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I’m sure many of you have horror stories of when you were a child and had a chest cold and sore throat and it was likely your grandmother who whipped up a mess of boiled potatoes mushed up with mustard and onions and a few other stinky goodies; an old family recipe. She then smeared it all over your chest and throat and it smelled so bad that you didn’t want to breathe, but it worked. I was lucky. My mom just rubbed Mentholatum all over me.
Since the onset of pharmaceutical solutions to colds, aches, and infections we don’t see too many people going the route of treating such things with a batwing and skunk carcass poultice. A poultice is a form of treatment where you apply a cooked-up paste of stinky goodies to an infected area to absorb the infection into itself and relieve the inflammation in the area. There are all kinds of recipes for poultices and as many of them work as don’t. Regardless, the idea is that they will draw out the infection in the affected area and relieve the pain of inflammation. It gets rid of the sickness and hurts.
I bet you didn’t know it but there is a theological term for this process of drawing out infection and relieving inflammation. The term is expiation. If you must know, it comes from the Latin word expiatio. Piatio means devout, pious, or simply clean. Ex means “Out of”. The dirtiness or disease is taken “out of” thus leaving the person clean. Theologically speaking, expiation refers to removing the disease of sin and its ill-effects from a person leaving the person clean or devout or pious.
This word is important for talking about the sacrifices practiced by the Israelites in Old Testament times as well as and more importantly for talking about Jesus’ death as sacrifice. In the Old Testament some of the sacrifices they had were for the purpose of expiation, for drawing out the sickness we have which we call sin and the hurtful feelings of shame and guilt that we feel when we realize we have sinned against God and against others and have hurt them and we need the relationship with God and those we’ve hurt restored. These sacrifices were for unintentional wrongs committed. God gave no means of expiation for intentional wrongdoing. When your wrongdoing was intentional, you had to find some way to live with what you had done which was difficult to do because the penalty for intentionally hurting another was death.
In ancient Israel they had three sacrifices of expiation. The big one was Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement which I won’t get into today. We don’t have the time. It was the day on which the nation of Israel as a whole was expiated. The other two are called the Sin Offering and the Guilt Offering
Just a little bit about how this sacrifice stuff worked. The underlying belief is that the only way the disease of sin and its ill-effects can be healed or removed from us is death. Something has to die. The Sin Offering and the Guilt Offering provided a means for life to pass through death that we might be cleansed. Israelites believed that the life of an animal is in the blood. When the priest sacrificed an animal and took its blood for ritual use, that was in essence life that had passed through death. The priests then did interesting things with the blood of the sacrificed animal to expiate one’s guilt and shame.
The sacrifices for the Sin and Guilt offerings were meant to heal things with God by getting the bad stuff out of us like a poultice. For the sin offering a person would take an animal to a priest. They would lay their hand on it and confess what they had done. In a cathartic way this transferred the sin, guilt, and shame to the animal. The priest would then slaughter it and take some of the blood in a bowl. This blood was now life that had passed through death on behalf of the person who brought the animal and was now cleansed of the person’s sin, guilt, and shame. The priest then sprinkled some of the blood on the ground before the curtain outside the room where the Ark of the Covenant was kept and where God was supposed to be. This was to symbolically present that person’s life that had passed through death and was thus clean to God so that fellowship with God was restored - forgiveness. They did the same thing for the guilt offering but with that one the priest would also put some blood on the person’s earlobe. Applying this blood, this life that had passed through death, to the person’s earlobe was meant to cleanse and heal the ear so that the person could hear the commandments of God better and keep them.
When we speak of Jesus’ death as being a sacrifice we are talking about expiation. Jesus, God the Son, became human and in so doing took the Sin of humanity not just symbolically but really upon himself by becoming one of us. By his death he removed Sin from us. When God raised him, he became the life of humanity that had passed through death and by the gift of the Holy Spirit to indwell us we are united to God in him. Jesus is humanity’s expiation of sin, once and for all. Jesus gives us this new humanity, this new human life by the gift of the Holy Spirit who lives in us each and bonds us together as a new humanity.
I haven’t said anything about our passage yet so just allow me a couple of more minutes. We needed that background first. This Pharisee in the parable was a devout, Law-abiding man and indeed more than a bit pompous about it. Because of his efforts to abide by the Law of Moses he feels he has the right to stand before God, toot his horn, and look down on “sinners”. “Sinner” was a derogatory term, as offensive as some of the racial slurs that get thrown around today. We find him looking with condemnation on this tax collector who is standing far off in the temple and is quite afflicted by the brutal fact that he had hurt a lot of people in so many ways and done so intentionally. Please remember that I said there was no sacrifice for intentional sin. This tax collector is so full of shame and guilt that he wishes he was dead. When somebody beats their own breast, they are symbolically driving a knife into their heart.
Tax collectors back then were Jews who collected taxes for the Romans and were therefore considered to be traitors. They always inflated the amount of tax owed so they could skim off the top to the detriment of many poor people. They would also have poor Israelites beaten and imprisoned for not paying up. They got very wealthy and were very hated. They were indeed “sinners” guilty of intentionally hurting God’s people for their own personal gain. Most tax collectors truly were deserving of death.
Well, this tax collector is standing far off, staring at the ground, beating his breast, and desperately praying, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” He is so full of shame and guilt from having realized what he has intentionally done to God’s people to make himself rich. He is sick to death with himself and he has got no way to get the shame and guilt out of his system because the expiation sacrifices were only for unintentional sins. I don’t know if you’ve ever been sick of yourself for the shit you’ve done (sorry to use that word but it’s fitting) and felt the helplessness of there being no way to make right for it. I’ve been there. All you can do is hope God can heal things. This broken man certainly was there.
The tax collector’s prayer is interesting. In our translation it seems he’s begging for mercy, or forgiveness from a judge. But, the word in Greek isn’t the word they would have used for mercy. It is the word they used for a sacrifice of expiation. Literally, he is prayerfully begging, “God, be the sacrifice of expiation for me, a sinner.” And…that is what God himself did in, through, and as Jesus by his death and resurrection and has applied it to us with the gift of his very self, the Holy Spirit. He was, is, and one day for good drawing out humanity's infection of sin and healing the
If you have ever been or are mired in the shame and guilt of the crap you have done intentionally or unintentionally, there is healing for that. Come as you are into the midst of the people of God where dwells God in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit and start crying, start letting it out. God will come to you and bear it away. God will let you know you are His beloved child, beloved and forgiven. And we the people of God won’t judge you. We will hold you just as you are in the arms of the unconditional love of our Father in heaven to reinforce the love he has for you. Just come.
The Eastern Orthodox traditions have a prayer that they like to pray that is based on this tax collector’s prayer. They call it the Jesus Prayer or the Prayer of the Heart. It’s simply, “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Many in those traditions strive to pray this prayer continuously. The past few weeks I’ve mentioned praying the Lord’s Prayer continuously. So, this is another option particularly if you are carrying a burden of shame, guilt, and regret. There is healing in this prayer. Just go online and look up the Jesus Prayer. The stories, the personal testimonies from people who have been healed, changed by praying it. How situations in their lives, relationships have changed in the wake of praying this prayer. Most importantly, how they have grown closer to God, their relationship with God and the sense of his presence deepening. If you want a deeper relationship with God, pray this prayer, the Jesus Prayer, “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Amen.