Humble Faith

I suppose in terms of Scripture today’s passage is pretty cut and dry. You have a Pharisee and a tax collector who come to pray. The Pharisee is all high and mighty and self-righteous. The tax collector is humble and acknowledges his sinful nature before God and is justified. This is our lesson in faith for today. Don’t be a religious snob or a jerk for Jesus. Be humble.That sounds simple enough.

Let’s go back to the Pharisee and the tax collector. Both would have been generally disliked by the surrounding community, but for different reasons. What might those reasons be? Rev. Cheryl Lindsey describes “The tax collector as an agent of the state. They received compensation by collecting taxes owed to the Roman government by any means. Their activities were not regulated or restricted. They could, and often did, use tactics of intimidation and extortion to reach their goals. A tax collector could levy significant surcharges and expand their portion of the collected fees. They could come back to those who satisfied their obligation with claims that further monies were due. They operated without integrity, honor, or compassion. As a result, to be a tax collector meant being rich in resources at the cost of being reviled in the community.” When I think of the tax collector, I think of the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, collecting money from the poor while lining their pockets with a few extra coins.

But the Pharisee on the other hand. Well who wouldn’t want a Pharisee in their church? They are at every Bible study (which they’ve probably read several times and like to remind you of that fact). They serve on the important committees. They live their lives to the highest moral standards. Cheryl describes the Pharisee as one who “promoted certain values and practices as a means of deepening and demonstrating faith.” Sounds good right? The only problem is, “the guidelines they voluntarily adopted for themselves as a form of devotion morphed into rules they imposed upon others as standards of right standing in the religious community. Unfortunately, those standards were lifted so high that even the Pharisees could not maintain them. Yet, they continued to impose them upon others with significant consequence.”

We are told that Jesus told this parable “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and held others in contempt.” So who is Jesus referencing here?

A Pharisee and a tax collector walk into a temple. They both begin to pray. The Pharisee begins by thanking God he isn’t like other people: all the thieves, rogues, adulterers, and all those pesky “others.” He even references the tax collector. over there. Yikes! That would be like praying with someone and you hear them say “well at least I’m not as bad as so-and-so down on the other end of the pew! How many times have our inward prayers reflected the “at least I’m not like them…you know, it could be worse” mentality. Or how many times do we take our disgust of others and dress it up in church clothes?

Drew Jackson has a poem entitled “When Hatred Goes to Church.” He says “Hatred likes to disguise itself as gratitude. Dress itself in a three-piece suit. Use religious verbiage. Turn amens into stamps of approval on bigotry. Thanking. Thanking. Thanking God that I am not like them. And the church said amen.”

And then there is the tax collector, hitting taxes and taking names one minute and beating his chest and proclaiming he is a sinner the next. Pleading for mercy. We don’t know what sin he is confessing, but he brings himself low before God. Notice he doesn’t say he’s gonna walk out and stop being a tax collector. Maybe he goes right back to it. And yet, Jesus says he is justified. This is getting confusing.

So who is the righteous one here? In Luke’s gospel, this can be hard to pin down? Eric Barreto notes how in Luke’s gospel, there are “righteous people like Elizabeth and Zechariah (1:6), Simeon (2:25), and Joseph (23:50), in whose tomb Jesus was laid, are to be imitated. But others who are called righteous seem to fall short of the description, and those who are anything but righteous, like the lost son in Chapter 15, are the focus of God’s grace and welcome.”

Maybe underneath a parable about prayer and humility there is a deeper lesson on our how we see one another and how eager we are to determine who is justified and who isn’t, making salvation our business instead of God’s. We want to easily assume that the Pharisee represents all Pharisees or the tax collector represents every other tax collector. When we lift up the tax collector an shun the Pharisee, we fall into the same trap humility trap. Debi Thomas says “On its face, this is a very simple parable. It feels silly to interpret it when its message is so obvious. But here’s the trap, expressed as a prayer I am sorely tempted to pray in response: “Lord, I thank you that I am nothing like the obnoxious caricature of a human being who is the Pharisee in your story. Thank you that I have arrived at a point in my faith journey where I am much more like the tax collector: self-aware, emotionally intelligent, mindful, cognizant, teachable, and oh so humble.” Or maybe we fall into the other humility trap and merely humble ourselves to be exalted or as the line from Wicked says, “you grovel in submission to feed your own ambition.”

Isn’t it easier when we can just make assumptions about others on the surface without going any deeper? Isn’t it easier when we can just say “thank goodness I’m not like them? Isn’t it easier when we can just assume one person represents the whole and so we can write the whole group of people off? We see this on full display today in our country. Virtually nothing feels bipartisan anymore. We assume one Democrat is just like all the rest. We assume one Republican is just like all the rest. And whichever side we are on, we have assumed we are morally in the right and that God is surely on our side. We are the righteous ones after all. And we villainize one another. Pharisees and tax collectors aren’t the same. They just don’t belong together after all. The truth is, at one time or another, we have been both. A friend said their professor used to say, “relax, you’re worse than you think.”

Wouldn’t it be easier if we stopped pretending to be more than we are or less than we are and just stop pretending altogether? Humility doesn’t need a good cover story that glosses over everything and casts us in the best light, IIt just needs us to come as we are with all that we are. When we stop pretending, God starts justifying.

If we leave today feeling spiritually superior to anyone else, we might ought to sit right back down because we have missed the point. John Van De Laar suggest that maybe “The point with this parable, as with all of Jesus’ parables, is that it’s not just about the people we dismissively categorize as “them”. Whether our “them” is self-righteous legalists or unrighteous sinners, Jesus’ story challenges any tendency to one-dimensionalise and disregard the “other”. Instead, Jesus challenges us to learn to make ourselves low enough to hold our assumptions lightly and to be curious enough to have our minds changed about the people we are tempted to write off.” Jesus’s disciples include both a tax collector and a Zealot. Jesus invites both to the table.

In my own experience, not every single person represents the whole. Humanity is more complex than a sound byte. I recently had a friend share how they were talking to a friend about someone and each of them had a different view because each of them had only received part of the whole. They both had opinions of the same person, but both were incomplete. I wonder what might have happened if the Pharisee and tax collector had gotten together, had listened deeper than the surface of their assumptions, had listened to stories on the other side of their biases, had stared into the human face across from them and discovered that in the end, we all stand in the need of divine grace. Ian Mobsy says “Grace is completely unfair because what we think is good and right and true matters little to God. Ultimately, not one of us matches up to the goodness of God and instead of kicking us out of the party for being unworthy, God says, “I will make you worthy.”

Do you see what that means? It means that the good religious work of the Pharisee is not able to justify him any more than the crazy sins of the tax collector can kick him out. The whole point of this parable, of almost all the parables, is that these two are both dead in the eyes of God, their good deeds and their sins can’t earn them or prevent them from salvation - they have no hope in the world unless there is someone who can raise the dead. Which is good news because Jesus came to raise the dead.”

The humility of Christ, the self-emptying of Christ, the pouring-out of Christ breaks down all of our “at least I’m not likes” and invites us into Christlikeness. The humility of Christ comes to us as a child, the power of raw vulnerability, and then invites us to do the same. Jesus says in Luke 18:17 “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Humble faith goes low. Not the lowliness of self-righteousness or the groveling of self-deprecation but the lowliness of a child filled with wonder and curiosity and ready to receive God’s grace fully. Ready to have their life completely transformed.