Proper 25 :: Jeremiah 14: 7–10, 19-22; Psalm 8: 1–6; II Timothy 4: 6–8, 16–18; Luke 18: 9–14
This is a homily by Fr. Gene
Tucker, delivered at St. John's Church in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania on Sunday,
October 23, 2016.
“WHO IS CLEAN? WHO IS UNCLEAN? AND ON WHAT BASIS?”
(Texts: Jeremiah 14: 7–10, 19–22 & Luke 18: 9–14)
Let’s begin by asking
ourselves some very personal questions:
- Am I am “holy” or an
“unholy” person?
- If I am “holy” or if I am “unholy”, why am I in the category that I am in?
We Episcopalians, who
are inheritors of the Anglican tradition, won’t ask you to stand up and declare
what place you find yourself in during service this morning. We are fairly
private about such things, although – as a priest – I often hear people “own
up” to the ways in which they fall short of God’s standards of holiness. As
their priest, I keep such information to myself and offer their situation up to
God in continuous prayer.
But such
inward-facing focus was entirely missing in the world into which Jesus
came.
Back then, 2,000
years ago, such things were a matter of who was “clean” and who was “unclean”. They
were a matter of who was “holy” and who was “unholy”. And, they were a matter
of public knowledge and concern.
So it is that Jesus
spins out the tale of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. (Known in an earlier
age as the “Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican”.) The Lord’s tale
exaggerates the actions of the Pharisee (a literary device known as hyperbole)
in order to show the Pharisee’s attitudes.
Taking the Law of
Moses as our starting place, let’s look at the tale Jesus spins.
The Law had to do
with a person’s outward actions. If a person did all the appointed sacrifices,
if the person did all the approved actions and avoided doing the sinful ones,
then that person was holy. The emphasis in the Law was what a person did.
But there’s a problem
in the Law’s approach: It allows a
person to think that, because they’ve done all the “right things”, they have
found acceptability in God’s sight, acceptability because of what they have done.
Spiritual complacency
can easily be the result: Consider the
prophet Jeremiah’s lament….In essence, Jeremiah asks God how He can abandon His
chosen people, simply because they are the chosen people. If we might
characterize Jeremiah’s argument another way, he seems to be saying, “How can
you, O Lord, abandon your people, the people you have chosen for yourself, the
people you have shown your favor to by the things you have done for them?” I
think that’s the essence of Jeremiah’s complaint.
It’d be easy for the
chosen people to think that they could behave in any way they wanted, thinking
that – because God had chosen them once – He’d continue to choose them again
and again, and would continue to show them His favor.
So Jesus’ tale of the
Pharisee and the Tax Collector seeks to upend these sorts of expectations.
For one thing, both
the Pharisee and the tax collector conceive of their true spiritual condition
by the testimony of others…No doubt, the Pharisee would have received accolades
from his fellow Pharisees about the exemplary way he had fulfilled every
smallest detail of the Law of Moses. Likewise, the tax collector had, most likely,
gotten an earful of the derision and disdain of others in his community for his
profession.
But, all outward
appearance aside, the true spiritual condition of each man isn’t seen in their
deeds, but in the inner discposition of their hearts, made known by their
physical posture:
The Pharisee, Jesus
tells us, stands “by himself”. Notice this key detail of the Lord’s story (the
Lord is a master storyteller!). The Pharisee stands apart, by himself, perhaps
so as not to come into contact with anyone who might be a “sinner”, an
“unclean” person. There, he boasts about his accomplishments: “I fast twice a
week, I tithe of all that I receive.” (I can’t resist saying that such an
attitude lies at the bottom of the problem of God’s people in Jeremiah’s time…they
thought that, because God had chosen them once, He’d continue to show them His
favor, no matter what…the problem with God’s people in Jeremiah’s time was
spiritual arrogance, pure and simple.)
The tax collector,
though, stands away from everyone else, and won’t even lift his eyes toward
heaven.
We can easily come to
the conclusion that the tax collector took the message he’d been hearing all
his adult life to heart: “Perhaps,” he might have said to himself, “I am really
a miserable sinner, in need of God’s forgiveness.”
But, by contrast, the
Pharisees is living in a dream world, a world created by his own conception of
the Law of Moses, and by the similarly-deluded testimony of his fellow
Pharisees.
For, as we come to
see, it isn’t the things that each man has done that makes them
acceptable to God. No, it is the inner disposition of the heart that makes that
possible
Jesus’ message seems
to be this:
- The beginning of any
relationship with God starts with a frank acknowledgement of our own unworthy
and sinful condition. We can’t stand on any accomplishments we might have done,
nor on any deed we have done.
- Our relationship
with God and our standing with Him can be abused. God’s ancient Chosen People
misused God’s goodness toward them, seeming to think they had some permanent
relationship with God that assured their good fortune into the future….that, in
essence, is Jeremiah’s lament. Likewise, Jesus points to a paragon of
uprightness and righteousness, a Pharisee, as the one who failed to merit God’s
favor.
- There is no permanent barrier between those who are “clean” and those who are “unclean”. No doubt, Jesus’ original hearers would have been shocked to know that it was that notorious sinner, the tax collector, who found favor with God. No one’s status with God is ever beyond God’s ability to repair and restore. Much of that restoration depends on our attitude before God.
AMEN.
