The Wisdom of the Tax Collector

Below is the sermon I preached at 8:00 yesterday. Our Bishop preached at the 10:00 livestreamed service. 

Our Gospel reading for this morning is another of Jesus’ challenging parables.
 
The fact that it is a parable is important. I have sometimes imagined Jesus sitting in the temple watching people pray, and pointing out two of them. But that’s not right. This is a parable, and so the Pharisee and the tax collector are not actual people, but rather representatives of two types of people.
 
The types the Pharisee and the tax collector represent are good people—that’s the Pharisee—and bad people—that’s the tax collector.
 
I emphasize this point because we tend to assume that Pharisees were all hypocrites who hounded Jesus to death. That was true of some Pharisees. But in general, the Pharisees were seen as faithful and solid citizens, and our parable only works if we see this Pharisee that way.
 
In this parable, the Pharisee represents good people, us, people who show up at Church on Sunday mornings, who support the Church’s work financially, who do the things we are supposed to do during the week. The faults that we can immediately recognize in the Pharisee’s prayer are the characteristic temptations that good people experience. That’s what makes this parable speak so powerfully and relevantly to us.
 
The Pharisee goes wrong right from the beginning, the very first thing he says: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people.” It sounds pretty arrogant, and it is. I find his arrogance amusing, given that his standard was so low. God, I thank you that I am better than the very worst people around.  
 
Still arrogance is a sin. And that makes this parable an invitation to reflect on the temptation to arrogance that particularly afflicts good people, people like this Pharisee and people like us. It is easy for good people to look around at the badness in the world and think, accurately enough, “I don’t always get it right, but I’m not as bad as some.” I am glad that I am not a thief, a rogue, or an adulterer. And there’s the temptation.
 
The best way to resist the temptation to arrogance is to remember that God doesn’t call us to be a little better than horrible. God calls us to perfect love. I am not horrible, but by God’s standard of perfect love, I fail pretty miserably. God’s standard of perfect love doesn’t leave much room for arrogance.
 
So, our Pharisee starts his prayer poorly. It only gets worse. He quickly goes from the arrogance of his opening to judgment of his neighbor. One commentator says the worst line of his prayer is “even like this tax collector” because that’s when the Pharisee gets personal.
 
But here, again, we need to remember that Jesus is not talking about a particular individual so much as a type of person. And the type of person represented by our tax collector is “the bad guy.” In first-century Israel, tax collectors were despised because they oppressed their own people in the name of the Roman Empire and enriched themselves in the process.
 
The Pharisee was not wrong to condemn the work of first-century tax collectors. Tax collectors were worthy companions of thieves, rogues, and adulterers. For a loose modern parallel to tax collectors, we might think of drug dealers or sex traffickers.
 
It is easy to judge people who do genuinely bad things. Still, the Pharisee’s judgment of the tax collector is a sin. And that makes this parable an invitation to reflect on our own temptation to judge others when we see them doing bad things.  
 
The best way to resist the temptation to judge is to remember that we can’t know what drives other people to do what they do.
 
I love the portrayal of the disciple Matthew in the series The Chosen. Matthew was a tax collector. Everything else I am about to say comes from the series or my own imagination, not the Bible.
 
In The Chosen, Matthew is autistic, and doesn’t know how to interact positively with other people. Matthew must have been lonely and isolated as a child. And as Matthew grew into adulthood, his difficulty relating to other people closed most options for earning a livelihood. But Matthew was good at math. And that made Matthew a natural tax collector. Tax collectors didn’t have to please the people around them. They just had to keep track of what people owed and what people paid.
 
But becoming a tax collector came at a huge cost for Matthew. His parents disowned him. People despised him. He couldn’t walk from his home to his workplace without an armed guard. During his work, people routinely abused him and spit on him.
 
So, when Peter first saw Matthew in the series, all Peter could see was a man who oppressed his own people, and that was true. But Jesus could see Matthew’s woundedness, and Matthew’s desire for love, and Matthew’s capacity for holiness.
 
As Christian people, we need to be able to recognize sin, in ourselves and in others. But we also need to see people like Jesus saw Matthew—not with arrogance, judgment, and hatred, but with compassion for their struggles and love for what they could be, with God’s help.
 
That brings us to what Luke suggests is our Pharisee’s worst mistake: his trust in his own righteousness. The Pharisee acts like his prayer is a prayer of gratitude to God when in fact the whole prayer is really about how awesome he himself is.
 
Self-righteousness is a sin like arrogance and judgmentalism. But self-righteousness is even worse than other sins because self-righteousness closes us off from God’s grace. When we think we are righteous enough, we stop trying to do better. And when we trust in our own righteousness, we don’t seek God’s help even if we do want to grow.
 
But self-righteousness is a temptation, and that is true even in its mildest form. Most of us have been trying to follow God as best we can for a long time. It is natural to begin to think, “this is who I am—better than some, worse than others, basically OK, and not likely to get any better.”
 
The best way to resist the temptation of self-righteousness is to remember our baptismal covenant, which we will renew in a few minutes.
 
When we were baptized, we committed to the ideal of “growing into the full stature of Christ” (BCP 302; Ephesians 4:13). We’re not likely to get there. But the full stature of Christ—perfect love—remains our goal. And it is always possible to grow in love, as long as we have God’s help. That is true when we are young and when we are old, when we are just beginning our Christian journey and when we have been at it for many decades.
 
That is why the tax collector’s prayer is so much better than the Pharisee’s. The tax collector really was a sinner, even worse than the Pharisee. But at least the tax collector could acknowledge his sinfulness and beg for God’s mercy. Jesus tells us the tax collector receives God’s forgiveness and has at least the possibility of future growth in love, with God’s help.
 
My prayer for us is that we can have the wisdom of the tax collector, that we can resist the temptations to arrogance, and judgmentalism, and self-righteousness, that we can sincerely seek God’s mercy for our failings, and that we can truly trust God’s promises about our own ongoing growth in love. And I pray that in Christ’s name. Amen.