Sermon - How to Impress God

Luke 18:9-14
How to Impress God
James Sledge                                                                            October 23, 2022

John Everett Millais
Pharisee and the Publican

The Bible is so much a part of church life, such a constant fixture in worship and Sunday School classes, that we sometimes forget that it wasn’t written for us. It was written for people from a completely different world and culture than our own, and so it can easily lose something in translation.

That may be the case with today’s scripture passage and the two characters in the parable Jesus tells. One is a Pharisee; the other is a tax collector, and the parable assumes that we are familiar with these two, even though that may well not be the case.

Growing up in the church I got the impression that Pharisees were the bad guys. The word pharisaic even means self-righteous and hypocritical. But the fact is that Pharisees were the good religious folks of their day. They were a Jewish reform movement that protested against the rituals, pomp, and sacrifices of Temple worship. They wanted people to “get back to the Bible,” as it were, to read the scriptures and do what it said there. In that sense they were very much like the reformers who led the Protestant Reformation, people like Martin Luther or John Calvin.

The Pharisees were also the inventors of rabbinical Judaism that is still around today. That means that the rabbis over at Temple Yodef Shalom are direct descendants of the Pharisees we see so often in the gospels.

The other character in the parable, the tax collector, poses a different interpretive problem. In his case, we may well not think badly enough of him. Americans may not enjoy interacting with someone from the IRS, but modern tax collectors have little in common with the tax collectors of Jesus’ day.

The Roman tax system awarded contracts to collect revenue, and they provided the support of soldiers for the process. Those with the contracts got to keep anything in excess of what was owed to Rome, and so tax collectors engaged in what was essentially a legal, shake-down racket. Under threat of arrest, they brutalized the population, especially those without any power or influence. In addition, Jewish tax collectors were collaborators with an occupying power, and they were hated and despised by the people.

There is really nothing comparable in our day, certainly no legal occupation that would be held in such universal contempt. In terms of reputation, they would probably fall somewhere between drug dealer and child abuser.

And so when Jesus tells his parable, his audience immediately knows who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy in the story. The Pharisee is a model citizen, and a man of devout faith. Most any church would love to have this fellow as a member. He walks the walk. He even tithes. And as a pastor who sees the inner workings of churches, I can tell you how rare that is.

No church would want the tax collector as a member. Even if he were to tithe, the money would be tainted, stolen from others in the church. Besides, tax collectors were by definition greedy and selfish. They wouldn’t be likely to part with any of the ill-gotten gain.

Now these two, the tax collector and the Pharisee, go up to the Temple to pray. The audience listening to Jesus’ parable are likely making assumptions about how this will play out, but I doubt that any of them were ready for the surprise ending that Jesus is going to spring on them.

The Pharisee opens his prayer with thanksgiving to God. He’s thankful that he’s a good, upstanding member of society, and why shouldn’t he be. It’s a good thing that he’s not a crook or a swindler, nothing like a tax collector. Why not thank God for his strong faith that keeps him on the straight and narrow, that makes him the person any church would want for a member? And when you’re a model citizen and ideal church member, it’s hard not to look down on people who are as disgusting as a tax collector.

The tax collector, on the other hand, seems to realize what a sorry excuse for a human being that he is. I don’t know if he’s had some sort of epiphany and is thinking about getting out of the racket, or if he just hates himself for what he does but can’t imagine giving up all that money.

Either way, he has no thanks to offer God and certainly nothing to brag about. He knows he has no standing before God, nothing good to point to. And so in a moment of repentance, he throws himself on the mercy of the court. “God be merciful to me, a sinner!”

I wonder what the people listening to Jesus’ story thought of this plea. Was it even genuine? And surely he’s not going to get off that easy.

But then Jesus says that the tax collector, and not the Pharisee, goes home justified, right in God’s eyes. Really Jesus?

Jesus ends the parable by saying, “…all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

There is a warning here about the dangers of religion. Religion asks us to do the very things the Pharisee does: moral living, generously supporting the church, engaging in spiritual practices. But according to Jesus, the temptation to trust in our religiosity can trip us up. The Pharisee imagines that his careful living elevates him in God’s eyes, and he begins to trust in his own religious activity rather than entrusting himself to God. The tax collector, for all his failings and despicable behavior, perhaps even because of them, entrusts himself to God’s mercy and finds that trust rewarded.

We live in a world that encourages us to be a lot like the Pharisee. We are supposed to do all we can to pad our résumés and sell ourselves. Students are encouraged to flesh out their profiles with extracurriculars and community service so as to stand out to that college admissions department. We are supposed to do everything in our power to demonstrate that we are good enough, impressive enough to get noticed.

Such thinking slides over into the religious realm. People imagine that they need to be more in other to get in good with God, more faithful, more prayerful, more knowledgeable, more generous, more adept at certain spiritual disciplines. All of these things are admirable in their own right, but when we began to trust in them, to think that they impress God in some way, then we need to remember the example of the Pharisee and the tax collector.

Jesus gives us a glimpse of God’s heart with this parable, and that shows us a couple of divine attributes. First, you really can’t impress God. That makes sense when you think about it. None of us come close to the example of Jesus. As the scriptures say, …all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. It would be good to be more faithful, more prayerful, and so on, but that’s not about wowing God.

But the second and really important attribute of God from this parable is how much God longs to embrace us. God stands with arms wide open, just waiting for us to fall into those arms, and it doesn’t matter whether or not we’re good enough. It doesn’t matter what we’ve done or what we’ve failed to do. Nothing will stop God from embracing anyone who turns toward God.

And when we experience the amazing grace of that embrace, we will want to become more faithful, more prayerful, more knowledgeable, more generous, more adept at certain spiritual disciplines. But we won’t be trying to impress God or anyone else. We will be trying to say “Thank you” to God with our lives.