Joel 2:23-32, Psalm 65, 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18, Luke 18:9-14
The Pharisee is a patriot and the publican is a traitor. The Pharisee desires the Kingdom of God, literally, politically, directly; by his rules and disciplines he keeps himself clean and qualified for the Holy Kingdom when God comes back. But the publican is against the Kingdom of God just by his job. He collaborates with the Romans and he deals in dirty money and legalized extortion. So, while we are prejudiced against the Pharisees, the publican would not have been your friend.
Jesus sets this parable within the temple in Jerusalem, and the temple was the epicenter of the Kingdom of God. The prayers of Israel were launched upon the daily sacrifices—a lamb every morning and another every afternoon, to make atonement for Israel. As the shed blood covered the sins of Israel in God’s sight, the Levites could launch their prayers. They lit the incense, and their prayers rose up with the smoke. The Levites at the altar interceded for the nation, and whoever was attending could pray along, with their own personal vows, and supplications, and intercessions.
Such as this Pharisee. He’s not interceding or supplicating, he’s lifting his hands in thanksgiving. He stands by himself so he won’t get touched by anyone unclean, but he’s not a bad guy. He knows he is righteous. He fasts twice as often as he has to, and he tithes more than he needs too. We’d like him as a member of Old First, even if we’re irritated by his seeming arrogance.
Also praying is the publican, but off in the back, and unwelcome. He’s a bad man and he knows it. He’s praying head down, and beating his breast. His prayer is literally this: “O God, let the atonement be to me, the sinner.” He knows he’s guilty, and that he has no right to talk to God, so he’s pleading to be included in the virtue of that sacrifice. He is pictured by the Lord Jesus as miserable and deservedly so, deplorable, someone all of us would judge and none of us would justify.
But the Lord Jesus says that publican is the one who went home qualified to be in the Kingdom of God. Understand that it’s not because the publican earned his justification by his humility. It’s about what God is like and what God makes God’s kingdom like, already now, already now for the publican.
The Kingdom of God is not what you keep yourself clean for, but what declares the unclean clean, the Kingdom of God is God’s power in the world to make the unrighteous righteous, out of sheer grace, especially those miserable deplorables who good religion says do not deserve it.
That’s why the Lord Jesus does not tell us that the publican went home and changed his life. We’d like him to, and maybe he should, but that would counter the point. That would suggest that the Kingdom of God has to be proven by us, made true by us, by our building it or extending it by our good work. But the Kingdom of God is proven only by our need of it. Your misery. Your remorse. It’s only when you recognize that it judges you that its mercy rides down on your misery.
Let’s not be smug against the pharisee, nor make an antihero of the publican. Our culture values movie characters like the Joker. Our TV shows celebrate the bad guy as somehow the truer guy. That’s the easy out, and its own kind of self-righteousness. The point is how the Kingdom of God embraces us, and in its embrace we discover ourselves as always both—both pharisee and publican. You are always both. You are a sinner when you are a saint, and you’re a saint when you’re a sinner.
You know what it is to be proud and to exult. You know how to compare yourself to others and come off well, even if you do that only off by yourself. And you know also what it’s like to be miserable—mad at yourself for what you’ve said or done, remorseful for having hurt someone, ruining relationships, blowing it again. “Why do I keep making the same mistake, why do I keep falling into the same traps, stupid, stupid, stupid! Oh God, let this atonement cover me, a sinner.”
How do you see yourself in the world? How do you present yourself to your own existence? Can the Kingdom of God save you as you are in the world right now, both pharisee and publican? “Can I please have some integrity, can I see myself as justified? Can I stop needing to justify myself and what I’ve done, and believe that even in my misery I have been justified by the Kingdom for the Kingdom? Yes, you can, and the doorway out of your misery is through thanksgiving, and the way to thanksgiving is through forgiving. Let’s see how this works.
We take it from our epistle, St. Paul’s second letter to Timothy. Now, right off St. Paul sounds a bit boastful, like a Pharisee! “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day.” Well, St. Paul, good for you. Stand there with your hands raised up in thanksgiving!
Of course he’s got prison chains on him while he writes this—so he’s allowed to sound like this. And he does not exalt himself by degrading others. He admits that other people did him wrong, that they deserted him, but he asks that it not be counted against them. He wants grace for them too. He forgives them, and he has to forgive them every morning again as he wakes up in his prison cell and is reminded of their desertion. He has to practice his forgiveness every day, and he has to do that in order also to practice his thanksgiving every day. And that’s what gets him out of his daily misery.
The sober truth here is that your gratitude depends on being gracious. You won’t be thankful unless you’re forgiving others who do you wrong. There’s a ratio of how thankful you can be and how much you practice forgiveness, both extending it and accepting it. That’s a take home. You have a ratio in your life of your practice of thanksgiving and your practice of forgiveness, both given and received. Grace makes for gratitude and gratitude makes for grace.
You can forgive others who have done you wrong, and are still unfair to you, and more, you can forgive yourself as well. You accept the forgiveness of others, especially of God, as the way out of remorse and also arrogance. The process goes from misery to mercy to forgiveness to thanksgiving, and back again, when you pray God’s favor on those who do you wrong and even on those who judge you for your doing wrong.
Let me turn to the Psalm. It’s one of my favorites, Psalm 65. The Psalm imagines a great song of thanksgiving that rises from the depths of human experience and also from the earth itself, the landscape, the soil and the pastures and the hills. The praise of God arises from the roaring of the seas and in the clamor of the peoples, and all creation gives thanks to God for the gift of its existence.
This thanksgiving is not the instant messaging of why might you feel good today. It’s rather a long, slow, patient, persistent thanksgiving, night and day, year after year. It’s the slow thanksgiving that rises from the soil, when the farmer comes through with a plow and opens up the furrows to the air and to the sun and the rain, and the ground bears its life and gives its growth.
The Psalm envisions the tracks of God’s wagon-wheels cutting through the surface of the soil, and in the cuts of the wagon-tracks the richness rises up. These wagon-tracks in the soil are an image of the prayers of repentance in verse 3. It is the cutting open of repentance and forgiveness that allows for the new life of thanksgiving rising up. The plowing is the repentance, and the harvest is the thanksgiving, and in between we open up our lives in prayer and good works. In fact, it’s out of our humble remorse that our works of love can rise up and grow.
At the end of the parable the Lord Jesus says that all who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted. That is circular, and it’s both a judgement and a comfort. It means that your life is both humbled and exalted. Your life is broken in how you live it, but you are exalted in the love of God. Your good works and your actions for mercy and justice in the world may be humble in ordinary estimation and even hidden from recognition, but you are magnified in the Kingdom of God and you are exalted in the love of God.
Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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