Luke 18:9-14
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
April 6, 2025
It is good to be trustworthy and dependable. But it’s even better to be trusting and dependent…if you are trusting in Someone completely trustworthy and depending on Someone completely dependable.
Of the four Gospel writers, Luke alone records today’s parable about God’s grace. Luke specifies whom Jesus, in telling the parable, is targeting. He identifies them by two qualities: they “trust in themselves” and they “regard others with contempt”.
They trust in themselves in the sense that they rely on their ethical and spiritual effort to achieve the right life. People like that frequently go far in becoming good. A lot of them are the kind of folks to whom you’d feel comfortable giving your house keys when you’re away. They’d never steal anything, snoop around in your medicine cabinet or forget to pick up the newspaper each day.
The problem with being self-reliant is that it can lead to being self-righteous. If you trust in yourself, you can easily become impressed with yourself, and obsessed with maintaining your status as a superior person. That can incline you to regard others with contempt. For, to prop up your high view of yourself, it helps to reinforce your low view of others. You look down upon them with disdain because you feel good about yourself when you think the worst of others, especially the worst folks.
Jesus told today’s parable with the self-reliant and self-righteous in mind. He didn’t intend to give them their comeuppance so much as to show them themselves, that they might turn away from their delusions and turn to God in an all-out dependence upon His unearned, unmerited goodness that is generous toward both the best and the worst people.
Most of us have heard today’s parable many times before, but we never grow tired of seeing the proud put in their place. In fact, by today’s parable we might be tempted to thank God that we’re not like those who thank God that they’re not like others.
But wait! Doesn’t that amount to the same self-righteousness and contempt for others we deplore?
While we’d like to identify with the tax collector in his humble dependence on God’s mercy, we may have more in common with the Pharisee!
When we, after watching the news, go on and on about how appalling is the behavior of certain politicians or our fellow citizens – a reality we may not be exaggerating – do we not act like the Pharisee? When we focus on how despicable our neighbors’ behavior is – whether it be the homeless leaving their half-eaten food for others to clean up and endangering public health thereby, or co-workers not doing their job and leaving it to us pick up the slack – is not our sub-text the self-congratulatory sub-text of the Pharisee: “Why can’t they be more like me?”
Or, when something bad happens to us and we cry out in protest, “Why me?”, even as we’re not much bothered when that same thing happens to others, are we not protesting as the self-righteous do? Are we not supposing that those other people should expect no better; but that we, because we are such good decent people, should be exempt from the misfortunes common to humanity? If it’s sad if it happens to others, but it’s a crime if it happens to us – we are like the self-righteous!
Back to the parable, “two men went up to the temple to pray”. They approached conversation with God from very different angles. I find the translation of verse 11 in the NIV Bible to better fit the parable’s main point than that of our pew Bible. The NIV reads, “The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself.” Is not his prayer all about himself? Though he starts out with thanks to God, he does so in passing as if to hurry on to highlight his virtue by contrasting himself to the bad people that come to his mind: “thieves, rogues, adulterers or…’this tax collector’”. In his prayer, the Pharisee does not praise God, but boasts on himself!
The tax collector takes an opposite orientation in prayer. While the Pharisee, in self-admiration, cannot keep his eyes off himself, the tax collector, in self-dismay, cannot lift his eyes up to heaven. He just beats his breast and throws himself on God’s mercy.
Let’s be honest. The tax collector earned a sense of shame and guilt. He’d betrayed his people by working for the illegitimate, oppressive, occupying power that was Rome. Furthermore, since Rome paid its foreign workers the bare minimum, most tax collectors (and likely this tax collector) felt they had to supplement their income by overcharging taxpayers and pocketing the difference.
So the tax collector could not trust or hope in himself. The only hope he could find was in the God who is, as the Bible often repeats, “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love”.
That’s why Jesus says that “this man”, who objectively was far less righteous than the Pharisee, “went down to his home justified rather than the other”. For Jesus, a person’s good standing with God is based, not on how good they are, but on how good God is. Our contribution to our being reconciled with the God who by rights could throw the book at us is next to nothing. We just honestly face the fact that our ethical and spiritual achievement gives us no claim upon Him, and then desperately dare to believe He will nevertheless accept, forgive and bless us beyond our deserving. We trust and hope, not in ourselves, but in the God who, though He doesn’t have to give us a thing, wants to give us everything – only because He loves us despite our unlovely deeds that make us feel unlovable.
Merely by believing that nothing is too wonderful for God to do and that God is eager to exalt the humble, we can have peace, joy and a vibrant friendship with God.
That’s a message Jesus yearned for even the annoying, smug self-righteous folks to take in. He didn’t intend to demean or to dismiss anyone, but to help everyone to see that the only hope of even the best people is the same as that of the worst people: an “all-out” dependence on God’s grace.
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