The Pharisee and Tax Collector

Some of you know my story of coming to faith, others do not. Like many folks who come to faith later in life - not pressed to do so by parents - I was extremely zealous both in my seeking to know God and in my proclamation of who God was to other people. And with that passion came something else. An unconscious desire for order, certainty, perfect knowledge, perfect performance. I started trying to categorize everything, just as I’d done as a young child. This is what families should look like; this is what this kind of person should do; this is how governments should work; this is how these people should live. And boy if I couldn’t find justification for my categories in Scripture; I tell you, they were right there. And woe to those who didn’t fit into my categories of right living. Thank God I was not like those heathens outside the Church; thank God I was not like those liberal church people with their wrong doctrines and immoral practices; thank God I was not like those fundamentalists either. Thank God. I was a fantastic Pharisee. Letter of the Law Pharisee, just like Paul, before he was struck blind by Jesus.

Yet as we read this morning, Jesus says of this Pharisee who fulfills the law with his fasting and tithing, with his knowledge and supposed adherence to God’s law: you missed the entire point of the law. The law is not a road map of directions and rules to make you righteous. The law is intended to keep you from repeating Adam and Eve’s mistake of presuming you have God’s capacity to know how all things work together for the good, when they should work and why they should work. It’s intended to prevent your arrogance that your ways are the same as God’s ways. 

Look, Jesus says to the pharisee, to me, to you, to Adam and Eve, when we’re tempted to presume we know good from evil, look at the tax collector whom you condemn: “I recognize I'm a sinner, he says, and cannot depend upon my own righteousness, my own knowledge to make myself or anyone else holy. So Lord, even in my errors, grant me mercy." And there it is: confession, repentance, acknowledgement of our need for God to take the scales from our eyes, as he does with Paul, to heal us from our blindness and deafness as God repeats again and again in the Old and New Testaments through Prophecies and Parables. Confession and repentance of how blind we are to our own sense of being righteous - especially more righteous, more knowledgeable, more holy, more right - than those people who are not like us, who don’t believe what we do, who we think are evil, wicked, wrong, blasphemous, unnatural, sick, etc. 

The moment that we set ourselves in the role of judging others, we turn them into scapegoats, either imagining that our judgment of others can hide our own sins before God, or causing us to remain completely blind to our own sins. We begin to judge ourselves righteous and close ourselves off to God working through others - even those whom we deem unrighteous - to better understand the complexities and nuances of how God is actually at work in the world. The consequence? We shrink God to our own very limited perceptions of life. That, my friends, is blasphemy: to presume that we define the fullness of who God is and how God has created and redeemed this very complicated world of ours. 

Like Cain, Jacob, David, Israel’s judges and Kings, like Judas, my zealous desire to make the world more palatable to me - where I imagined my vision of good was the same as God’s - turned into pride and categorical judgement of others. And just like these figures of Scripture and millions of Christians afterward who conflate their vision with God’s own - I got tangled in envy, jealousy, rage, humiliation, moral failures, confusion, fear, wandering, and finally, when things fell apart, to the place of the tax collector: Lord, I have nowhere else to go, I have sinned against you and so many others, I have failed my own righteousness tests, please, help me. 

And guess what? God’s ways, perfectly timed, perfectly coordinated, working through others - especially through the kinds of people whom I’d often cast off as wrong or unholy - working through them to break me down, challenge all the categories and judgements I held to so tightly, well this released me from my blindness and hardened heart. It created a new person who could see his judgments of others were a response to his own struggles for security and meaning. A new person in Christ who was able to let go and stop seeing the world in the psychological categories of black and white. Pressed out of fear - of needing to control according to my standards - more and more into faith - of asking God what he would have me do here, in this place, with these people. And I began to see the world with hope, even in its darkest corners. 

To fulfill the law, to seek God, one must be willing to let go of believing that our ways are God’s ways. St. Augustine writes of this teaching, “He who exalted himself was not full; he who humbled himself was empty, and therefore could be filled.” Filled with the gift of seeing life no longer through our limited perspectives, but through the hope of God coming for us. I tell you, says Jesus: “[these are the ones who will be justified] … for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted." AMEN