The other night at a
potluck in one of our Cooperative sister churches we were discussing the
perceptions people have of church. One
woman shared a story of a conversation she overheard between a mother and her
child. That particular church lets a
daycare meet there one morning a week in their basement. This woman happened to be coming in when the
parents were picking up their children and as one mother was leaving with her
child, the child pointed up the stairs to the sanctuary and said, “What’s up
there, Mommy? Let’s go see.” The mother immediately responded, “No. You
have to pay money to go up there.”
Talk about a
misconception! But it’s a misconception
come by honestly. How many times have we
heard, “Churches only want your money?”
Regardless of what we teach about stewardship and giving, because
churches pass a collection plate around during worship, it isn’t a stretch to
see why some might think that you have to pay to come into the presence of God.
Another common
misconception that used to be quite popular is the idea that you have to wear
your Sunday best to come into the presence of God. Whether it’s a suit and tie or a ladies hat,
somehow this expectation gave the impression that you needed to clean yourself
up, be presentable and a model of good citizenship, in order to come to church.
These misconceptions that
you have to pay to come to church or get yourself cleaned up in order to go to
church are based on a conditional understanding of God’s love. Somehow, people have gotten the idea that the
church teaches that you must do something before God will accept you: clean up
your act, do good works, have faith, be morally upright, make a personal
decision to accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour. When we look through the history (long past and
recent) it isn’t difficult to see how the church has taught and perpetuated
these misconceptions. Through one side
of our mouths we say the love and grace of God is free and unconditional (Jesus
died for all), but through the other side of our mouths, or perhaps in the
disapproving look down our noses, those who are ‘not like us’ somehow don’t
qualify as part of the ‘all’ included in the ‘free and unconditional’.
The Pharisee in Jesus’
story has a similar misconception of God’s love and grace. He believed himself to be righteous: he
followed the law, he gave to the poor, he worshiped in the temple, he read and
studied his bible. He did everything he was supposed to do and he did it
properly and in good order. We need to
understand that this man was a good man.
And we have a lot in common with him.
He was faithful to his wife, he wore his Sunday best to church. He was an honest businessman and didn’t take
advantage of anyone. He didn’t bully others.
He was sincere and honest in his devotion to God and it showed in the
way he lived his life. According to his
belief and his conduct, he had absolutely every right to be there in the temple
– in the actual presence of God.
So, if he was such a good
guy, why did Jesus say that it was the tax collector who went away justified
(rightly related to God and others)?
That hardly seems fair, doesn’t it?
If this man wasn’t justified, then how could anyone else be?
The bottom line is that
the Pharisee misunderstood the source of his righteousness. He thought it was about him: what he believed
and how he embodied his faith in the world.
Jesus is telling us through this story, that neither what we believe nor
what we do makes us acceptable to God.
What justifies is God’s grace, and God’s work of removing sin from his
presence.
Let me explain that
further. The Jews rightly believed they
were God’s chosen people. The very fact
that God chose them, brought them into existence through Abraham, made an
everlasting covenant with them, rescued them from slavery in Egypt, and gave
them the law is the evidence that they were already righteous – already
accepted by God, already in right relationship with him because God chose
them. The problem wasn’t that they
weren’t righteous, because they were. The problem was that they were also
sinful. And they couldn’t bring that sin into the presence of God. I realize
that’s a hard concept to get our heads around – righteous and simultaneously
sinful, but it is the reality of God’s people.
Which brings us to the tax
collector in Jesus’ story. How on earth
does a guy like this inherently corrupt tax collector win out over the devoted
obedience of the Pharisee? We might
quickly conclude that it was because he was humble, he recognized that he was
sinful and in the presence of a holy God. And we might quickly conclude that
the moral of the story rests in the benefits of humility before God. But Jesus never makes it that easy for us.
Your Greek lesson for the
day: I think all of our translations say that the tax collector pleaded with
God, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”
Many of the characters in the gospels call out and plead for Jesus to
have mercy on them: the ten lepers, the
rich man in Hades, Bartimaeus the blind beggar, the man possessed by many
demons. It is a common cry on the lips
of the poor, the outcast, the marginalized, the sick, and the diseased. It is a plea for God’s favour and his
benevolence. But, in the Greek the word
for mercy isn’t what this tax collector uses. The word that Jesus has the tax
collector use here is the word that implies atonement, pardon for sin, and
forgiveness. It’s the word that is used
for the mercy seat in the temple – the actual place where God sits. It’s the
word that is used in Hebrews when we are told that Jesus became like us in order
to be a merciful and faithful Great High Priest making atonement for the sins
of the people (Heb. 2:17). It is a word
that is only associated with God and the work of atonement done by the high
priest on behalf of the people.
Now, I don’t want to give
you a whole sermon on the atonement, because that would take a very long time –
though we have just passed Yom Kippur…
But I will say this. Atonement is
the fancy theological word that we use to talk about the way God covers over
our sin, bears it away, washes it clean, removes it from his presence and
unites us to himself. In the days of the
sacrificial system, with which both Pharisee and Tax Collector would have been
familiar, the high priest would go through an elaborate ritual of sacrificing a
bull and a goat, and taking the blood – which represented the life of the
animal passed through death – and sprinkling it around the temple and finally
on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, God’s throne on Earth. This sprinkling of life that had passed through
death cleansed the temple of iniquity, the stain od sin, and finally united God
and his people. There was a second goat,
to which the priest would whisper the sins of the people and then the goat
would bear them away off into the desert, thus removing them from the people
and the presence of God. This was a
ritual that was practiced every year so that the righteous people of God could
have their sin removed from them, and so truly know the presence and power of
God in their lives. Jesus death on the
cross and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church on Pentecost
fulfilled the atonement (at-one-ment) foreshadowed by these sacrifices.
The tax collector wasn’t
asking Jesus to show him favour. He wasn’t asking Jesus to heal him. He made no promises of repentance, and he
gave no indication that he was going to turn his life around. What he did was plead for Jesus to be
atonement for him – to bear his sin away, to remove it from his sight. He was asking God to be the life that passes
through death and Jesus would become just that.
When it comes to anything we think we must do to make ourselves right
with God, Jesus has done it all.
This is what the Pharisee
missed – his sin. He was right about his
righteousness, but he overlooked his sin. And that misconception, or failure,
or oversight, or whatever you want to call it, caused him to set up barriers
and lines between people with respect to their relationship with God – lines
and barriers that God himself was about to destroy for good through Jesus’
death and resurrection and then the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.
Winding down, if we to
place ourselves into this parable what would be our prayer in the temple? As
the parable stands, Jesus offers us two choices: standing off looking down our noses at those
who are different and thanking God we aren’t like them, or desperately pleading
for God’s mercy. But in these
post-resurrection, and post-sending-of-the Spirit days, there is a third
option. Friends, the church, the people
of God, has been equipped and empowered by the Holy Spirit to be a dwelling
place for God on earth. We are now the
temple of God! So, what is our prayer if we are the temple? It is the prayer of the one who sees the
utter brokenness of the tax collector and who reaches out to him with the mercy
of Jesus, praying, “Lord make us instruments of your peace, your grace and
loving kindness”. Our disposition is one
of humility and compassion, not standing apart or far off but standing together
as the temple of Christ, shaped and empowered by his spirit to reach out with
compassion and mercy to the broken.
I’ll end this with a joke
I heard the other day. “How many
Christians does it take to change a light bulb?” “None, Jesus already changed the light bulb,
we just need to turn it on.”
