Proper 30, Year C

We’ve all been told we shouldn’t be judgemental, and we believe it.  We’ve all come across people who are arrogant, and we know how obnoxious that behaviour is, and how much we dislike it.  So when we come across today’s parable, it is very easy to identify the arrogant people we know with the Pharisee in the parable, and to think that those people shouldn’t be so judgemental.  We can easily slip into being thankful that we’re not like those arrogant judgemental people.  The irony is that in being thankful we’re not like them, we are doing exactly what the Pharisee is doing: being arrogant and judgemental.  

Today, Jesus is alerting us to the fact that sin is sneaky that way: that it slips in to our attitudes so quickly that we don’t see it, and we’re least likely of all to see it when we’re convinced we’re being good.  

I think it’s a mistake to treat the Pharisee in today’s parable as a cartoonish villain.  Even though we know we shouldn’t be judgemental, the judgemental thoughts just pop up in our minds before know it, and they pop up every day.  All of us are like that Pharisee.  And he probably thinks he’s doing the right thing.  He’s supposed to be righteous, and he’s doing all the right things, and plenty of them.  He’s practicing the spiritual discipline of fasting, he’s tithing all his income.  He thinks God will be pleased with him.  And he knows that the thieves, the adulterers, the tax collectors, are sinners who are not doing the right things.  So he thanks God that he’s not like the people who sin.  

But Jesus, in this parable, turns that whole mentality upside down.  We are used to a system in which we do good behaviours in order to get rewarded.  We earn money, status, security by our hard work and good behaviour.  We work to please those who have the power to reward or punish us.  This is the way the world works.  So we take for granted that this is the way God works too.  We want to do the good behaviour and hard work to please God and earn the rewards we deserve.  We expect God will punish those who don’t do these good behaviours and give them what they deserve.

Jesus gives us the surprising news that this whole system is not really how God works.  How God works is not to give us what we deserve; how God works is to give us mercy.  All of us are sinners and all of us need mercy.  God makes this even more visible to us in Jesus.  The good news of the gospel is that God even sends us his son Jesus to take on the punishment we deserve for our sins, and God offers us the mercy we don’t deserve instead.  

When we look closely at the first verse of today’s gospel passage, we see that Jesus calls our attention to what’s going on here right before he tells the parable.  It says Jesus told this parable to some who trusted IN THEMSELVES that THEY were righteous, and regarded others with contempt.  The problem is the focus on ourselves and our righteousness, rather than the focus on God and God’s mercy.  We can see this in how often the Pharisee says the word  “I “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.”  

One of the reasons we keep slipping back into this mentality of trying to earn the stuff we want from God is that it’s so common in the way the world operates.  The other reason we keep slipping back into that mentality is that it offers us the illusion of control.  It gives us the sense that if we work hard and do the good behaviours, we can control the outcome, we can control God, and we can make sure we get the rewards we want.  

As one commentator puts it, the Pharisee’s “ ‘prayer’ told God that he was waiting for well-deserved honors.  If that seems an incredible attitude, we should recall that many people think God owes them something, as is shown by their question when sorrow comes, ‘why has this happened to me?’ If they can claim a respectability that has not risked jail, they think they are entitled to favors; and if the favors do not come, they write letters to the celestial newspapers protesting obvious failures on the part of the celestial government.  But the [tax collector] saw God as burning holiness, yet of such love that even a tax collector could be pardoned.” [Interpreters Bible, c 1952,  p. 310].

This attitude of trying to earn rewards from God also warps our relationship with one another.  Instead of loving our neighbour, it pits us against our neighbours in an endless competition in which we have to constantly beat them.  When we look closely at the Pharisee’s words, we see that the first thing he says is to define himself as “not like other people” and to point fingers at other people’s sins.  We can keep in mind that if we hear preachers who talk about how much better their group of Christians is than everybody else, and who regard others with contempt, we are dealing with something that Jesus has told us in today’s gospel passage is the opposite of the good news of the gospel.  And if we hear ourselves slipping into that attitude, we can remember Jesus said it is the opposite of the good news of the gospel.

Pretty much everybody would have thought of the Pharisee as righteous, just as he does himself.  Look at all these righteous deeds he’s always doing.  Pretty much everybody would have thought of the tax collector as unrighteous.  Look at all of these unrighteous deeds he’s always doing.  We might think it’s obvious who’s going to heaven and who’s going to hell.  But in today’s parable, Jesus cautions us, as he so often does, that we are very often wrong about who is righteous and who isn’t.  Jesus cautions us, as he so often does, that we are very often wrong about who God justifies and who God doesn’t.  

Even though we don’t like to admit it, even though we don’t want to hear it, the reality is that we’re all a bunch of sinners.  It’s simply part of being human.  The more we are in denial about our own sin, the more we condemn our neighbours because we inevitably project our own sin onto them, and try to prove how different we are from them, and convince ourselves that we’re righteous in doing it.  “God, I thank you that I am not like other people.”  But the reality is that we are like other people, we’re like all the other sinners in humanity.

The person who sees this is the tax collector.  He can’t even look up to heaven, but is beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  Jesus told us at the beginning that he tells this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous.  Here, Jesus shows us the alternative to trusting in yourself that you are righteous.  The alternative is trusting God that God is merciful.  If we take a step back, we realize that if we’re deciding which horse to bet on, putting all our money on our own righteousness is backing the wrong horse.  We’re much better off putting all our money on God and God’s mercy.  

Trusting God’s mercy means we don’t have to do the constant one-upsmanship.  We don’t have to do the constant arrogance and judgemental attitudes.  We don’t have to regard others with contempt.  We don’t have to cling desperately to our denial about our own sin and project our condemnation onto other people.  We don’t have to put constant pressure on ourselves as if nothing mattered except our own righteousness.  We don’t have to keep trying to control God.

We can simply acknowledge that we are sinners, just like the rest of humanity.  When we recognize that we’re not earning anything, we can receive gifts from God.  We can receive the enormous gift of God’s mercy.  We can receive the enormous gift of God’s love.  We can receive the enormous gift of Jesus, who dies for us not because we are righteous, but because God is righteous and merciful and loving.  

We will slip back into arrogance and judgemental attitudes because we’re all sinners.  But when that happens, we can simply recognize it for the delusional thinking it is, and confess it to God, and ask for God’s mercy.  

Jesus tells us that the person who trusts in himself that he is righteous is not the one who goes home justified.  The word “justified” literally means “made right”.  It’s not our righteousness that makes us right.  It’s God who makes us right.  It’s God’s mercy that makes us right.  We thought we had to earn it.  We don’t.  It is a free gift from God.  We thought we had to compete with everybody else to get it.  We don’t.  It is a free gift from God.  

When we come to God in prayer, we can pray the simple, humble prayer of the tax collector, recognizing that each of us is a sinner.  We can be open to receiving the gifts we don’t control, don’t earn, don’t compete for, which are given to us simply because God loves us infinitely, tenderly, mercifully.  We can go back home justified by the love and mercy of God.