Text: Luke 18:9-14
The story is told of the Sunday School teacher who was instructing a class on this parable. After waxing eloquent on the virtues of the tax collector and the evils of the Pharisee, she said to her class, “Let us pray.” They bowed their heads, and she said, “O God, we thank you that we are not like this Pharisee...”
She had missed completely the point.
Last week, we heard another parable, the story of the widow and the unjust judge, which teaches that God does respond to the faithful who cry out to him. It could be said that it is about the prayer of saints, and some might find its standard of persistent faithfulness hard to aspire to. Not to worry! Immediately afterwards, we hear today’s parable, which deals with the prayer of sinners.
Both the Pharisee and the tax collector are sinners, but for different reasons. Let’s start with the Pharisee. The truth is, I believe, that many people can relate quite well to this man. We know who we are, and we can become quite proud of ourselves and our deeds. In the eyes of the world, we’re honest and upright citizens, doing all the right things. We have much for which to be grateful. The trap is that we can become self-righteous, and begin to regard all that we have and do as coming from us, and putting us in a right relationship with God. By all outward appearances, this man was no sinner. But his prayer reveals that he has his world-view reversed: himself at the centre, God hovering around somewhere to “bless him,” and other people somewhere in outer darkness.
On the other hand, the tax-collector is a visible sinner—someone whose whole way of life went against community and religious standards, profiting from his neighbours to benefit the oppressors of God’s people. He knew quite well where he ought to fit in God’s eyes—and the Pharisee did too!—out on the fringes of life, at whose centre is the throne of God.
What distinguishes the two men in this story is their awareness of sin, and of being in need of God’s mercy. The first one is not aware of any sin in his life. For the second, sin is all he can see. The first one has no real need of God, except perhaps for a congratulatory pat on the back. The second one knows that nothing but the mercy of God will help him in his situation.
And so he prays, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’
Jesus uses a startling contrast between two people to make a point to his listener. The Pharisee and the tax collector stand at opposite extremities in terms of how they would be perceived by the original listeners—the one a paragon of civic and religious respectability, the other a reviled outcast. It shouldn’t surprise us if we don’t easily relate to either person. What we hear, though, is that both of these polar opposites are nonetheless sinners—and therefore everyone between the extremes is also a sinner.
As Paul said
For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus…[i]
It’s easy to think of people who have “sinned and fallen short.” Sometimes we know that these words apply directly to us through our own action or inaction. Sometimes we may look at others, and see grievous sin, and then we may pray for amendment of life in those people—never of course forgetting our own need for repentance.
My first posting as a priest was to a small country parish, whose congregation was heavily weighted towards retired farmers—salt of the earth folk, who had led good and productive lives, and now basically looked to the Church to give them some comfort as they faced their eternal reward. Among them was a dear lady whom I shall call “Mabel.” If ever there was “good person,” Mabel was surely it—one of God’s quiet saints. That year, I offered a Bible study on the Gospel of Luke, which Mabel decided to attend. I think it was the first time in her almost 90 years that she had done something like this. I don’t recall what passage we were discussing, but at one point I said “Everyone is a sinner,” and Mabel looked up and said, “Well, I’m not. I’ve never done anything wrong in my life.”
In one sense, Mabel may well have been right. Certainly, she knew of no sin she had ever committed. In that respect, she might have been like the Pharisee, except she had great respect for other people. When she died, her eulogist spoke the truth about her, something which is not always the case…
Nonetheless, Mabel was human, and to be human is to part of the human condition, and the human condition is that all fall short. Left to our own devices and desires, we drift away from God’s intentions, and focus on our own.
At the heart of original sin is the self-centredness of the ordinary human being.
The prayer we are all called to pray is ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ This simple prayer exists in a more explicitly Christian variation known as the “Jesus Prayer:”
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God,
have mercy on me, a sinner.
When we pray the Jesus Prayer, we remind ourselves that we are not at the centre of life, but that God is.
We remind ourselves that life lived without conscious connection to God leads to alienation from God—the state of the sinner.
And we remind ourselves that only through God’s grace, mediated through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, will we be reconciled with the living creator of all.
And so we pray,
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God,
have mercy on me, a sinner.