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CHILDREN'S EDUCATION |
SERMONS The
Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost By David Christian Who would you rather be? Which of the two characters in the parable we just read would you rather be: the Pharisee or the tax collector? Or, let me ask you a related question. Which of them would you rather have as a friend; or dating your daughter or your sister? It is tempting for me to say "the tax collector." He is the good guy in this parable; the one who goes home justified. So Jesus must like him better. There must be something good about him that is not apparent in the story. Maybe he has a heart of gold. Or, now that he has confessed his sinfulness, maybe he is repenting of his wickedness and will give back all the money he has stolen. Surely this must be the reason he is justified rather than the Pharisee. And we all know about Pharisees. Jesus calls them hypocrites. He calls them a brood of vipers. They are obviously an unsavory group. So this guy must be some smarmy, unctuous fellow who always walks around with an air of being better than everybody else. At least, that's the way I want it to be. Because, you see, I know how the parable ends. I know who Jesus will proclaim to be the good guy, and who Jesus will denounce as the bad guy. I want some reason to like the one Jesus speaks well of, and to dislike the one Jesus does not care for. I want some reason that I can be thankful that I am not like that Pharisee. But that is not what the parable says. This parable contains no hint of irony in its description of either the Pharisee or the tax collector. We must assume that they are as Jesus described them. The Pharisee really did try to live according to the Law, to live a just and upright life. He fasted twice a week as the Law required. He gave ten per cent of his income to the Temple. He tried to be honest. He did not steal; he did not even cheat on his taxes. And he really was grateful to God that he was able to do all these things. He would make a wonderful vestry member. Tax collectors, on the other hand, were the lowest of the low. They made their livelihood by working for the enemy, for the Roman authorities. He knew where to find his fellow Jews, he knew how much they made. He could track them down and make them cough over the taxes that the Romans had levied. After all, he had the power of the Roman Army to back him up. Any extra money that he could squeeze out of his kinspeople was his to keep. For parties. For gambling. For some extra affection on the side. If the funds ran low he could just go back and squeeze a little more. It is tempting to believe that, as a result of his being justified by God, this tax collector went home and mended his ways. That he renounced his sins, made restitution to those he had wronged, and generally cleaned up his life. But that would just make him another Pharisee. And it would be reading things into this parable that are not there. Jesus tells us nothing about what happened to the tax collector after he left the Temple, but there is no reason not to believe that he kept on doing what he had been doing: lying, cheating, and stealing. So to answer the question that I started out with, who would I rather be associated with? I have to say the Pharisee. While the tax collector's parties might be interesting, I would spend every minute with one hand on my wallet. And I would know that my money was being used to pay for it. The Pharisee, at least, I could trust. He would do what he promised. He would be fair. And we could have fascinating discussions about God and sin and what's wrong with the world. The truth is that we want people to approve of us; and we want God to approve of us. We want to act in such a way that God, and those around us, will love us. Robert Capon writes, "We all long to establish our identity by seeing ourselves as approved in other people's eyes. We spend our days preening ourselves before the mirror of their opinion so we will not have to think about the nightmare of appearing before them naked and uncombed, And we hate this parable because it says plainly that it is the nightmare that is the truth of our condition. We fear the publican's acceptance because we know precisely what it means. It means that we will never be free until we are dead to the whole business of justifying ourselves." Most of us feel, at some level, that we are not worthy of being loved. We feel that that if people knew us as we truly are, they would want nothing to do with us. So we build facades--we build masks--to hide our true selves and to present a self that we hope will be accepted and loved. Then we lug all our masks and props and facades and barriers with us to the temple, hoping that God will see something there that God will approve of and love. The frightening, and ultimately liberating, truth of this parable is that God sees right through those masks. God knows that, at heart, we are tax collectors; and God loves us anyway. God loves us as we truly are. God loves us enough to die for us. God offers that love and acceptance to us freely. All that there is for us to do is to reach out and grasp it. But we cannot grasp it if our hands are full of masks and disguises. God calls us to let them go, to let them go and reach out and receive his love into empty hands.
Proper
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