Bible Text: Luke 18:9-14 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus
An old Latin proverb reads duo cum faciunt idem, non est idem. When two people do the same thing, it isn’t the same thing at all. This is what Jesus shows us in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Two men do the same thing, but it’s not the same thing at all. Two men go to the Temple to pray, the one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. Both go to the temple, both go to pray, but at the end of it one goes home justified and the other goes home condemned.
Every earthly standard would favor the Pharisee. Outward sin is devastating. We all know that. Adultery destroys trust between husband and wife; it wrecks homes. Stealing denies the God who provides for all. The Pharisee is a good man. He doesn’t steal. He doesn’t commit adultery. He is better than good. He goes beyond the outward requirements we expect from people, even, seemingly beyond the expectations of God Himself. God required His people Israel to fast only once a year, on the Day of Atonement. This Pharisee fasts twice a week. God required the people of Israel to give a tenth only of their crops and their animals, but this man gives a tenth of everything that he has. Our churches would have no issues with finances if our members did what this man did. And he is orthodox to boot. He’s a Pharisee, believes in the resurrection, in the life everlasting, in the verbally inspired, inerrant Bible; he’s not a liberal like the Sadducees. But when he prays, it is an abomination to God. And he doesn’t just go home not justified, he goes home condemned, an enemy of God, a child of Satan. His good works and his prayer are all an afront to God.
There was a controversy among Lutherans over good works during the Reformation, one that was so severe that it had to be settled by the Formula of Concord, the last of our Lutheran Confessions. A man named Georg Major made the claim that good works were necessary for salvation. Which is very false. But Nicolaus Amsdorf made the counterclaim that good works were detrimental to salvation. He argued that doing good actually hindered your salvation. We know that good works can’t earn salvation. They help and save us never. Christ alone is our salvation. Faith receives what He has done. Faith claims nothing of its own, only the blood and righteousness of Jesus. But good works flow from faith. A good tree bears good fruit. They aren’t detrimental to salvation. They are the fruits of salvation. God loves them. They are precious in His eyes. Amsdorf was wrong.
But what he meant was right. He meant that trusting in your good works, as if they made you good before God, is so evil, so wicked, that you’d be better off not doing a single good work than to trust in them. And you see this with the Pharisee. He would have been better off not giving a penny of his money, not fasting at all, but letting it all go and being a drunk and a glutton, fornicating and thieving, than to trust in his works and boast of them before God. Because at least then he would have known he was a sinner and that he needed God as His Savior. There is nothing more wicked than to come before God and claim what the Pharisee claimed, that he was good of himself, that he was better than others, and so God should be proud of him. The outward good works only covered up the pride that is the source and essence and wellspring of all evil.
But this, sadly, is the thinking of most people who count themselves religious today. It used to be a popular evangelism tool to ask people whether they knew if they died today they would go to heaven. It may work, I don’t know, it’s good to get people thinking of heaven and hell and what happens to them when they die. But the problem is that most religious people when they get that question say, Yes, they know they’ll go to heaven, and when they answer the question, Why? it is almost always because they’ve been decent people. They give the answer of the Pharisee. We’re talking about people who go to church, who come to the altar, who are baptized and read their Bibles and pray. And they will claim that they know they will go to heaven because they were good enough, because they prayed, because they went to church, because they tried to do as much good as they could.
This is why Jesus tells this parable. It is in many ways the most important parable he tells, because it speaks to us, who I hope are giving a tenth of all we have to the church, who I hope are self-controlled and keep ourselves from drunkenness and gluttony, who I hope are faithful in church attendance, who do good and are not like the tax collector in our outward works, we don’t steal, or fornicate, or commit adultery. And Jesus says to us, Check your pride. Because nothing you have done has been perfectly good. Your greatest, most selfless deeds, your giving of your money, your faithful attendance and praying, yes even your orthodoxy, your believing the right things, all of it has been imperfect. And what’s worse, we have taken pride in them, we have judged others in comparison not with the Law, which would condemn us too, but in comparison with ourselves. Here is a humbling fact. It is something only Christians understand. The evil I have done is truly and completely, perfectly evil. But the good I do is never perfectly good. Until I die and this sinful flesh dies with me, even the good I do will be inextricably bound with the pride of my sinful heart. As we sing in this beautiful hymn, “When all my deeds I am reviewing,
The deeds that I admire the most, I find in all my thought and doing That there is naught whereof to boast.”
Jesus describes the Pharisee as one who prays not to God but to himself. That’s how radically Jesus divides the self-righteous from the Christian. As long as we do not acknowledge our sin, we are creating a god for ourselves and praying to him, and that god is ourselves. St. John preaches this when he says, “If we say we have no sin we make God a liar and his word is not in us.”
So Jesus points us to the tax collector. The tax collector was a bad man. His outward works were on display for anyone to see. He had betrayed his people and his country, worked for the Romans who were oppressing the Jews. He had committed legal theft of his own countrymen and taken the money they needed to feed their families to fill his own belly. He was bad. But the difference in the end between him and the Pharisee was not that one was good and the other was bad, but that the tax collector knew he was bad and was contrite, crushed. He was unwilling to lift his eyes to heaven, because God knew not only the bad stuff that he had done, but the bad that was in him, the selfishness and pride that he was in himself. The reason we commit outward sins is because we are inwardly sinners. That’s our problem, far deeper than any particular sin.
So the tax collector doesn’t confess, have mercy on me Lord for I have stolen, or have mercy on me Lord for I have betrayed my country. He goes to the source of the problem and says have mercy on me, a sinner. Me, from whom come sins that people know and sins they don’t know that are known only to me, and sins even that I don’t know and are known only to God. He goes to the root of the problem and confesses that it is him.
When he says have mercy on me, he uses a different word for mercy than we usually see in the Bible. He doesn’t say Kyrie eleison here. That is the usual cry for help, for aid, in every circumstance, it’s what the lepers cry out to Jesus because they need healing, what the blind man cries out, because he needs his sight. When we cry out for mercy we are asking for mercy in all sorts of things, we give the Lord all our problems, all our cares, our financial problems, our family problems, our health problems, our vocational problems, we heap all our cares on Him, as He tells us to do, because He cares for us. That’s what Lord have mercy, Kyrie eleison, means.
But not here. The word here is hilastheti, and it is a hyperfocused word. It isn’t concerned about health or wealth or job or family problems. It is concerned with one thing and one thing only – your relationship with God. Is He angry with you because you are a sinner? Or does He love you, because as great as your sin is His love is greater and the sacrifice of His Son is greater. Hilastheti, have mercy, means, “take away your anger,” it means, “set a Mediator between me and you,” it means, “cover my sin with blood.” This is the cry of a sinner who knows he stands before the righteous God and deserves His anger and punishment. But it is also the cry of a sinner who knows that a price has been paid to take God’s anger away. And God Himself has paid it in the flesh, because He loves sinners. It is the prayer of faith that points to Christ and says, “There is my righteousness. I have no other. I don’t claim that I am worthy, but I know the One who is, and He has given His life for mine. I appeal only to Him.”
One more thing about this tax collector’s prayer. He says, “Have mercy on me, the sinner.” The article is there in the Greek. He calls himself the sinner, because he is not focused on anyone else’s sin, but only his own. He could compare himself to other tax collectors, surely he was a better one. You can always play that game, always justify yourself by comparing yourself to others, because there’s always someone worse. But not for the Christian, who repeats with St. Paul the faithful saying, Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief. So the tax collector calls himself the sinner. And when you do this, when you stand alone before God and confess yourself the sinner, He answers and calls you the righteous, the forgiven, the justified, just as if you were Christ Himself who stands righteous for you before God.
When two people do the same thing, it isn’t the same thing at all. I say to you, this one went home justified rather than the other. When God humbles you and shows you that you are weak and powerless to save yourself, when you come before Him and confess that you are the sinner, then He does the same thing always, what He has bound Himself by His own blood to do, He justifies you, declares you righteous, names you His child, smiles on you, promises you eternal life in His heaven, and sends you home to serve Him and pray to Him and love one another. In Jesus’ name.