Coming Down

Text: Luke 18:9-14

This parable is not for everyone. Jesus did not tell this parable for all to hear. He told the parable to some, it says. Some who trusted in themselves and regarded others with contempt. Perhaps a small group. Perhaps not.

This story is about two sinners. Two men who sin. And two who are favored by God. Two men who are blessed. The same two men. A Pharisee and a tax collector.

The Pharisee is blessed by being good. The Pharisees were a bunch of liberal, pretty inclusive, religiously observant faithful people. They had the blessings of living a life a faith, the confidence that comes from knowing that you are known by God. The joy of the discipline of a faithful life and the strength that living a life founded on faith can be. The Pharisee is thankful, generous, nearly always mindful of God and God’s ethics. He seems in this story to be content and happy. What we hope for in our own lives of faith.

Yet the Pharisee is a sinner. He personifies the problem in the story. He is the one, we soon figure out, who embodies the two sins that are the point of this parable.

The first sin is that he trusts in himself to be righteous. Which means that he believes his many blessings are a result of his own effort. He is good because of the person he is, the work he has done, his generosity, his careful living. The Pharisee is like us when we think that gifts of body, mind, or character—being smart, or healthy, or kindly—are something that we have been responsible for on our own. God favors the Pharisee, he thinks, because of the way he acts. His blessings in life are proof of that. And in his arrogance he sees—his second sin—he concludes that those who are not blessed are condemned by God. And so rightly—by his own judgment—he despises those not like him. “I thank you, God, that I am not like other people.” People like that tax collector over there.

The tax collector is a sinner. Tax collectors at that time were in general not nice people. They were not government employees, but independent contractors given a license or concession by Rome. They paid an upfront fee to Rome. Their business was to make a profit beyond that fee in any way they could. They were known as greedy, nasty, extortionists. Rogues and thieves, as the Pharisee calls them.

Yet the tax collector is blessed. He is justified, as it says in Luke, meaning that he has it right. He is humble before God. He knows in his heart that it is God to whom he must answer. He acknowledges, unlike the Pharisee, that he has made a mess of things, and he desires for God’s blessing in spite of his deeds, not because of them.

Both of these men seek to be righteous. Righteous is a strange sort of word. It means “fine,” as in “what a fine day.” Or “what a perfect day,” but not “a perfect score.” It does not mean “good,” as in “be a good boy,” but it does mean “good” as in “it is good to be here.” Or “good” as God said when God created the world. It means to be right with God. In that way, it stands for all the ways there are to be at peace, content, “actualized” as people used to say. To be righteous is to be as God created us to be and as we each of us always wanted to be. To be good, to be fine, to be happy.

Most of our lives are a little gritty, and little out of sorts. Things are a little out of key, off color, clumsy. We get tripped up and trip over ourselves. This kind of minor daily suffering is the opposite of righteousness.

Justice, which comes from the same word as righteousness in the Bible, is the setting of things right. To right what is askew, or off kilter. So we have social justice, economic justice, ecological justice. God is righteous because it seems that God’s deeds match what we imagine God’s nature to be. God is just because God’s intent is that things will be made fine.

The tax collector goes home justified because he has given himself up to the way of things as they should be, to the way of God. For the moment, at least. Who knows what he did later. It does not say. It does not matter. The Pharisee, for all his claims of righteousness, is not. Because he has given himself up to nothing. He goes his own way. And we who hear this story feel it to be so. In spite of our knowing that the Pharisee is a good man and the tax collector a nasty one, we can see that in this story, at least, it is the tax collector who is blessed and leaves the story in peace. But the Pharisee just leaves.

In the parable the Pharisee looks up and the tax collector looks down. The Pharisee looks to heaven (though it does not for sure say so), and the tax collector looks to the earth. In our Sunday worship, in the dialog (the beginning of the eucharistic prayer), the minister says “lift up your hearts,” and the congregation responds, “we lift them to the Lord.” A scholarly colleague said last week at a clergy gathering that this is unfortunate wording. He prefers “open your hearts,” and “we open them to the Lord.” So we are going to try that today. His point is that, especially for Lutherans, our job is not to lift ourselves up to God, ascending, sort of, to the heavens. To become divine. Our job is to be creatures of the earth, opening ourselves to the God who comes to be with us. This being with us is what Jesus did. This is what God does in almost all the stories in the Bible. We are on an adventure with God, but the instigator and guide of this divine journey is God, not us.

The Pharisee in his arrogance wants—expects, maybe?—to be exalted. To be made more heavenly and pure. The tax collector knows that he is always a sinner, but that God is always with him nonetheless. It is not helpful in prayer to prove ourselves to God, to impress God. God is already impressed. Or not. But to call on God to be present in us.

We come here hoping for something. You might say we come hoping for righteousness. We come for some transformation, some new thing, new way to live and to be. Not to be immaculate. But to be as earthy as God made us and at peace with all things, ourselves, and others. That is a big hope. As in all transformations of this sort, we start by acknowledging that we live in sin and suffering—what the tax collector did and the Pharisee did not—and that it is beyond us by ourselves to transform ourselves—as the tax collector realized and the Pharisee did not. To open ourselves, asking God to transform us, and not to leave as we arrived, unchanged.

This parable is not for everyone. Not all will hear this parable. For those who do trust in themselves that they are righteous, who trust that they can right themselves, this parable is empty of meaning. For those who do not suffer, for those who not sin, for those who are content, this parable offers nothing. But for the rest of us sinners, it reminds us that we may open our hearts to God in expectation of new life.