Sermon Sunday 23 October 2016
Lessons Joel 2: 23 – 32 2 Timothy 4: 6 – 8, 16 – 18 St Luke 18: 9 – 14
Prayer of Illumination
Let us pray.
Lord God, Sacred Spirit, grant us in faith patience, discernment and compassion. May we speak in love, seek after truth and celebrate the goodness in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
It was in my late teenage years that I began to read the New Testament in earnest. Now, thirty years later, some passages of Scripture continue to resonate deeply. One such passage is that briefest of conversations which Jesus has on the Cross with the two thieves. The New King James Bible reads:
Then one of the criminals who were hanged blasphemed Him, saying, ‘If you are the Christ, save Yourself and us.’
But the other, answering, rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation? And we
indeed justly, for we receive the due rewards for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.’
Then he said to Jesus, ‘Lord, remember me when You come into
Your kingdom.’
And Jesus said to him, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.’
That story lodged itself in my soul, but why? On reflection, at this distance, I suppose it was a number of things which struck a chord and which have settled very deep within me. First, it was the goodness of Jesus laid side by side with the destructiveness of the criminals, the thieves. Second, it was the generosity of Jesus towards two men who seemed unworthy of such goodness. They were being punished but Jesus showed them acceptance, love and forgiveness. Despite His own traumatic suffering in those final moments, He reached out saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.’ Third, it was the promise of Paradise, of heaven, of a peace, purity and wholeness this world cannot give.
This story meant and means a lot. Why should this be? Could it be that, within me, there was and is a craving, an insatiable craving to be touched by that goodness, to receive that acceptance, love and forgiveness and to taste that peace, purity and wholeness which this world cannot give? A couple of weeks ago I listened to an evangelical Christian talk passionately about humanity’s Fall and our need for salvation and redemption. He spoke of Adam and Eve, the serpent, the nakedness of Adam and God’s banishment of humanity from
Eden.
With all the fervor of evangelical Calvinism, he spoke of the need for God’s mercy, for atonement, for our restoration to God. The language of sixteenth century Reformation theology is not to my taste but I realized that, at psychological and spiritual level, what he was saying was essentially no different from what all religions say and what I want to say and need to hear.
In language which made sense in the sixteenth century, he was talking about the goodness of God, our primal need for acceptance, love and forgiveness and our desire for a peace, purity and wholeness this material world does not give.
In the apostle Paul’s Damascus Road conversion, he experienced a real and transforming encounter in which he felt God’s unconditional love. It came to him through Jesus; through a mystical experience of the Risen Christ. In the Second Letter to Timothy, in the name of Paul, the writer tells of standing alone in life: ‘All forsook me….but the Lord stood with me and strengthened me…’ Was it Paul’s sense of Christ’s unconditional acceptance that turned his life around?
The spiritual writer, Alastair McIntosh, tells the very moving story of a young friend who lives on the Isle of Lewis. As a serious young man, earnest in his faith, his friend took to heart the Calvinist teaching of double predestination, which is that, from before we are born, God has decided which of us will go to heaven and which to hell. The young man became convinced that he was not one of God’s elect and that he was going to hell. Tortured by this torturous theology, he resolved to commit suicide. In his room, as he prepared to take his own life, there was a knock at the door. He opened the door and there stood Jesus, the Risen Christ. In that moment, in that mystical experience which defies rational critique, a vision perhaps only he could have seen, the young
man felt God’s Presence and God’s unconditional love. The moment of danger had passed. His life has changed; his love of Jesus unshakable.
Our Gospel lesson this morning is the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. The biblical scholar, Joseph Klausner, says of Jesus that there is no parallel ‘to the remarkable art of His parables.’ Writing forty years ago, the
Jewish scholar, Geza Vermes, says:
Second to none in profundity of insight and grandeur of character, [Jesus] is in particular an unsurpassed master of the art of laying bare the inmost core of spiritual truth and of bringing every issue back to the essence of religion, the existential relationship of man and man, and man and God.
The essence of religion, of all world faiths, is our sense of aloneness. We are sentient, self-conscious beings with an unsatisfiable longing for inner wholeness. All religions seek to address that existential problem. On the Cross, through the suffering, Jesus lifted and transfigured the soul of one criminal, the one open to Him. In the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector we meet with the same Divine empathy, the same acceptance, love and forgiveness and the same promise of eternity as we see in those final moments on the Cross.
The Pharisee is one who trusts in himself and who despises others. The
Pharisee is a religious man, whose religious practice is there for all to see. He is secure in his lifestyle; he is entirely respectable. In a sense, there is nothing wrong with any of that: he is a decent man. By contrast, the tax collector is a social outcast, a traitor to the Jewish people, a ‘low life’, a man who put personal gain before the protection and dignity of his nation. He may have been rich, having collected too many taxes from ordinary people.
The characters in the parable are deliberately extreme. The Roman Catholic priest and scholar, Dominic Crossan, tried once in one of his books to modernize the story. He called it the Parable of a pope and a pimp. His publisher refused to print it! The Pharisee is thanking God for God’s grace, and that is surely fine. The crux of this parable is the goodness of Jesus and the acceptance, love and forgiveness, which He offered the tax collector. The tax collector was a man who had travelled to the temple, to the most sacred space in Jerusalem, the most sacred space on earth, to stand in the presence of the Holy of Holies, albeit at a distance, and to plead for mercy. Mercy in this context means atonement. The tax collector beat himself, an expression found only in one other place in the New Testament, in the Gospel of Luke, when the people beat themselves at the moment of Jesus’ death. The tax collector craved salvation or redemption. Believing that there is more to life than this world can give, he sought inner wholeness, the sanctity of God’s peace.
One of my heroes, Martin Luther King Jr, once said, ‘How hard it is for people to live without someone to look down upon – really to look down upon. It is not just that they feel cheated out of someone to hate. It is that they are compelled to look more closely into themselves and what they don’t like in themselves.’ In this parable of Pharisee and tax collector, Jesus was saying something profound about human nature: we like having people to look down on. It makes us feel better about ourselves. It helps us mask or hide our own weakness and brokenness. It helps us live a lie. Jesus is not so much exposing the piety of the Pharisee, which is, in fact, beautiful to see, but is exposing the
‘superiority’ of the Pharisee, which is, of course, the insecurity of the Pharisee.
Both Pharisee and tax collector are broken people but, in the parable, the tax collector is right with God because he knows he is broken, he knows his need of acceptance, love and forgiveness. It is through the cracks in our life that the light gets in. The Pharisee is kidding himself. Jean Vanier tells the story of a boy with a disability who was making his first Communion in a church in Paris. After the service, a family celebration with tea and coffee took place. The little boy’s uncle said to the boy’s mother, ‘Wasn’t it a beautiful service? The only sad part is that he didn’t understand very much.’ The boy heard what was said and, with tears welling up, he told his mother, ‘Don’t worry, Mummy, Jesus loves me.’
‘Love is not love,’ says Shakespeare, ‘Which alters when it alteration finds;
Oh no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
…..Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy cheeks and lips
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Of love, St Paul wrote:
Love is patient and kind; love envies no one; is never boastful, never conceited. never rude; love is never selfish, never quick to take offence. Love keeps no scores of wrong, takes no pleasure in the sins of others, but delights in the truth.
There is nothing that love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, its endurance.
Love will never come to an end.
The Parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is about your brokenness and mine, about the lies we tell ourselves regarding self-sufficiency and superiority, about the love of God – its extravagance – and about our deepest human need for acceptance, love and forgiveness and the inner wholeness and sacred peace and rest only God can give.
Amen.
1