Text:
Luke 18:9-14
A Sermon by Jack Cabaness
Twenty-third
Sunday after Pentecost October
27, 2013
There’s
a story about a Sunday School teacher who taught the Parable of the Pharisee
and the Tax collector to her class, and then, without any apparent
self-awareness or sense of irony, ended the class by saying, “All right,
children. Let’s say a prayer, and
thank God that we’re not like that Pharisee.”[i]
It
is easier to hear this parable if we pretend that the Pharisee is not like
us. I must confess that I have my
own tendency to sugarcoat this parable.
It’s much easier for me to listen to this parable if I imagine that the
Pharisee is a real smug, holier-than-thou type,
who is always putting other
people down and that the tax collector is basically a good and humble person
who only got into the tax collecting business to pay for his wife’s medical
bills and to send their oldest child to college.
But
if we want to experience the full impact of this story that Jesus told,
we need to take it straight
up, without any sugar. The truth is
that the Pharisee really is a good man.
It’s the Pharisee who pays for his wife’s medical bills and the oldest
child’s college tuition and who still faithfully tithes. It’s the Pharisee who works two jobs to
get all the bills paid, and who still fasts during the lunch breaks.
And
it is the tax collector who drives up to the Temple Mount in his stretch
limousine, the floor of which is littered with mini bar bottles and other
evidence of the previous night’s excessive carousing--all of it, of course, at
tax payer expense.[ii]
What
makes this parable difficult to accept, what makes it truly shocking for Jesus
to say that the tax collector went home justified but the Pharisee did not, is
that the Pharisee really is every bit as good as he claims to be, and that the
tax collector really is every bit as bad as he claims to be.
We
sometimes imagine that the Pharisees were exceedingly legalistic, that for them
justification was mostly a matter of good works. We assume that there wasn’t much room for grace in their
theology. But biblical scholars
like E. P. Sanders and others have helped us to understand that those
stereotypes weren’t entirely accurate.[iii]
The
Pharisees were careful students of the scriptures. They could quote chapter and verse out of Deuteronomy, when
God is granting Israel the land of Canaan, particularly the part where the Lord
says, “Do not say to yourselves, it is because of our righteousness that God is
giving us the land to possess.”
(Deuteronomy 9:5ff) The
Pharisees understood themselves to be the chosen people, not because of any
inherent goodness on their part, but because of God’s grace. God had graced their lives so that they
might be a blessing to the whole world.
They knew that. They
understood that.
And
so when this Pharisee goes up to the temple to pray, he goes there in a spirit
of gratitude. But at that precise
moment, the stretch limousine pulls up to the Temple Mount and out stumbles the
tax collector. The tax collector
was the ultimate traitor, someone of Jewish birth who collaborated with Rome to
extort money from God’s people.
And the tax collector lived off the excess.
The
Pharisee’s mood darkens. But then
he remembers where he is. He is
standing in the Temple Mount, a powerful symbol of God’s enduring presence.
He may have even recalled a
passage of scripture from the prophet Joel:
You
will know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord your
God—no other exists; never again will my people be put to shame. (Joel
2:27)
The Pharisee takes
heart. That tax collector standing
over there, that collaborator with Rome, does not have the ultimate power to
put God’s people to shame. Even
though the Pharisee has to work hard for everything he has, while the tax
collector lives a life of leisure and ease, there is coming a day when there
will be abundant rain and the threshing floor will be full and God’s people
will never be put to shame by the likes of that tax collector. (Joel 2:23-24, 27)
And
so the Pharisee prays, and in his prayer he gives thanks to God. I imagine the Pharisee casting a
sidelong glance at the tax collector and saying essentially, “There but for the
grace of God go I.” The Pharisee
is thankful that he has not betrayed those closest to him, and he is especially
thankful that, unlike the tax collector, he has not betrayed his entire people.
I
could be wrong in my portrayal of the Pharisee. After all, the Gospel writer Luke introduced this parable by
saying that “Jesus told this parable to certain people who had convinced
themselves that they were righteous and who looked on everyone else with
disgust.” (Luke 18:9) And when the Pharisee prays, he does
only pray about himself. Perhaps
he really is smug, arrogant, and self-congratulatory, vainly trying to conceal
his self-righteousness by addressing his prayer to God. Maybe sometimes even when we say,
“There but for the grace of God go I,” what we really mean is “Dear God, I
thank you that I am not like other people.”
But
if I listen only to the parable that Jesus told without the benefit of Luke’s
introduction, I hear the prayer of a faithful and frustrated man who resents
the way that his people have been treated. I hear the prayer of a man who did almost everything right. Almost. What he did wrong was that he presumed to know the limits of
God’s grace. He presumed that he
was more entitled, somehow more deserving of God’s grace, than the tax
collector. When the Pharisee casts
a sidelong glance at the tax collector and says essentially, “There but for the
grace of God go I,” he is saying more than he can possibly know.
Many
people attribute the saying “There but for the grace of God go I”
to the English Puritan John
Bradford. He was imprisoned in the
Tower of London during the reign of Mary Tudor, a.k.a. “Bloody Mary.” It was a time when many Protestants
were being put to death. John
would watch as other prisoners were taken to their death, and he would exclaim,
“There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford.”
But
for John Bradford, it was only a matter of timing. When he said, “There but for the grace of God goes John
Bradford,” he was not trying to imply that somehow his life was more graced
than someone else’s. He was simply
saying that by the grace of God, he, John Bradford, had another day to live. But eventually came that morning when
John Bradford himself was taken out of his cell in the Tower of London to the
place of public execution where he would be burned at the stake.[iv]
If
we say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” because we are pondering the
mysteries of life, that’s one thing.
When I was in college I had a friend who flew on Pam Am Flight #103 the
day before the tragic crash over Lockerbie, Scotland. “There but for the grace of God go I.” Even then, I don’t think we want to
take that famous saying too literally.
Do we really mean to imply that those who lost their lives in a plane
crash were outside the reach of God’s grace, or would we rather affirm with the
Apostle Paul that in life and in death we belong to God? (Romans
14:8)
And
if we are ever tempted to say “There but for the grace of God go I” because
somehow we think that we are better than someone else or somehow more deserving
of God’s grace than someone else, then we especially need to be careful. In that case, we haven’t understood
what grace means. Because the
moment that we think that we are entitled to grace, then it is no longer grace!
Our
chancel choir sang as their anthem last week the old gospel hymn “Standin’ in
the Need of Prayer.”
It’s
me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.
Not
my brother, not my sister, but it’s me, O Lord,
standin’
in the need of prayer.
Notice
that there is no comparison with the brother or the sister. The singer does not sing out, “Dear
God, I might mess up sometimes, but I’m so thankful that I’m not like my
brother.” That’s not the spirit of
the song!!
The
second verse is much like the first:
It’s
me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.
Not
the preacher, not the deacon, but it’s me, O Lord,
standin’
in the need of prayer.
Now, this particular preacher, I’ll tell you, is
standing in the need of prayer.
But please don’t presume that I am somehow more in need of prayer than
you are, and I won’t presume that about you, either.
The
proper prayer, the proper song, is simply:
It’s
Me, it’s Me, it’s Me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.
All
glory and praise be to our God.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Jack Cabaness, Pastor
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Westminster, Colorado
[i] Fred Craddock, Luke in the Interpretation Commentary Series (Louisville:
John Knox Press, 1990), 211.
[ii] I’m in debt to the late Robert Farrar Capon for the
creative anachronisms. See Robert
Farrar Capon, The Parables of Grace (Grand Rapids: Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 1988, 1996), 179.
[iii] E. P. Sanders makes this argument in his books such
as Jesus and Judaism and Paul
and Palestinian Judaism.
[iv] Bartlett’s Book of Quotations credits John Bradford with the saying “There but for
the grace of God go I.” I’ve
gleaned other facts about Bradford’s life slowly over the years, but I must
confess that I also relied on Wikipedia to check my memory. “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
