The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

For many years when I heard this story of the Pharisee and tax collector, I found myself silently praying: “Lord, I thank you that I am not like that Pharisee.” Until one day it occurred to me that I was missing the point entirely.

To understand the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees, we need to understand who the Pharisees were. Because I know I grew up thinking they were really awful people that everybody hated them. In fact, the Pharisees were the best of the best in first century Judaism. They were the lay leaders who kept worship happening in every town that had a synagogue. They were the generous contributors who provided not just for religious needs but for the poor. Every Pharisee tithed to the synagogue and gave beyond that to the poor.

[So if you don’t tithe to St. Mark’s, don’t think you are somehow superior to the Pharisees!]

The Pharisees believed in an active God and eagerly looked forward to the coming of Messiah. Every Jewish mother would have been delighted for her little boy to grow up to be a Pharisee. In fact, Jesus would have been viewed as a Pharisee with a few strange ideas. And the Pharisees probably thought they were helping one of their own by correcting him. Furthermore, many of the Pharisees became followers of Jesus.

One particularly prominent one was named Saul of Tarsus. And he could write that as to righteousness under the Law, he was blameless…Something that still confounds us Lutherans with our false humility.

Paul’s conversion was not the result of a guilty conscience fed by some fire-and-brimstone preacher, but only happened because Jesus revealed himself to Saul as the promised Messiah—an event which forced Saul to rethink everything he thought he knew (took 14 years to work it out).

And if the Pharisee was really as good as he said he was, the tax collector was really as bad as both agreed: the tax collector was a traitor to his God and to his nation. He served the hated Roman occupiers, dealing in their money which had a blasphemous inscription. And undoubtedly he robbed from the poor, who had no legal rights to withstand him.

For most of us, the real and frightening point of the parable will only come when we understand this: the Pharisee really was a pillar of his synagogue and community; the tax collector really was a reprobate.

And yet Jesus tells us the tax collector went down to his home justified, not the Pharisee.

We trivialize this story if we simply turn it into an object lesson celebrating humility (as I have done). In fact, the meaning cuts to the heart of what faith is. Repenting of our sins is actually fairly easy (at least in the sense of being sorry for them). We know we are wrong, we don’t like what we are doing, and we are often burdened by our guilt.

Now actually changing is quite different, unlike feeling guilty. If it were easy to change my ways, instead of my sin of gluttony I would be 20 pounds lighter. And instead of my sin of sloth I would be in a lot better physical condition.

But you see, the justification means not so much repenting of our sins but repenting of our virtues.

Paul would say that even though as a Pharisee he had been blameless under the Law. Yet he counted all that as garbage (actually stuff you flush) for the worth of knowing Christ.

For most of us gathered here, the biggest barrier between us and God is not our sins but our virtues, as we are not notorious sinners and we are always tempted to look down on those who are.

Neither Paul nor I advocate giving up virtue and gleefully going around sinning. When I say that the hardest conversion is to repent of our virtues, I mean that we need to stop trusting in our virtues and instead focus on Jesus and His promise.

We will never be justified by looking inward but only as we are drawn outward to God and neighbor.

We are justified because God has come to us in Jesus Christ through Water and the Word. And in the power of the Holy Spirit, God has joined us to Christ now and for eternity

Yes, the tax collector had to repent of his sins and ask forgiveness (and he did and so do we). But the Pharisee presumed that he had nothing to repent of. And in the sense of being a terrible person or an awful sinner, he was undoubtedly right.

But the Pharisee by exalting himself over his neighbor, and in fact over against God, needed to do the hardest repentance, to repent of his virtues so that God could be God for him instead of the Pharisee thinking he had a claim on God.

God is the one who justifies us.

Trusting in our virtues builds walls between us and God and between us and our neighbor, exactly as the Pharisee in the story was alienated from God and from the tax collector. For most of us, what separates us from God most dangerously is not our sins but our virtues.

Like St. Paul, we need to repent of our virtues to experience the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ, the fellowship of his sufferings, and the power of His Resurrection.

Amen

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.