it. We’re told nothing about what the tax collector did after he left the temple other than go home. We are told nothing about what came next. For all we know the tax collector went home exactly as he had been—a tax collector collaborating with the hated Gentile occupier.

I hear that silence about what happens next as a pregnant silence. It is heavy with questions. Did the tax collector repent? If he did repent, did he do it so that he would receive grace, or because he had received grace? If he didn’t repent, was he still justified before God, or did he lose his justification because he did not repent, because he did not change his sinful ways? The parable is totally silent on these questions, and I think that it is silent on these questions on purpose. In the open-ended way that the parable ends I feel invited into the story to consider what comes next. To consider those questions. To try to work them out for myself, and because I’m the preacher to work them out in front of you and to invite you into your own consideration of what comes next. Here’s what comes next for me.

The tax collector did not have to repent to receive God’s grace. Precisely because it is grace and not a reward God’s grace is free and utterly unconditional for all people. We don’t have to earn it, which is a very good thing because we can’t possibly earn it. In that conviction, though I trust in not much else, I am a true Calvinist Christian in the good old New England Puritan Congregationalist tradition. And for me, because the tax collector didn’t do and didn’t have to do anything first in order to be granted God’s grace, he doesn’t have to do anything afterwards to remain in God’s grace. God’s grace never depends on us, on what we do, what we refrain from doing, what we believe or don’t believe. We are justified before God only because that is how God has decided to treat us. That’s why the tax collector was justified. That’s why we are justified.

The tax collector didn’t have to do anything to remain in God’s grace, and neither to we; but that doesn’t mean that our receiving God’s grace has no effect on us or that it makes no demands on us. When we truly feel ourselves touched by God’s grace our hearts are stirred, our souls come to life, and we feel drawn to the source of our forgiveness, to the source of the grace in which we stand. Saint Paul put it this way: “How can we who died to sin go on living in it?” When we know that, as we might put it, our sin is dead to God because God has chosen to ignore it we feel ourselves called and drawn to a new life, to a new way of living, to a life that is as free from sin as we can make it. Christians so often say “Repent and be saved!” I once read someone—I of course don’t remember who—put it “I have been saved, now I can repent.” If we truly feel God’s grace in our lives it’s more like “I have been saved, now I must repent.” I must repent not because God will take away my grace if I don’t. I must repent because when I truly live in the knowledge of God’s grace nothing else is possible for me. I have known unconditional love, and I feel myself compelled to respond to that unconditional love as its grantor would wish. Compelled not by some outside force, not by an angry, judgmental God, but by the inner dynamic of grace itself. God’s grace calls out of us human grace, calls out of us gracious lives that reflect God’s grace in the world. We don’t repent to receive grace, we repent precisely because we have already received grace.

I don’t know if the tax collector of Luke’s parable did that or not. The story doesn’t say, and it is idle to speculate about a story that gives no answers to our questions. I do know that this story—precisely because it gives no answers—invites me, and you, into questions about grace, questions that are among the central questions of our faith. What came next? I don’t know. The story doesn’t say. I do know, because I have felt it myself, what usually comes next in the authentic dynamics of grace. Repentance comes next. A new life comes next. A new way of being comes next. Not to earn grace but because of grace. Amen.