the pharisee and the publican
This parable is the touchstone and apex for the parables of grace.
Comments, notes and observations:
This parable is not a lesson in the virtue of humility. It is instruction on the futility of religion — in the idleness of the proposition that there is anything at all you can do to put yourself right with God.
Forget the prejudice of Jesus stinging remarks, in the rest of the Bible, about Pharisees and give this particular pharisee all the credit you can — he tithes, gives God glory and thanks, he is the epitome of perfected religion. Today, he would be a model church member.
Jesus is saying that as far as the Pharisee’s ability to win a game of justification with God is concerned, he is no better off than the publican.
Jesus condemns the Pharisee because he takes his stand on a life God cannot use; he commends the publican because he rests his case on a death that God can use.
Our love of justification by works is so profound that at the first opportunity we run from the strange light of grace straight back to the familiar darkness of the law.
Jesus came to raise the dead. Not to reform the reformable, not to improve the improvable…
Discussion, exercises and questions:
What if a ministry leader or pastor in our church dipped into our tithes and offerings to procure himself a Lexus and splurged on high price prostitutes? And then waltzed into a weekend service, and proclaimed, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!”. Would we commend him for his imitation of this parable and praise him for preaching not only in word, but in deed?
God’s perspective — the eternal order is a perpetual-motion machine. Even one grain of sand - one lurking vice in one of the redeemed - given long enough, will find somewhere to lodge and something to rub on. What Jesus is saying in this parable is that no human goodness is good enough to pass a test like that, and that therefore God is not about to risk it. He will not take our cluttered life, as we hold it, into eternity. He will take only the clean emptiness of our death in the power of Jesus’ resurrection.
Follow the publican for the following week in your mind’s eye, as he leaves the temple but returns seven days later. What do you want to see him doing those seven days? Do you not feel compelled to insist upon a little reform? For the sake of an exercise, let us say he comes back, changing not one iota about his daily routine. But he prays to God in the temple in the same fashion, eyes down, breast smitten, God be merciful and all that. On the basis of the parable, God will do exactly has he did last week. Do you like that? For a second exercise, have him engage in a little reform during the week — maybe giving money to charity, and a bit kinder. What do you want God to do with him now? If God didn’t count the Pharisee’s impressive list, why should he bother with this two-bit one?