A Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity
A Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity
1 Corinthians 15:1-11 & St. Luke 18:9-14
by William Klock
“Two men went up to the temple to pray,” Jesus said. The temple was the place where heaven and earth met. The place where men and women could go to be in the presence of God. Twice a day the priests would lead the people in prayers, at nine in the morning and at three in the afternoon, but people could go any time to pray. On this day, two men climbed the steps to the temple courts to pray. “One,” Jesus said, “was a Pharisee.” A Jew could pray anywhere—at home, wherever. But if anyone was going to go out of their way to pray at the temple, it was going to be a Pharisee. The temple was everything to them. They weren’t priests, but they lived their lives as if they were. So it was natural for a Pharisee to go to the temple to pray.
But there were two men this day, Jesus said, who went up to the temple. “The other was a tax collector.” If there was a polar opposite of the Pharisee, it was the tax collector. The Pharisees were devoted to God’s covenant and to his law. They kept every last jot and tittle of it. But the tax collectors. When Jesus mentioned a tax collector, his whole audience recoiled. They were the worst of the worst. There were “sinners”—that means Jews who made lifestyle that rejected God’s covenant with them—but then there were tax collectors. They were a special kind of sinner. The scum of the earth. They got rich sucking up to the gentile dogs while swindling their own people.
I expect that as Jesus described these two men, everyone had a similar mental picture. The Pharisee, dignified, wearing his fine clothes, making his way confidently up the steps to the temple complex, and striding just as confidently through the outer courts. Everyone knew him, everyone he passed greeted him respectfully as he made his way through the various gates and colonnades, further and further into the temple complex. But then the tax collector. Maybe it took him three times to make it up those steps, because twice he turned around, overwhelmed by guilt and shame. And on the far side of the court of the Gentiles, the soreg, the low wall that marked the boundary between the pure and impure, made him pause. He didn’t belong on the other side. But he’d already spent weeks tracking down the people he’d fleeced and making restitution to them. There was no going back. So he steeled himself and passed through, head down, trying to look unobtrusive, because he knew—he just knew—that everyone recognised him. And he went to one of the men selling lambs. And he picked one out, paid for it, took it in his arms—he wasn’t used to handling animals—and he got in line in the courtyard outside the sanctuary, waiting for a priest as the lamb struggled. And finally, a priest motioned him toward the altar. He presented the lamb, his sin offering, and as the priest held it, the tax collector laid his hands on it and slit its throat. And the priest collected the blood and poured it out at the base of the altar, then butchered the little lamb and burned its fat. Now he was pure. But there was still more to do. The tax collector went back out to the outer court and this time he bought a ram for a guilt offering. And a servant helped him with the ram as he, again, went back to stand in line for a priest. And, again, he placed his hands on the ram as the priest held it. And he killed it, and as with the lamb, the blood was poured out and the fat was burned. And his guilt was expiated. And now he could go and pray. And there he saw the Pharisee. The Pharisee had seen him, too. The Pharisee had seen him all along. As he’d chatted with a friend, the Pharisee had seen the tax collector buy his lamb. And he’d seem him again as he bought his ram. As he stood there praying, he’d seen the sacrifice. God may have forgiven the tax collector, but the Pharisee sure didn’t see him that way. He took a smug look back at the tax collector and, Jesus says, “he prayed in this way to himself, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: greedy, unjust, immoral, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get.’”
And the tax collector. Jesus says he “stood a long way off, not even wanting to lift his eyes to heaven. He beat his breast and said, ‘God, be merciful to me, sinner that I am.’” He’d gone through the formal actions of forgiveness, but he knew that mere formalism would never see him reconciled to God. And so, after offering his sacrifices, he knelt humbly and prayed the words of Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me, O God—the psalm goes on—according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.” He knew. God isn’t a vending machine. Offering a lamb isn’t like pushing B4 and absolution drops into the slot for you to take. He knew the words of the psalm. David went on to sing, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” And so the tax collector knelt—and without any presumption—threw himself on the grace of God. And, as Jesus has said elsewhere, all of heaven rejoiced over this repentant sinner—even as the Pharisee scowled at him.
And Jesus said to the people, “Let me tell you, he—the tax collector—was the one who went back to his home vindicated by God, not the other.” That had to make some people angry. It was one thing to grant—even if a little grudgingly—that there was something good about a repentant tax collector. Okay, he offered his lamb and his ram and his contrition was obviously real. But dissing the Pharisee? That was too much. But you see, this is exactly why Jesus told this story. Luke introduces this episode saying, “Jesus told this next parable against those who trusted in their own righteous standing and despised others.” And so Jesus explains: “Don’t you see? People who exalt themselves will be humbled, and people who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Going to the temple, standing before the Lord, and singing out a litany of your own pious greatness—that’s not pleasing to the Lord. That’s a good way to find yourself humbled on the last day. And having this in mind that makes this bigger than the Pharisees. Maybe they were the worst offenders, but Jesus gets to the heart of Israel’s problem and exposes it. They knew they were “in”. They knew that when the Day of the Lord came, judgement would fall on everyone else and that they would be vindicated and go on to live in his presence in the age to come, they knew this because they faithfully bore all the markers of God’s covenant. They were circumcised, they kept the sabbath, and they ate the right foods—they kept God’s law. That meant they were righteous…or so they thought. But Jesus sort of asks here: “Where is your heart?”
This is what the prophets had been asking Israel—and warning her about—for centuries. Reminding the people that formalism doesn’t cut it. Yes, God required sacrifices. He’d given them a law. But obedience was supposed flow from a humble heart overflowing with gratitude for God’s grace. It was supposed to be rooted in faith—faith in a God who had called a childless pagan named Abram and blessed him beyond anything he deserved; faith in a God who called a sorry and miserable group of slaves out of Egypt and blessed them beyond anything they deserved. But Israel got complacent, and comfortable, and forgot the source of her blessings. Instead of trusting God, she trusted in horses and chariots and kings—and even foreign gods. She thought mere formalism would satisfy God’s requirement for holiness. And her heart became hard, idolatrous, and self-righteous. So for all their love of torah, the hearts of the Pharisees were far from God—and in that, they represented most of the people in Israel. They exalted themselves and presumed upon God, when they should have been humble before him, thanking him for his grace. When judgement day came, they were ready to sing that litany of their righteousness: We’re not like other people. We fast and we tithe. We’re circumcised and we keep the sabbath. And God would high-five them and the invite them along to go smite the sinners and tax collectors and gentiles. Their hearts will filled with pride, not faith.
Habakkuk was one of those prophets that had warned Israel in the days before the exile. “Look at the proud!” he said, “His spirit is presumptuous and is not right, but the righteous shall live by faith.” Pride and faith, Brothers and Sisters, are polar opposites.
Habakkuk looked around him lamented to the Lord:
O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see iniquity,
and why do you idly look at wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law is paralyzed,
and justice never goes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
so justice goes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1:1-4)
Wickedness, idolatry, injustice—pride. Judah no longer trusted in the Lord and it showed. The heart of the people was far from God and those who were humble, who did lean on his grace were trampled under foot. And Habakkuk knew it couldn’t go on like this forever. He knew the Lord’s judgement on a wicked and faithless and proud people had to come soon. And so he cried out to the Lord and the Lord assured him: “The righteous shall live by faith.” In other words, the righteous will live the way they always do, regardless of circumstances: by faith in the grace and mercy and goodness of God—not in pride, but by faith.
Pride is insidious. It can take any form in order to push out faith. The Pharisees were, in most ways, so close—but in them pride twisted faith itself. I wonder what Habakkuk would think of our world. We now have a whole season devoted to pride. At first it was a month, but now it just seems to go on and on: Pridetide, the unholy parody of Trinitytide. At least the Pharisees were prideful for their good works. Today, the wicked and perverted announce their sins with pride and their “ally” lackies signal their virtue as loudly as possible. And the wealthy and the powerful, governments and corporation and businesses big and small join in the litany of pride and woe to anyone who dares to dissent and on whom the scorn and wrath of the Pride Pharisees falls. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The proud are always convinced of their own righteousness and standing before God.
And yet Jesus told so many stories in which the proud—so sure of their righteous standing—ended up finding themselves in the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing their teeth, while the tax collectors and sinners—having discovered the mercy and grace of God, having repented in faith—found themselves welcomed into the feast. Again, pride and faith are polar opposites, mutually exclusive.
And I think this is why the church, for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, has coupled this Gospel about the Pharisee and the tax collector with St. Paul’s affirmation of faith at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 15. He begins with the gospel, with the good news about Jesus. He writes: “Let me remind you, Brother [and Sisters], about the good news which I announced to you.” I love the way it works in Greek. Paul talks about the gospel that he gospelled to them. The gospel is the best news ever. It’s the news that changes everything. It’s the news that dispels—or, at any rate, it should dispel—any ideas we have about being proud of ourselves. Because Paul goes on and says, “You received this good news, and you’re standing firm on it, and you are saved through it, if you hold fast the message I announced—I gospelled—to you. Unless it was for nothing that you believed.”
These were men and women who had stood on all sorts of things. Some of them were Jews and once they had stood on that: on their circumcision, on their sabbath keeping, on their general keeping of torah. Some of them were Gentiles. They’d stood on their pagan gods, or on the emperor, or on their philosophies. But then Paul came and he gospelled the gospel. He announced the good news and it changed everything. Or, at least it did for a time. And then pride started creeping back in. It’s insidious. And as pride crept in, it pushed faith in the good news out. And Paul says of that good news: “What I handed on to you at the beginning, you see, was what I received, namely this: The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, he was buried, he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, he was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve, then he was seen by over five hundred brothers and sisters all at once, most of whom are still with us, though some fell asleep, then he was seen by James, then by all the apostles.”
The good news is that Jesus died and Jesus was raised and that it happened just as God had promised in the scriptures. Jesus led his people in a new exodus and in that exodus he revealed God’s mercy and grace and God’s power and might and glory. He revealed God’s faithfulness to his promises. In Jesus’ death sins are forgiven and in his resurrection the life of God, his new creation began. If the exodus from Egypt and all it revealed about God and its annual remembrance every year in the Passover could dispel Israel’s pride and fill the people with faith in their God, how much more should this new exodus from sin and death dispel our pride and bring us humbly in faith to God through Jesus? If we will only believe and trust.
That was Paul’s problem. He was filled with pride. He refused and refused and refused. He persecuted the church. But as a testimony to the patient grace of God, Paul goes on. He writes, “And last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared even to me.” It’s hard to say exactly what he means here when he says “untimely born”. The word in question is only used this one time in the New Testament, but it refers to a premature birth. It could be a miscarriage or premature birth where the baby lives, but it could also refer to a child monstrously deformed by having been born premature. It may be that some people in Corinth who didn’t like Paul called him a monster because of his appearance and Paul is humble owning the accusation. But the key thing, what Paul’s getting at is the risen Jesus—not just a vision of Jesus but the real, live living Jesus—appeared to him last of all and Paul wants to stress that he didn’t deserve it. “I’m the least of the apostles,” he writes. “In fact, I don’t really deserve to be called ‘apostle’ at all, because I persecuted God’s church. But I am what I am because of God’s grace, and his grace to me wasn’t wasted.”
Paul has been the epitome of the proud Pharisee. And then he met Jesus on the road to Damascus and every last bit of his pride came crashing down around him. Seeing Jesus alive was the proof that the gospel was true and if the gospel was true, none of the things in which Paul had prided himself mattered any more. The only thing that mattered was faith—faith in Jesus the Messiah who died and rose again. Paul knew he didn’t deserve that vision of Jesus. He didn’t deserve the grace of God. But there it was. God had given his son to die, so that Paul, the proud Pharisee could live. And ditto for everyone in the church in Corinth. God gave his son to die so that those other Jews there could live. He gave his son to die so that soldier proud of his devotion to Caesar or the prostitute proud of her devotion Aphrodite or the witch proud of her magic or the philosopher proud of his philosophy could live. Each one of them, confronted with the gospel had their pride dispelled and that same gospel filled them with faith in the living God and his son who died and rose again. And forever after they came to him in humility to fall on his grace and to praise him for his merciful lovingkindness. Even Paul, after all he accomplished as a missionary apostle, writes to them: “I am what I am because of the grace of God, and his grace to me wasn’t wasted. On the contrary, I worked harder than all of them—though it wasn’t me, but God’s grace which was within me. So whether it was me or them, that was the way we announced it, and that was the way you believed.” Paul won’t even take credit for what had happened in Corinth as a result of the gospel being preached. It wasn’t Paul’s skill or his reasoning or his apologetics. It was the grace of God.
Brothers and Sisters, be captivated by the grace of God on display at the cross. There God displayed his glory and that glory ought to dispel every last bit of pride we have—whatever it is we take pride in. The gospel shines so brightly, it exposes the things in which we take pride as filthy rags in comparison. And when pride is gone, then the gospel—this good news of God’s saving grace, this good news about the God who humbled himself to take our form and to die for us so that we, his enemies can be his friends again, good news of the god who gave his own life to forgive our sins, that good news ought to fill us with faith overflowing. So Brothers and Sisters, hear the good news about Jesus this morning. How he died and rose again for you. Not because you are so great, but because he loves you—his precious creation so much—hear that good news in the scriptures and in the liturgy and when you come to his Table. Let it dispel all pride; be humbled by the gospel, and be filled instead with faith. In the midst of a broken word, faith in the living God will begin to set things to rights, not pride in ourselves. Faith in the living God, not pride in ourselves, is our real and lasting source of hope.
Let’s pray: Lord God, you declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: mercifully grant to us such a measure of your grace, that we, running the way of your commandments, may receive your gracious promises, and be made partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.