Luke 18:9-14
A game that kids like to play is ‘would you rather’. Would you rather be a tiger or a bear? Would you rather eat a slug or a snail? Would you rather have wings or be invisible? The answers, of course, are guided by our perception of what is better or worse. I would choose to be a bear, because I enjoy both honey and sleep. Hibernating your way through the cold part of the year sounds great! You might make a different choice of course, because you have your own sense of what is preferable.
When it comes to the multitude of decisions we have to make every day in the normal course of life, some research has estimated that an adult will make around 35,000 choices every day. Of course, that can be taken with a pinch of salt, and it depends what you count as a decision as opposed to simply a reflexive action prompted by your surroundings and circumstances, but still, making choices is something we do a phenomenal amount of. You chose to come to church, to wear those clothes, what you had or didn’t have for breakfast, and so on. And all these small choices are informed by who we think we are, and who we want to be.
We put ourselves into categories, and differentiate ourselves from others by the choices we make. Or sometimes we do or say things because it is the same as what someone else does or says. We like to fit in, to have our group, to belong to something. Who we are is so often defined by comparison to someone else.
So we come to our gospel reading this morning, with the pharisee exclaiming, ‘thank goodness I’m not like that dude over there!’. Now, in a lot of ways, the Pharisee should be seen as the good guy. He is doing everything right. He knows he's obeying God's law. He is considered to be one of the most righteous people in society. He prays, he probably loves God, he spends his time immersed in scripture. He fasts, he tithes, he feels grateful that he has spiritual knowledge.
Tax collectors, on the other hand, were generally known to be greedy and untrustworthy. There's a reason why the tax collector didn't even dare to look up to heaven - he may well have been exploiting people, stealing, being dishonest with the money he worked with. Perhaps he had come to pray because he had been overcome with guilt.
Is it any surprise that the Pharisee is thankful to not be like such a person? Wouldn’t YOU be thankful to not be like that person? So why in this parable is the righteous Pharisee painted as the guy we don't want to emulate? What is it, really, that he is getting wrong?
It’s all in one word. Contempt. The Pharisee and tax collector both had made their choices in life, their hundreds of thousands of choices which had led them to this point, but somewhere along the way the Pharisee had lost sight of the fact that all of us rely entirely on the grace of God. He had written off the tax collector in his mind, seeing him only as a measurement of his own superiority.
We all know we aren’t perfect. I doubt there are many, if any, people in the world who would seriously claim that they were perfect. And yet, we can’t help but rank ourselves in comparison to each other. We may accept that we aren’t at the top of the scale, but doesn’t it feel pleasing to think that nevertheless, ‘I am somehow better than person X’. And with that move, we pass our small judgements on our neighbours, and start to forget that it is God who loves and saves each of us entirely through grace.
The truth is, we are all lost causes. The pharisee was working so hard at being holy, yet failing spectacularly because he credited his righteousness to himself rather than to God. In playing the comparison game, he was making assumptions about who was ‘in’ or ‘out’, and that is a dangerous game to play.
For all we like to think that God is on our side when we make choices, whenever we decide that others aren’t good enough and draw a line between themselves and us, God is almost certainly on the other side of that line… It’s a truth that we like to pretend isn’t there, but God’s love and forgiveness are bigger than we are ever comfortable with, and include the people who we identify ourselves in opposition to, or the people who we would think aren’t good enough.
It’s a tendency we’ve probably had since the dawn of time, that we assess ourselves to be better or worse than each other in all sorts of ways, rather than simply recognising the precious sanctity of personhood. And with this parable, Jesus is trying to get his listeners to realise that our judgements of each other only serve to break down relationships - between ourselves and others, and between ourselves and God.
This is the one key thing that the tax collector got right - he was focused on his own relationship with God. It wasn’t in a great place, he knew that he’d messed up, but it was his own heart that he was attending to, by leaning on the mercy of his creator. He’s a good example of someone putting the focus on their own spiritual journey.
Perhaps this is a good summary of the parable: the Pharisee thought he was at the end of his journey of spiritual growth because he’d arrived at the goal of holiness. Whereas the tax collector knew he had a very long way to go.
And I think this is what church is all about - we come because we gather to share together in the wonderful knowledge of being loved and forgiven as we navigate our paths with God. It is the great strength and the great challenge of a gathered community, that it asks us to put aside our desire to compare all the time, and holds us with all our sharp edges and pointy elbows in a unity of belovedness. So we gather to rejoice and learn together.
We come to encourage each other in our christian walk, to inspire and help and lift each other up, all the while being continually reminded that despite our varying choices, personalities, temperaments, skills and flaws, we are joined with a great commonality that supersedes our differences. None of us will ever hit 100% holiness. But all of us are children of our Creator. All of us can cry out to God and offer all that we have and are in thanksgiving and praise. We are each called to be family, to be grace, to be love to one another. What a challenge. What a gift!
So, what would you rather - be a pharisee or a tax collector? I wonder where you feel you are on your journey with God, and what the cry of your heart is? I wonder what choices you will make to continue to form you into a person of grace and generosity.
I wonder if we can learn to see each other with new eyes, eyes that do not compare or judge but see instead the beauty of each fellow traveller making their own choices on this wild and glorious journey through life with God.
Amen.
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