Last Sunday after Trinity 2013
“Two men went up to the
Temple to pray”, says Jesus, but only one of them went home again actually
having achieved anything by this.
In some ways this is one of
Jesus’ simplest parables, with characters that are easy to recognise. The first
is a stock figure from comedy. His words invite us to ham them up, as I am sure
Jesus did. “God, I thank you that I am not like other people…” He’s a
pompous, self-righteous fool who sounds as if he thinks he is the bee’s knees and
that everyone – including God – must surely be aware of it. No sitcom is
complete without someone like this. He is Captain Mainwaring, Basil Fawlty or Hyacinth Bucket, destined for greatness, if
only they weren’t surrounded by idiots, people determined to keep up
appearances, but always coming a cropper in the end. We know when we hear this
Pharisee’s words that there’s a banana skin just around the corner.
If
the Pharisee is a stock character from comedy, the tax collector is equally
familiar from tragedy. He is the broken man who’s hit rock bottom, the man with
no reputation to lose, for whom redemption seems like an impossible dream.
We’ve met him in a thousand soap operas, popular dramas, films and books. He is
the maverick detective, one of those gloomy Scandinavians – with a broken heart
and too much fondness for the booze. He’s the flawed hero who is always on the
edge of breakdown and disgrace. He’s the person who has apparently wasted his
life, but at the last minute manages to do just one noble, right thing. He is
Sydney Carton, if you are familiar with Dickens “Tale of Two Cities”, whose
love for the innocent Lucie Manette is the sole ray of sunshine in the inner
darkness of his dissolute life. Since she is married and unattainable, the only
service he can render her in the end is to take the place of her husband on the
guillotine, ”It is a far,
far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest
that I go to than I have ever known." For all his failures, at
that moment his life is made worthwhile.
We recognise these characters in Jesus’ story, just
as his first hearers would have done. And the point Jesus is making is equally
clear. Only one of them goes down from the Temple justified, and it is not the
Pharisee, despite his fine opinion of himself.
It’s important to note that Jesus doesn’t say that
God didn’t hear the Pharisee’s prayer, nor did he say that God didn’t
love him as much either. He says that it was only the tax collector who was justified
– literally that meant “straightened out, set to rights, made just” –not simply
counted as just, but really changed. The
changes might be small, but they are a start, and that’s why Jesus commends
him. The Pharisee, on the other hand, goes home exactly as he was when he
arrived; he might as well not have bothered.
Jesus is being deliberately provocative with this
conclusion. Tax collectors were widely hated at the time. They collected taxes
to fund the Roman occupation, and were suspected of creaming off a percentage
for themselves along the way. But Jesus is quite clear; it is better to be like
the tax collector than the Pharisee, and the difference he is calling attention
to is really to do with the way these two men deal with sin.
Sin is a word which has rather fallen out of
fashion these days. Even within the church it is something we tend to shy away
from talking about. It’s important, of course, to get the balance right, and
the Church often hasn’t, using the language of sin and guilt to control and
oppress, but if we deny the reality of sin, insisting that “I’m ok, you’re ok”
and “everything in the garden is rosy” we do ourselves no favours at all,
because it is patently obviously not true. There are times when I’m not ok and
you’re not ok and the garden is full of weeds.
There can’t be a single one of us who doesn’t at some
point in life get a wake-up call, some moment when we get a clear view of
ourselves and wonder what happened. How did it come to this? We might have done
something which we thought we’d never stoop to, or perhaps something has
happened to us which we haven’t dealt with well, and we have passed on that
hurt to others. It might be that we have simply drifted away from the things we
thought mattered to us; our priorities have all gone awry. Or maybe we’ve grown
disillusioned with the world after one too many grim tv news bulletins, one too
many tough days at work, one too many compromises that leave us feeling just a
bit grubby, and we realise we’ve stopped caring, stopped trying.
That’s the truth about life. It is the truth about
me and about you, and about the many people who talk to me in the course of my
ministry. That nagging sense that things aren’t as they should be is part of
the human condition, common to us all. It doesn’t matter how hard we try to do
the right things, sooner or later we will get it wrong, foul it up, because we
live in an imperfect world, full of imperfect people like us who are also
getting it wrong and fouling it up. That’s what sin is, not chocolate or sex,
something “naughty but nice” to be trivialised, nor something dramatic and
dark, the preserve of psychopaths and monsters. It is the everyday wrongness
that sucks the joy and colour out of us and renders life small, grey and lonely.
Acknowledging and naming it is the first, and
vital, step to doing something about it. That’s what the tax collector does,
and what the Pharisee, with all his self-righteous bluster, cannot bring
himself to do. Instead he papers over the cracks in his life with the glossiest
paper he can find and hope that no one will notice. The reason these two men
respond so differently to the sin in their lives is because they believe very
different things about God.
The tax collector has somehow dared to think that
God might love his creation, just because it is his creation, and that he can –
and wants to – fix it when it is broken, even the miserable twisted bit of it
that is himself. He has dared to believe that this is true even if he has
nothing to give in return. How has he come to believe this? We don’t know.
Maybe it is just desperation, or maybe someone in his life once loved him for
himself before – his mother or father perhaps - so he has a model to look to.
The Pharisee, in contrast, is convinced that the
only way to get God to love him is by manipulating and bargaining with him
through ritual, through good behaviour, through giving. There might be no word
of a lie in the things he says – he might indeed live a virtuous life – but the
fact that he has to say so as loudly and publicly as he does tells us that deep
down he knows that isn’t the whole truth about him, and that he is not nearly
as secure as he wants to look. “Do not
offer God a bribe” said the book of Ecclesiasticus in our first reading, but
the Pharisee obviously hadn’t read it, because that is just what he was doing.
He thinks he has to, otherwise why on earth would God want to help him?
He’s not alone in this - it is a common human
tendency. I was watching a documentary earlier this week on the Medieval attitudes
to death. There was a fascinating
section on the last will and testament of Henry VII. Like most people at the
time he believed he would have to spend time after death suffering in
purgatory, and he wanted to make sure that he was delivered from it as swiftly
as possible. So he left an enormous sum of money, and ordered that 10,000
Masses should be said for him as soon as possible. It was the detail that was
fascinating though. He set down that 1500 should be dedicated to the Trinity,
2500 to the five wounds of Jesus, 2500 to the five joys of Mary, 450 for the nine
orders of angels, 150 for the patriarchs (obviously he didn’t think they had
much clout in heaven), 600 for the 12 apostles – 50 each, so they weren’t much
use either – and 2300 for All Saints –there were a lot of saints to cover. In
life he had always needed to buy loyalty, influence and power, and he assumed
it would be no different in the heavenly courts.
But when the doctrine of purgatory and masses like
these were outlawed – ironically through the Reformation in which his own son,
Henry VIII was a prime mover - for many people the situation felt even more
hopeless. Now what would they do to keep God on their side? Believe the right
things, live the right lives, pray the right prayers in the right sort of
churches, plain and unadorned with images… A new set of bribes was put in place
of the old ones. They still didn’t get it, and we very often don’t get it
either. That’s why we are so scared of owning up to our wrongdoing.
The truth that the Bible proclaims, that this
parable proclaims, is that God loves us anyway. That’s the Gospel message, the
message the tax collector dared to believe, the message that Jesus’ death
spelled out. Human beings did this to him, nailed him to a cross, and yet still
God loved them and loves us too when we do things that nail him to the cross
all over again. We can’t make God love us any more than he does by anything we
do. We can’t make him love us any less either. He loves us anyway. That’s the
Gospel.
Why does it matter? It matters because if we dare
to believe this, it is then safe to acknowledge our sin. And if we can
acknowledge it, then the things that need to change can start to change. And if
that happens then we, like the tax collector, might also go home justified,
straightened out, a little bit more set to rights, and that will be good news
for everyone.
Amen
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