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Sermon: The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost Year C - 17th October 2010
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7, 8 and 10am
Readings: Jeremiah 31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:10-4:5; Luke 18:1-14
I like movies that are predictable. I like movies where the hero wins in the end. As a child I liked westerns where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats. And the good guys were usually the sheriff and the bad guys were usually in jail by the end of the show and everything was as it should be. Even with Jane Austen, there is the sense of satisfaction at the end of the book that the right people have met and married the right person. We have strong ideas about right and wrong, about good and bad. We like stories where justice is satisfied.
So it becomes difficult when Jesus confuses the picture, when he turns our values upside down. For example, we’ve learnt from experience that Jesus saw the Pharisees as quite flawed people. But we must remember that in Jesus’ day, the Pharisees were well respected and they had quite a reputation for godly living.
So when Jesus began telling stories about a Pharisee and a tax collector the person in the crowd could reasonably assume that the Pharisee was the good guy and the tax collector was the bad guy. Though we read of the story of Zacchaeus who decided to give back four times all he had cheated, he is an exception in that he changed his ways. But he was typical of tax collectors in that, he had cheated people for years before he met Jesus. So long as the tax collectors could raise the money required by the Roman government, that government didn’t really care how the tax collectors did their job or how those funds were raised. Taxes were only charged to non-citizens, so Roman citizens didn’t care how the taxes were collected. And because the tax collectors had such a free hand, you can imagine the type of people who would be attracted to that kind of work. They were the type of people who would be prepared to sell their own grandmothers – quite literally.
So as Jesus began to tell the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector, we should remember how the crowd would have anticipated the story. First, we have a description of the Pharisee. He stood up to pray, which was the usual position for prayer. And then he prayed his prayer of thanksgiving. But the prayer might shock us. It seems so arrogant to us. But that would be a harsh judgment. It is a style of praying that we are unfamiliar with, but it was common in those days. The essence of the prayer was a prayer of thanksgiving. When we pray like that we think of all the good things that God has done for us. That’s one way to do it. But the Pharisees’ method was just the reverse. He is thanking God that bad things hadn’t happened to him.
It was common for Jews to thank God for being his people. But they would express it by thanking God that they had not been created as a foreigner or an alien. Instead of thanking God for their good health, they would thank God for not making them crippled or blind or infirm. So it was a prayer of thanks that God had not visited some evil upon them. You can see the Pharisee doing it here. Instead of thanking God that he was able to remain honest, he thanked God that he wasn’t a robber. He lists all the things he might have been, lifestyles that were rejected by God and he is thanking God that he has resisted the temptation. So he thanks God he is not like some men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers. You can easily imagine people in the crowd with Jesus approving of this sort of prayer. It is only right that he should pray like this. And then the Pharisee set his gaze on the tax-collector and he thanked God that he had never become one of those – a cheat, an extortioner, a traitor to Israel.
So knowing tax collectors its not surprising that the Pharisee prayed like that. And then we learn that the Pharisee fasted twice a week, and gave a tenth of all that he received. Jews were required to fast several times a year, not twice a week. There was no requirement to give a tenth of everything. So this Pharisee was very careful to live a life acceptable to God, to do far more than God required of him. But he was overdoing it, creating rules of his own invention and not from God.
And then in contrast, we have the tax collector. They represented organised corruption on a grand scale. Notice how he stood at some distance away. Perhaps he had only ventured just inside the Temple precinct and no further. He didn’t adopt the normal posture of prayer. Rather, he hung his head and beat his breast, as a sign of mourning. And his prayed his simple prayer. “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” No doubt the crowd standing before Jesus thought the prayer summed up what he really was.
So what we have is two very different prayers. Now the question is, which prayer did God hear? Which prayer would God accept and approve? We can be sure the crowd would have approved of the Pharisee’s prayer. As for the tax collector – what hope could he have, particularly as a tax collector? His own career would have condemned him. Yet Jesus shocked the crowd with the announcement that it was the tax collector’s prayer and not the Pharisee’s prayer that was accepted by God. And that would have disturbed them.
When Jesus began telling a story about a Pharisee and a tax collector their minds might have raced ahead anticipating how the story would end. And they would have been wrong. And the catch for us is that we too could be wrong. Notice how Jesus introduces this parable. “To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable.” I once assumed that this introduction was talking about the Pharisees. But it probably isn’t. Jesus didn’t address the Pharisees when he told this parable. This introduction is a description of the crowd standing before Jesus. Jesus wasn’t criticising Pharisees, he was criticising the crowd. It was all about them.
You may know the story about the Sunday school teacher who taught this parable to their class and then concluding with the remark “Lets thank God we’re not like that Pharisee.” She had made the same mistake. She was confident of her own righteousness. And now we are in danger of making the same mistake – thanking God we are not like that Sunday School teacher. But it is a trap we need to avoid, the danger of becoming too confident, too arrogant, too easily convinced of our own innate goodness. Jesus used the Pharisee and the tax collector to trap the crowd.
Its all about who we compare ourselves to. The Pharisee compared himself to the tax collector. That only showed him how good he was. The tax collector had only thoughts of God, and understood how good God was, and how he needed God’s mercy. I make the same mistake. My favourite TV show is “Judge Judy”. Why? Its only so I can feel superior to the silly dills who appear weekly on the show. Here am I being confident in my own righteousness and looking down on them.
But I am fascinated by the book of Job. He has some understanding of the nature of God but he cannot make sense of God or his life in the face of his terrible suffering. Suffering is always a challenge to our theology. How can there be a good God, in a world of awful suffering? Job’s comforters attempt to come to some conclusions about God but none of it fits. Job himself delivers speeches about what he knows of God, of the world, of evil people, of his own life. But how does any of it fit together? There are no simple solutions. And though the problem of suffering is argued and argued, by a range of speakers, they are not able to come to any simple solution about the nature of God, his work in our world, or what sense we can make of suffering. With God and the problem of suffering there are no easy answers.
We get the same picture from the Psalms. I’m intrigued by the number of argumentative psalms, where the authors complain about the world, complain about their neighbours, complain about their situation and complain that God isn’t doing what they want him to do. So many Psalms are a struggle as people attempt to come to some understanding of the nature of God. But what really surprised me is that the Bible is the only sacred text where people actually argue with God, and question his wisdom.
And that is the point of the parable. When it comes to understanding God, there are no simple answers. It’s a warning not to become puffed up and impressed with our own thinking about God – believing we have it all worked out. Because the time will come when we are brought to the end of ourselves and in a loud voice we demand to know from God “Why?” – and the answer doesn’t come. And we realise how little we really know.
And that is the reason why Jesus gave us the first parable in our reading. Here was a woman who kept coming to an unjust judge and begged him time and time again for justice. The judge appears to have no morality. He declares he neither fears God nor cares about men. His one desire is for a quiet life. And because of that he gives the woman what she asks for. Jesus’ point is if an unjust Judge can act rightly, then our persistence in prayer will be rewarded. Job, in the end, doesn’t get answers to his question, but his prayers are answered. Jesus’ promise is that persistence in prayer is never futile. Though they may sound reckless, the behaviour of the psalm writers are examples of their persistence in prayer. Persistence is never a problem for God. But the question Jesus asks is “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
If he looked into the heart of Job he would find it there. If he looked into the hearts of the Psalm writers, no doubt he would find it there. And what about us? The pressures of life are great. Suffering can consume us. We lack the wisdom we need for the decisions we have to make. There are no easy answers, and if we think we know them we are probably wrong.
But Jesus words encourage us not to give up. Job, and the Psalmists and this persistent widow are examples to us not to give up. We need to exercise our faith, continually turning back to God, continually calling on him in prayer, continually trusting he hears us and loves us.