Bible Text: Luke 18:9-14 | Preacher: Pastor Andrew Richard | Series: Trinity 11 | Trinity 11, 8-23-20, Luke 18:9-14, Pastor Richard
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
It’s common to hear scoffers say that the Church is full of hypocrites. “It’s just a bunch of people who don’t practice what they preach.” Some Christians respond to this accusation rather unfortunately by conceding the point. “We’re all sinners, none of us claims to be perfect, so the Church must necessarily be full of hypocrites.” But is that what the Church is? A house of hypocrites, established by Jesus to be a house of hypocrites? That doesn’t sound right. Jesus told his disciples in Luke 12, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.” Jesus says in Matthew 23, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” Jesus tells his Church that hypocrisy is to have no place in her, and warns that hypocrites are bound for hell. Well doesn’t that mean that we’re all condemned? After all, we say we must keep the Ten Commandments, but none of us does. Is Jesus pronouncing woe on us?
No, he’s not. And in order to understand the truth of this, we must properly understand what it means to be a hypocrite. The world uses the word hypocrite to mean someone who doesn’t practice what he preaches. But that is not the definition of hypocrite that we find in the Scriptures. The word hypocrite comes from the Greek word ὑποκριτής (hypocritēs), which is the word we find in the New Testament. The word ὑποκριτής was a term for someone who plays a part on the stage. It didn’t have to have a negative connotation, and could simply refer to an actor. The word ὑποκριτής did have a broader meaning, however, and could refer to anyone who pretended to be something he was not. This is the negative sense of the word that survives today. But notice, it doesn’t mean “someone who doesn’t practice what he preaches.” It means “someone who pretends to be something he’s not.”
That’s what the word hypocrite means in the New Testament: a pretender. The enemies of Jesus were known for their pretending, their hypocriting. For instance, we hear in Luke 20, “So they watched [Jesus] and sent spies, who hypocrited (who pretended) to be righteous, that they might catch him in something he said.” And Jesus was constantly calling them on it: You actors, you pretenders, you hypocrites! Why put me to the test?
And even when the scribes and Pharisees weren’t trying to trap Jesus in his words, they were still hypocrites, always acting, always putting on a show. Jesus speaks of the showiness of hypocrisy in the Sermon on the Mount: “When you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others.” “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others.” “And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others.” The life of a hypocrite is a life of masks and makeup, stages and scripts.
And it is not innocent pretending. The hypocrisy of hypocrites is meant to deceive. Hypocrites don’t want people to appreciate their acting. They want people to believe that they are the characters they’re pretending to be.
And what are hypocrites pretending to be? They’re pretending to be righteous. Everyone who’s called a hypocrite in the New Testament is pretending to be righteous. Hypocrites pretend they are not sinners. They pretend that they do not need the grace of God (and thus you see that Christians are not hypocrites). But however well hypocrites may be able to deceive men, they cannot deceive Jesus. In Matthew 23 Jesus tells them, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
Turning to today’s reading, we hear Jesus tell a parable to hypocrites. They are not called hypocrites in the reading, but we recognize from their description that they are. “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt.” We hear first that these people had so deluded themselves with their pretending that they thought they actually were righteous. It is the nature of hypocrisy to fool the hypocrite himself more than anyone else.
Secondly, we hear that these hypocrites treated others with contempt. The hypocrite has to despise everyone else, and I’ll tell you why. You see, the hypocrite can’t convince himself that he’s righteous by judging himself according to God’s righteous Law. Then the hypocrite would learn that he is not, in fact, righteous. But the hypocrite has to have some standard for convincing himself of his own righteousness, and so he compares himself to his fellow man. In order for the hypocrite to think he’s righteous, he must then see himself as better than everyone else. He will look for fault in everyone, and fixate on other people’s wrongs in order to think more highly of himself. And if he finds someone who seems more righteous than himself, he’ll simply hate the poor man for no good reason.
As Jesus begins his parable, he sets before us the arch-hypocrite, the Pharisee. This Pharisee despises mankind generally and the tax collector specifically. He supposedly prays, but he’s just pretending. He doesn’t actually ask God for anything, because he doesn’t think he needs anything. He comforts himself with what he hasn’t done, and with what he has done, but he doesn’t take any comfort in what the Lord has done. And he has acted so well that he has fooled himself: he really does think that he’s righteous all on his own.
Now as we digest what this Pharisee was doing, we recognize how vain and false he was. But we should also recognize how easy it is to be a hypocrite. It’s easy to think of yourself as righteous and everyone else as sinners. It’s easy to see the speck in your brother’s eye and not notice the log in your own eye. Jesus recognizes this danger, not only for the world, but for his Christians as well. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, which is not addressed to the Pharisees, but to his own disciples, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is a log in your own eye?” And then comes the word: “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
Jesus warns: Christians can become hypocrites. How do we prevent this from happening? By seeing the log in our own eye. And for an example of this, Jesus presents us with a second man, the tax collector. “But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast.” The tax collector knows he’s not worthy to come before God, and so stands at a distance. He turns his face downwards in shame. He beats his breast, lamenting his sins. And he is not pretending. He doesn’t think to himself, “How would someone act who was keenly aware of his own sins?” No, he is keenly aware of his own sins.
The Law of God is what gives us this awareness, as it says in Romans 3:20, “Through the law comes knowledge of sin.” And this is good for us. Jesus doesn’t leave us to our own devices to figure out what the log is, what is sin and what isn’t sin. Rather, he holds the Ten Commandments in front of us, in which we can plainly see what it is that’s jutting out of our eye sockets.
God’s Law exposes the sins both of the Pharisee and the tax collector, but it’s the response to this awareness of sin that distinguishes the two. The Pharisee pretends the log isn’t there, and he maintains that he is righteous by closing his eyes and ears and ignoring the truth. The show must go on! In short, the Pharisee is a hypocrite. God shows him for what he is, and he in turn believes and acts like he’s something he’s not. This is also what it means to exalt oneself.
The tax collector, on the other hand, looks full on into the Law of God, knowing that he can trust what he sees. And when he sees the log in his own eye, he doesn’t pretend it’s not there. He doesn’t play the hypocrite. He beats his breast and calls himself what he is: a sinner. In this he shows what it means to humble oneself: he acknowledges that God is right and he is wrong.
But he humbles himself in another way as well. He prays, and unlike the Pharisee, the tax collector actually asks for something. The tax collector recognizes, “ I need something from God. I don’t have everything in and of myself. I’m not righteous.” It’s humiliating, but true. And thus he says, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Now the word that he uses here is not the usual word for “have mercy.” He more literally says, “God, atone for me, a sinner.” His prayer makes sense given where he is when he prays it, and also shows us our hope when we become aware of our sins. The reason the Pharisee and the tax collector both went up to the temple at the same time to pray is because there were two set times of prayer in the temple during the day. Those two times corresponded to the two daily offerings. Each day, once in the morning and once in the evening, the priests would sacrifice on the altar of burnt offering a lamb, a year old and without blemish. As the tax collector prays for atonement, he sees right there in front of him the lamb burning and the smoke rising as a pleasing aroma to the Lord. The tax collector sees that the Lord is making atonement for him, a sinner. The Lord has appointed this sacrifice because he wants to atone for sinners, and this sacrifice is the basis of the tax collector’s prayer.
We can see the same thing in Jesus. He’s the ultimate sacrifice to which all of these daily sacrifices pointed. He died on the altar of the cross to atone for you, to bring you near to God, to lift up your head, to turn your mourning into dancing. It is because of Jesus that you go down to your homes justified, that is, righteous in the sight of God. The Pharisee who denied his sins and pretended to be righteous is not righteous. But the tax collector, who knew and confessed that he was not righteous, is indeed righteous for the sake of Christ.
And thus you see from all of this that being a hypocrite is a far different thing than the world imagines, and, in fact, the world is the hypocrite who delights in its own so-called righteousness and scoffs at Christ. But the Church is not so. The Church is characterized by “genuine faith,” as it says in 1 Timothy 1. Or to put it more literally “unhypocritical faith,” that is, faith that is honest about what is trustworthy and what is not. Hypocritical faith trusts in oneself, but unhypocritical faith trusts in Christ alone.