Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
“Humbled and Exalted” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Psalm 84:1-7, NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 18:9-14, NRSVUE)
Way back in medieval times, when I was in high school, the State of New Jersey required students to take nine weeks of driver’s education — not behind the wheel, mind you, but in the classroom. If you wanted to get experience driving an actual automobile, you had to do that on your own. And this struck me as odd.
Don’t get me wrong: learning about what all of those street signs mean, and who’s required to yield the right of way in different circumstances, and which direction you’re supposed to point your front wheels when you’re parallel parking uphill versus downhill is important, but trying to figure out how to do some things without actually doing them certainly isn’t ideal (you know — things like surgery or, in this case, driving); at the very least it can make them seem a bit abstract and thus uninteresting to some.
One day my driver’s ed teacher was explaining what to do if you’re out on the road and your car begins to skid: First, take your foot off the gas pedal; and second, steer in the direction you want your front wheels to go. If I’m being honest with you, he probably said more than that but that was all I remember hearing because I may have been otherwise occupied doodling in my notebook or talking to the person sitting next to me. Thankfully, I never found myself in such circumstances whilst in the driver’s seat — well, until I did, that is.
About twenty years later, my friend Fredd and I took an all-day, hands-on driving class — it was somewhere on the continuum between defensive driving and Formula One, but leaning more toward the latter. Our instructors were all professional race car drivers and their mission for the day was to help us push cars right up to the point where all heck was about to break loose and then teach us how to rein them back in again. This was going to be fun.
After a session of classroom training (which, I’m not gonna lie, seemed to take forever and felt like high school all over again) we finally got to drive something: in this case, a pickup truck — one with intentionally bald tires on a circular track that had been sprayed with vegetable oil and then subjected to a barrage of sprinklers in order to render it as slick as possible. We were told to take the vehicle up to forty miles an hour at which time the instructor would pull the emergency brake, throwing us into a skid from which we had to recover without running off the road. And, lucky me, I got to go first.
As the speedometer approached forty, my hands were sweating profusely in anticipation of was about to happen; and when we finally hit forty the instructor yanked the e-brake, just as he’d promised.
It’s difficult to explain what I experienced next; time began to move more slowly and I swear I could hear the voice of my high school driver’s ed teacher telling me, “Foot off the gas” and “Turn the steering wheel the way you want the front wheels to go.” And then I began to wonder what other wisdom he might have shared with us that day so long ago.
I say this because once I’d executed steps one and two (to absolute perfection, I might add) the vehicle just skidded in the opposite direction. Not long after this I ran off the pavement and onto the infield grass, at which time we came to a rather abrupt stop.
As the instructor, my two fellow students who were watching from the back seat and I sat there cleaning grass and dirt off ourselves, I got some clarity about what I’d missed in that driver’s ed class two decades earlier — which, of course, was step three.
Apparently, after you’ve taken your foot off the gas and aimed the front wheels in the direction you want to go and the car begins sliding in that direction, you’re supposed to turn the steering wheel back the other way. And then, when the car begins sliding in the opposite direction, you’re supposed to keep repeating steps two and three until the car eventually stabilizes. In retrospect, I realized that this would have been good to know. At the end of the day, as I learned the hard and humiliating way, this exercise was about finding balance — and that’s what today’s gospel passage from Luke seems to be about too.
As it begins, Jesus are the disciples are still making their way toward Jerusalem when they run across “some who trusted in themselves and regarded others with contempt.” Jesus decides to share with these folks a parable — one that takes them to task for their behavior. This is going to be fun too.
He tells them about a Pharisee and a tax collector who go up to the temple to pray. We then hear what the former offers-up as a prayer. Now far be it from me to judge what someone else decides to bring before God, but Jesus’s clear implication here is that the Pharisee’s prayer misses the mark.
Sure, he begins by giving thanks to God (and that’s generally a good thing to do), but what he gives thanks for is the fact (at least it seems like a fact to him) that he’s better than a whole bunch of other people; thieves, rogues, adulterers and, of course, the aforementioned tax collector (and that doesn’t feel like such a good thing to do).
And if this isn’t quite bad enough, the Pharisee’s prayer (such as it is) actually gets even worse. I say this because, after giving thanks to God, he cites the things he does that make him better than other people: he fasts twice a week, he gives a tenth of his income. And while things like this may help him win the award for Church Member of the Year, they don’t sound very worshipful or grateful. Here’s a helpful prayer tip to do with whatever you will: You probably shouldn’t thank God for making you better than other people, but you probably shouldn’t take credit for making yourself better than other people either.
Standing far off on the other side of the temple is the tax collector. Unlike the Pharisee who doesn’t seem to want for self-confidence, this tax collector can’t even bring himself to look up to heaven because he feels he’s not worthy. Instead he beats his chest and cries out, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (a sight that had to be a little uncomfortable for the other folks in the Temple to behold). Jesus then tells his listeners that “this man [the tax collector] went home justified rather than the other [the Pharisee]; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” And here endeth the parable.
None of this should be surprising because we’ve heard it before. Ever since Mary, waiting for Jesus to be born, first sung about the God who had “brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly” and had “filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” way back in chapter one, Luke has constantly made reference to this kind of inversion of the worldly order of things —one that Jesus came here to implement. And you definitely don’t want to get caught on the wrong side of that when it goes down.
So, it’s only natural that we would read today’s story and ask ourselves whether we’re the Pharisee or the tax collector, whether we’re on the right side or the wrong side. The problem in doing this, though, is that neither character comes across as straightforwardly relatable or likable; the truth is, they’re both kinda complicated, as people tend to be.
The Pharisee, at least on the surface, appears righteous enough — you know, the kind of person you’d want sitting here on Sunday morning; he’s pious; he follows God’s commandments to the letter; he fills out his pledge card every year, turns it in on time and makes good on it; he does all the right things. But the minute he opens his mouth and bares his soul — blithely thanking God for making him better than everyone else, and then detailing the things he does to make himself better than everyone else — his seeming righteousness is revealed for what it really is: self-righteousness. Who on earth would want to be like this Pharisee?
But are we more like him than we really want to admit? Come on, be honest — how often do we look at that person who doesn’t worship in a church like ours or who doesn’t vote for the candidate we do or or who doesn’t support the causes we support or who doesn’t understand the world quite the way we do, and see them as less-than, see us as more-than, see ourselves as earning our way into heaven while thinking (perhaps even hoping) that they’ll end up somewhere else?
So let’s be like the tax collector instead, right? Let’s throw ourselves on God’s mercy and, in so doing, wipe the slate clean and secure our spot in heaven — after all, Jesus himself says that this tax collector is the one who goes home justified. But this is Jesus telling this story so could it really be that simple?
We have to keep in mind that this tax collector isn’t the ancient equivalent of an agent for the IRS; he’s a participant in — and a beneficiary of — a system that’s corrupt from top to bottom. The people of Israel had to pay exorbitant taxes to Rome to fund, among other things, the army that occupied Israel — so the people were, in essence, forced to fund their own oppression.
But the Romans couldn’t possibly collect all of these taxes on their own, so they farmed-out the work to certain Israelites in the form of tax collection franchises. These tax collectors were responsible for paying a certain amount to Rome based on the population of their territory, and anything beyond that they were able to gather they could keep for themselves.
I probably don’t need to tell you that this structure incentivized the tax collector to reap all that they could by any means necessary — so they were not only participating in a scheme that in and of itself violated Jewish law (you know, God’s commandments), they were also engaging in some pretty egregious behavior to profit by that scheme. What I’m saying is that this guy in our story had a lot to make amends for — and let’s be honest, we all do to some extent too. Good on him for throwing himself on God’s mercy; perhaps we ought do the same.
But what’s not clear from the story is whether he changes the way he lives his life after he leaves the temple. Does he give up his terrible tax collecting gig and find an honest means of making a living, or does he just go back to his old ways? I’d like to think it’s the former (and I bet Jesus does too). It’s one thing to head home justified —having received God’s grace and mercy — but it’s quite another to act like it.
And so as we look to locate ourselves in this story — both where we are and where we seek to be — we’re left with a bit of a dilemma. The Pharisee does the right things for the wrong reasons; he follows the law in the hopes of earning God’s favor, failing to see that this is neither the point of the law nor how God’s favor works. The tax collector does the wrong things and rightly seeks God’s mercy, but does he truly repent — does he actually change the way he lives his life when he returns home in light of the fact that he has God’s mercy?
So maybe, just maybe we should look to end up somewhere in the middle — between the Pharisee and the tax collector; and maybe, that’s where we might find our truest selves:
by trying to do the right things for the right reasons;
by following God’s commandments as best we can (Jesus, it should be noted, never lets us off the hook for that) but realizing we’ll never be able do so perfectly;
by living as though we already have God’s favor (because we do), instead of constantly seeking to earn God’s favor (because we don’t have to);
by trusting in God’s mercy more than we trust in our own abilities;
by striving to be righteous without being self-righteous.
Because discipleship, as is the case with so many things in life, really is about finding the right balance.