Losing Your Religion
Luke 18:9-14
Do you remember the movie Titanic? Sandy and I saw it in the theater back when we were dating. For some reason we brought along her five-year-old nephew John, who patiently endured every minute of the movie’s three-hour-and-15 minute running time. For the sake of comparison, the actual Titanic sank in just 2 hours and 40 minutes.
I did not enjoy the movie much more than John did, but probably for different reasons. To be fair, I’m not one for melodramas, and Titanic is as much a melodrama as it is a disaster film. Also, Titanic, a technically brilliant but hollow picture, undeservedly received the Best Picture Oscar over the brilliant and timeless L.A. Confidential, a personal favorite.
Those biases acknowledged, I will admit that watching the massive luxury liner split in two and sink beneath the icy waters of the North Atlantic did instill a kind of morbid thrill, but I just could not get past the cartoonishly evil character of Rose’s fiancé played by Billy Zane. Arrogant, envious, and cowardly, with no redeeming features whatsoever, Zane’s portrayal of the villainous Cal Hockley has all the subtlety and complexity of Wile E. Coyote trying to blow up the Road Runner with a stack of dynamite. I half expected him to leap from the sinking ship and hover in mid air with a look of—“Oh no, not again!”—before plummeting into the ocean.
I see a lot of Cal Hockley in the Pharisee that we meet in today’s Scripture passage. Proud, arrogant, and cartoonishly self-righteous, he is more caricature than character. “Lord, I thank you that I am not like this degenerate over here. I am your humble servant, the most humble in all the land. No one outdoes me in humility.”
We’re used to thinking of the Pharisees as opponents of Jesus. They’re the bad guys in the black hats that the audience boos and hisses at when they walk out on stage. They wield the law of Moses like a weapon, using it to try to embarrass and entrap Jesus. They are legalists who care nothing for the spirit of the law and the principles undergirding God’s commandments, only the strict and unflinching application of the letter of the law. They are hypocrites, demanding uncompromising adherence to the letter of the law for others while allowing themselves leeway when the law is inconvenient.
Our familiarity with all of the negative portrayals of the Pharisees that we see in the Gospels immediately predisposes us to find them suspect. In fact, beyond the Bible, the word “Pharisee” has come to denote a self-righteous or hypocritical person. And yet, in their own eyes, the Pharisees were the good guys, the upholders of tradition, the defenders of orthodoxy. It was Jesus who was the radical nonconformist, repeatedly violating the law and the sabbath by healing the sick on a day set aside by the Lord for rest.
It’s interesting that the setting for the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is the temple in Jerusalem because if someone with the religious habits of the Pharisee—someone who fasts twice a week and who gives a tenth of his income to the church—stepped through the door of a church and parked himself in a pew up front, the pastor of that church would be delighted. That’s someone who would come to Bible study every week, sing in the choir, volunteer in various church ministries, not to mention give a tenth of his income to the church. With a few more people like that, you’d be in business.
Whether by the external standards of Jesus’ day or our own, the Pharisee has it all together. He is doing things the right way. He is religious. He is righteous. He is moral. He reads Scripture, he prays, he tithes. He is checking all the boxes. Well, all but one.
For all his prayer detailing his righteous living, the Pharisee seems blissfully unaware that he is, in fact, already dead. He is dead and in need of resurrection, because all his righteous acts—and, to be sure, they are righteous—have not earned him any bonus points, have not helped him climb a heavenly ladder to get any closer to God. If anything, they have blinded him to the fact that he is dead and in need of resurrection. And yet he carries on as if his good works were anything more than dust and ashes.
By contrast, the man beside him, the tax collector, knows full well that he is dead and that only the God who resurrects the dead can save him. I will explain. Whether in Roman-occupied Judea of the first century or our own time, no one likes paying taxes. But in the Judea of Jesus’ day, tax collectors were especially reviled, and for good reasons.
For all his prayer detailing his righteous living, the Pharisee seems blissfully unaware that he is, in fact, already dead.
First of all, tax collectors were Jews contracted by the Romans. That is, they collected taxes on their fellow Jews—taxes that helped maintain the Roman occupation of Jewish lands. That alone would have made them unpopular.
But in addition to being perceived as collaborators with Rome, tax collectors were also regarded as crooked opportunists. Tax collectors paid for the privilege of collecting tax. Why would someone want to do that? Because tax collecting was a lucrative business. Subjects of Rome didn’t fill out their Form 1040 and send it, along with a check, to Rome’s version of the IRS. Instead, Rome assigned a tax collector a specific sum of money to collect in his district. However, if he raised more than that sum, the excess amount was his to keep.
So, for example, if the tax quota was $1,000, but the tax collector managed to collect $1,500, he could keep the extra $500 for himself. Thus, tax collectors had an incentive to squeeze from people as much tax as possible. Seen in that light, you can understand why elsewhere in the Gospels the Pharisees are appalled that Jesus dines with “tax collectors and sinners.”
The tax collector in the parable knows that he is a sinner. He has robbed from the poor and lined his own pocket. He knows that he is dead in sin and has no hope of resurrecting himself. Ashamed even to look up, he beats his breast and begs God for mercy.
Despite the fact that the Pharisee and the tax collector have both come to the temple to pray, they are opposites. Their prayers are inverse images of each other. Outwardly the Pharisee is a righteous man, a well respected man, but inwardly he has lost the plot. He believes that he is the main character in the story—the noble hero—and that God is in the audience, applauding his splendid performance. He is so unaware of his dependence on God that his prayer is essentially his reminding God how fortunate God is to have such a distinguished worshiper as him. “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” Boy, God, aren’t I wonderful? You must feel so blessed to have me on your team!
By contrast, the tax collector stands far off. He won’t come near to where the Pharisee is praying, probably because he doesn’t feel that he deserves to stand in the presence of one so outwardly righteous as a Pharisee. He feels shame. He knows guilt. Unlike the Pharisee, he doesn’t present God with his spiritual résumé. He doesn’t boast about what he is doing; he confesses what he has done. He cries, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”
Now, there’s an inherent tension in preaching this passage—a tension between the reputation Pharisees had in the first century and the reputation they have for us today. In Judean society, Pharisees were thought of as righteous. They were religious leaders, authorities on how to live according to the law of Moses. But of course to us, because we view the Pharisees through their contempt for Jesus, we see them not so much as righteous but as self-righteous, as hypocrites. We see that underlying their love for the law is a self-deceiving pride. They don’t love God’s commands for their own sake but for how keeping them makes them feel set apart and above the common people.
The Pharisee in this parable is a case in point. He sees himself as set apart from thieves, rogues, adulterers, and tax collectors. You know, all those filthy, faithless sinners. I’m sure when he prays he doesn’t clasp his hands because he’s too busy patting himself on the back. We listen to his prayer and have to stifle our laughter. There’s absolutely no self-awareness. No humility.
And therein lies the danger, not for him, but for us. It would be all too easy to take from this parable a simple lesson in the importance of humility. Jesus even comes right out and says it: “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” There you have it! Humble yourself. Don’t humble brag like the Pharisee. Don’t exalt yourself. Don’t worry, be humble. Be like the tax collector.
The problem with that interpretation, however, is that it follows the same logic that the Pharisee uses against the tax collector but just switches the roles. We might as well end up praying, “Lord, we thank you that we are not like other people—the proud, the self-righteous, the legalists, the religious scorekeepers, or even like this Pharisee. We have learned that we should always be humble.”
And there we go again, turning the spotlight back on ourselves in a misguided attempt to show the world and to show God that we have it all sorted out. We are different. We are doing things the right way. We have the proper attitude. Not like that other guy or gal over there.
All of that—that focus on what we are doing or not doing—smacks of religion. Religion is about us climbing, earning, and achieving our way to God through our own effort. We don’t need religion. In fact, we ought to lose our religion. We don’t need religion. What we need is faith. A faith in something beyond ourselves. A faith in the God who raises the dead.
For all their differences, that is what the Pharisee and the tax collector have in common with each other and what we have in common with both of them…we are all dead. And no matter how strong our spiritual résumé, we will never be qualified for the job of raising the dead. Besides, there’s only one position available and it was filled 2,000 years ago. Fortunately for us, however, Jesus never stops working, and the power of his resurrection is such that he can raise to new life even dead sinners like you and me.