Not like other people – 21 October 2016

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘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.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other.  [Luke 18:9-14]

It seems to me worth noting however that each man was correct, in a way.  There’s no need to see the pharisee as a hypocrite.  He may well have been just as upright as he claimed, observing the law, and genuinely grateful not to be part of the degeneracy around him.  It is a feeling we might sometimes be reasonably familiar with.  The tax collector by contrast may well have become ashamed, even disgusted, with his life – these tax collectors were men who bought contracts from the Roman government to collect taxes; they lived on what they could extort above and beyond the money the government required.  It was a squalid system, made for corruption and for leaving misery and penury in its trail. 

So what is the point in this story…?  Jesus says that it was the tax collector who went home “justified”, and not the pharisee.  “Justified”, in this context, means something like restored to favour, let out of the dog box… Yes, you can get off the naughty chair, now run outside and behave…!  In the religious thinking of that time – and, I’m sad to say, in many places in our time – you are either right with God or you are not.  God is pleased with you, accepting you, or not.  Some forms of faith actually encourage people to think this way, even warn that we may be offside with God without realising it, accidentally so to speak.  So then faith and worship and service become a matter of doing whatever you have to do to be right with God.   

Now, I confess, I don’t know that God… the God served this way seems like an idol to me… and here Jesus seems to be saying:  If you want to think in those terms, OK… but realise that it doesn’t turn out how you expect.  It was the one who had no illusions about himself whom God saw and accepted.  It was the one who never dreamed of claiming, “I am not like others, I am better than others…”   That was the crucial difference – not one man’s moral achievement and the other man’s moral failure, but the fact that the tax collector saw himself as one with all fallen and fallible humanity.  The pharisee saw himself safe on the moral and religious high ground, unsullied… and separate.

I am corresponding with a man in prison, sentenced for sexual crimes.  There is no way this man can occupy the moral high ground.  His professional life, his social life, his family life, are at an end, along with his self-respect, his dignity and his reputation.  For the rest of his days, in prison or out, he will have people passing judgement on him, restricting his life, rejecting him.  He is a Christian believer, although the faith in which he was instructed is desperately infantile and moralistic.   My task is gently to introduce him to the God Jesus called Father, who upsets religion and justifies, restores the ungodly who call in their need.