Sermon: The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

Date Preached: Sunday October 28th 2007

Bible Reference: Luke Chapter 8, Verses 9-14

We know this story so well - Jesus' parable, of the Pharisee and the tax collector: two men Jesus says, "who went up to the temple to pray.

We must remember that a tax collector was a crook. He was a person who was a Jew but he worked for the Roman government. He had a franchise, an area in which he was entitled to collect taxes. He’d have been told by the Romans the exact amount he needed to pay them. Anything else he made over and above that was his to pocket for himself. “Tax collectors”? Well not surprisingly they were despised as turncoats, traitors. So in the way he’s constructed the parable Jesus has set us up. He’s sent in the Pharisee who was one of the most respectable people in Judaism of his time and he’s sent into the temple with him this tax collector -  a mafia-style enforcer, the rotten apple.

We know the details. The Pharisee stands by himself and he prays and he says, "God, I thank you that I’m not like other people. I’m not a thief. I’m not a rogue. I’m not an adulterer. And I’am certainly not like this tax collector over here. I fast twice a week. I give away a tenth of my income."

That’s his speech. He probably goes on interminably like that. And then it’s the tax collector’s turn (and he won't even look up to the heaven; he looks down at his shoes), "God be merciful to me a sinner."

Then Jesus says, "I tell you it’s this man (this tax collector) who went to his house justified rather than the other - for all who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted."

Well that’s the story – and like all of Jesus' parables, it should probably carry a health warning which would read something like: "this will be hazardous to all your previous opinions about how religion works and how God works."

As we’ve been seeing, Jesus' parables are designed to outrage the hearers, and to shock, and to show how God has stood almost all of our values on their heads in this upside down Kingdom of his.

So what this parable is about is not, as it seems to say at the end, the virtue of humility. The Pharisee's problem is not that he’s showing off. It’s that he really believes that his stack of good deeds is enough to save the world and himself. And he believes it would be enough if only everyone else would do what he does.

But what God really says in Christ is that human goodness isn't good enough to do this trick. Human goodness cannot reconcile the world.

Basically, if the world could have been reconciled by good advice from God, to which human goodness then responded, the world's problems would have been solved ten minutes after Moses got down to the bottom of the mountain with the commandments. Everyone would have read the commandments and said, "Oh, yes, of course," and the problem would have been over. The trouble with the commandments is that while they’re fine in themselves, while they underpin many western systems of justice and morality, no one has ever paid much personal attention to them.

The law, the commandments, are efforts at morality, humility, spirituality and, above all, efforts at religion. They’re efforts at trying to do something that will get us right with God. The problem is they don't work. Therefore God, as Jesus speaks of him, doesn't risk trying to save the world by human good behaviour.

The Pharisee's mistake, is not that he is saying something that it is just proud or a little bit arrogant, but that what he is saying is dead wrong. His goodness is irrelevant to the problem that he’s talking about. Therefore, God says that the tax collector who simply looks down at his shoes and says, "I'm no good," is justified. Now, why?

The point is that this parable is really about death and resurrection life. It’s not about morality, or spirituality or one-upmanship or anything else. It is about the fact that both the Pharisee and the tax collector, without God’s mercy are dead ducks. The Pharisee is a very high- class kind of dead duck, but they are both dead as far as being able to get their lives right with God is concerned. The point about all of this is that the reconciliation God has in mind for them – where he’s able to bring them back into the relationship with him he’d always intended is totally dependent on them dying to their notions of what matters.

Jesus came to transform people and situations; he came to raise the dead. He didn’t come to teach the teachable; or to improve the improvable; he didn’t even come to reform the reformable. Because none of those things works. As Robert Farrar Capon puts it: the tragedies go on. The lies go on. The nonsense goes on. The twaddle goes on. All the things that are wrong with the world go on. They’re not amenable to talk. They are only amenable to action and, therefore, Jesus came to raise the dead -- meaning you and I in our deadness, the Pharisee in his deadness and the tax collector in his. .

Now if we ask ourselves the question. Do we like the parable? Of course, we don't like it. The point is that it violates every notion that we really are basically doing fairly well. If only other people were as nice and considerate and as wonderful as we are, the world would be a better place to live in

and God says, "No. That’s not going to work." It can't be done that way. It can't be done by people who think they’re winners. It can only be done by people who are willing to admit they are losers and then who are willing to trust God to deliver them the gift of a new relationship.

Do we like that idea? Once again the answer (if we’re honest) is probably ‘no’. Here’s this terrible tax collector who is really a monstrous character and probably rubs salt in everybody's wounds. These days he’d be driving around in a stretch limo with a case of Chivas Regal whisky in the back and several very expensive call girls with him at all times. And he’d have been skimming the cream off his neighbour's milk money. But the point is that the Pharisee is no less virtuous – not in God’s economy, God’s way of figuring things, than this odious little character – and it’s this that would have been the shocking bit for Jesus’ hearers.

So if we turn the parable around a little bit, we can imagine what it is like to see how the Pharisee is so wrong. Here’s a very interesting take from a very playful American theologian I discovered when I was at a really low point years ago.

“Imagine God sitting in the temple at a golden card table in a golden chair and in come these two characters. The Pharisee comes across the temple and God is very busy. He’s creating the universe out of nothing. He’s holding the stars in their courses. He’s reconciling all the generals in the Pentagon and the street walkers in Times Square (in New York) and the drug addicts asleep in doorways. He’s making the few hairs left on my head grow, He’s doing all these things and He is very busy.

So up comes this character, this Pharisee, and he whips out a pack of cards and he does a couple of one-handed cuts and an accordion shuffle and bridges them and fans them out for God and says, "Pick a card. I want to play cards with you."

God folds the deck back up and he says, "Don't play me."

So the Pharisee says, "No, no. I've been very lucky lately. Let's play Black Jack - Pontoon."

He deals God a king and an ace and God pushes the card away and says, "Look, I don't want to take your money. You can't play with me. The odds are always on the house here and besides, no matter how full you think your deck is, you haven't got a full deck and you can never win playing this game of cards with me. So why don't you just be like that fellow over there who’s looking down at his shoes and the two of you go over and have a free drink and enjoy yourselves because you can be ‘home free’ here if you’ll only stop this nonsense of trying to buy me, trying to win me over, trying to twist my arm, to do something to me to prove that you’re okay. Just trust me. That fellow over there, all he said was he was no good. He threw himself in trust on me. All you have to do is recognize that death to yourself is the key to your own salvation."

And this is the challenge – the offence - of the Christian Gospel: we fear salvation that is so freely given to blatant, self-conscious sinners. But this is where and how God works. God works in the losers of the world. He works in all of us. The reason we fear it so much, is if everybody has the invitation to the party, then God has no taste. God is vulgar. God is indiscriminate. God is immoral. He lets in sinners and forgives their sins. But that’s what he does in Jesus. If they turn around – if they repent - he lets in the most obnoxious and undeserving person you can think. He lets me in. He lets you. All we have to do is believe it, not try and earn it.

We have a God, according to Jesus' proclamation, who probably would be refused membership if there was a God union. Because it’s us who try and set the criteria for what God should look like.  A God has to be a punisher; a God has to be a judge; a God has to be a respectable God. He has to do all the things that enforce morality as we see it according to our prejudices. The problem is the true God doesn't work according to that agenda.

On the cross, in Jesus, He drops dead to the whole subject of sin and shuts up about the whole subject of condemnation. It’s over - finished. As Paul says in the beginning of the 8th Chapter of Romans: "There is, therefore, now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus."

So this parable is about death and it’s about the resurrection from the dead. The most important thing is that we believe – we place our trust - in Jesus. Those that count themselves as dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and they will live – they’ll go to their homes justified. Amen