A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 6
6
The paradox of pardon
Luke 18:9–14
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: 10‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.”
13‘But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
14‘I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.’
Jack and Joe went to church one evening. Jack knew his way around. Well, he'd been brought up in the place, hadn't he? Sunday School from the age of three, and all that. He knew his parents would be there, too, in one of the other pews, watching him proudly. He wanted to make sure they saw him. So he walked right up to the front and sat in the first row. He bowed his head and shut his eyes for a few moments. He'd seen dad do that; he knew it looked holy.
Jack, you see, took his religion very seriously. He carried a big Bible and knew all the latest choruses. He liked the image of being a highly principled young man, too. Unlike many of his peers he never consumed alcohol or cigarettes. He was also extremely self-righteous about sex. No messing around behind the school bike sheds for him. He and his girlfriend had intellectual conversations about vegetarianism and the nuclear issue. Instead of going to discos they went to prayer meetings at the youth leader's house.
As Jack reflected on his life in those few moments before the service began, he glowed with inward satisfaction. How reassuring it was to know that you were a good Christian! Nothing to confess, nothing to feel ashamed about, nothing...
Good grief, it couldn't be! Out of the comer of his eye he caught sight of a familiar figure who had just entered the church behind him. 'It's Joe,' he thought incredulously. 'What on earth is he doing here? He's no right to come to church, the old hypocrite!' But if he had been able to read Joe's mind he would have realized that precisely the same thoughts were going through his head too.
What right, Joe thought, did he have to be in church? He hadn't been in church for years. In fact he felt thoroughly uncomfortable in the place. He kept looking around nervously as if he expected somebody in authority to appear at any moment and tell him he had no business to be there. He was unsure where to sit, or if there was some special ritual he should observe before committing himself to stay. Didn't Christians cross themselves before they sat down in church? Or was that Muslim? He really couldn't remember. In the end he slid cautiously into the very back row. 'Oh no,' he wailed inwardly, 'that's Jack in the front, and he's seen me. I'll never live this down in the neighbourhood now.' He crumpled up, his legs tucked under the pew, his head sagging down between his knees, trying to hide.
As you may have guessed, Joe was not the religious sort. In fact he had a reputation as a bit of a lad. If there was trouble with the police on the estate, you could bet on the fact that he'd be involved. Nicotine stained his fingers and there was a distinct smell of beer on his breath. In fact he'd been in the pub down the road only fifteen minutes before.
Why on earth had he come to church? Was it because of the row he'd had that morning at home, thrown out on his ear for stealing his mother's housekeeping again? Or was it because of the sense of humiliation he was feeling as a result of Julie slapping him around the face last night and telling him in unambiguous four-letter words to get out of her life, just because she discovered he was also sleeping with Karen? Yes, it was both of those things and neither of them. Somehow, as he tried unsuccessfully to drown his sorrows in that pint, he'd just been overcome with a sense of how dirty he was, and what a mess he'd made of things. Suddenly, sitting in that back pew, guilt and shame brought tears to his eyes, a blush to his cheek and a lump to his throat. 'Oh, God,' he sighed quietly, into clenched fists. 'Oh, God.'
I tell you, it was Joe who went home a believer that night, not Jack.
For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted (Luke 18:14).
We said earlier that one of the great problems in reading the parables today is the difficulty of recovering the shock factor that they undoubtedly possessed for Jesus' original hearers. Too often, familiarity with these stories has disarmed them of their punch for us, deprived us of the sting in the tale.
Take the story of the good Samaritan which we studied in chapter 2. The very word 'Samaritan' has become proverbial for goodness. So when Jesus tells us that it was a Samaritan who stopped to help the injured man, we're not surprised, still less outraged. There's no scandalized intake of breath at the mere mention of the word, as there certainly would have been when the parable was first told. The hammer-blows the parable delivered to the prejudices of Jesus' original audience are reduced, for us, to the caress of a reassuring feather. We know all about good Samaritans.
Even more is that true of the parable to which we turn in this chapter. I have retold it in modern dress in an attempt to help us feel more powerfully the contradiction of conventional expectation that it represents.
Think about it for a moment. Two men went up to the temple to pray. A self-evidently laudable ambition, you would have thought. Both came to pray and both went home believing sincerely that they had prayed. Yet the extraordinary lesson of this parable is that while one of them truly did have dealings with God in his devotions that day, the other, in spite of his avowed good intentions, was conducting a soliloquy all the time he was in the temple.
The text which our translation renders 'prayed about himself' (verse 11) could equally be translated, 'prayed to himself'. The prayer was indeed a soliloquy. That alone should be sufficient to worry us, shouldn't it? Yet Jesus says it is possible to come to church thinking that you want to meet with God, and leave believing you have done so, and all the time be self-deceived. What a disturbing challenge to the reality of our own spiritual experience that must be!
But the paradox is even sharper than that. And it's here that the modern reader so easily forfeits the scandalous element in the story. For Jesus tells us that the man whose prayer was heard was a tax man. For us, that occasions no surprise. In our society, representatives of the Inland Revenue, generally speaking, are pillars of the Establishment; we make occasional sarcastic jokes about them, but none of us would question their respectability.
Not so this tax man. In Jesus' day a tax man was a crook, a treacherous, despicable collaborator with the Roman enemy, who made himself rich by exploiting his fellow countrymen. Think of some provincial mayor in France lining his fat pockets during the days of the Occupation by licking the boots of the Nazis, and you get the feel of how Jews felt about tax men in the first century. They didn't make sarcastic jokes about tax men, they lynched them. They spat on them when they passed and cursed the ground they walked on. Yet God heard the tax man's prayer—the very person they would never have listened to, let alone helped, in a thousand years.
On the other hand, the man who went home unheard, Jesus tells us, was a Pharisee. Once again, as modern readers we so easily miss the outrage of such a suggestion. For if we know from childhood that Samaritans are proverbially good, then even more do we know from childhood that Pharisees are proverbially bad. As soon as Jesus identifies this man as a Pharisee, we conclude that he's going to be the villain of the piece. All kinds of negative and damning associations flow into our minds at the mere mention of the word 'Pharisee'.
Once again, that would not have been the reaction of Jesus' original hearers. For the Pharisee was the churchman, the Bible student; fundamentalist in his view of Scripture, scrupulous in his observance of God's law, a patriot, a philanthropist, a model of holiness, an enthusiastic supporter of Mary Whitehouse, 'Keep Sunday Special' and the Moral Majority.
This is one parable the shock factor of which we just can't afford to miss. Jesus has got something vital to teach us here about the whole nature of religion, of prayer, of guilt, of righteousness; and we dare not allow our twentieth-century images of tax men and Pharisees to blunt the force of his warnings.
So try hard with me to get under the surface of this parable into the shoes of Jesus' original hearers, and benefit from it.
First, let's ask a question. What was so wrong with the Pharisee's prayer and right about the tax man's prayer, that God's assessment of them should be so radically different from our expectations? I don't think the answer is difficult to spot. Notice how the Pharisee begins. 'Lord,' he says, 'I thank you that I am not like other men.'
Can you imagine a man going to his doctor and saying, 'Doctor, I want you to know that I am in superb health; my lungs are functioning perfectly, my muscle tone is ideal, my digestion couldn't be better, my circulation is A-1, I have no infections, no ailments, no diseases. In short, Doctor, unlike the rest of the miserable specimens I observe in your waiting-room, there's absolutely nothing wrong with me at all.'
What could a doctor do for such a man? He would leave the surgery unchanged, unbenefited in any way. There's little point in visiting at all, except to parade as a kind of one-man medical beauty show. He could receive nothing, because he asked for nothing. And why does he ask for nothing? Because he feels no need.
Had he allowed the doctor to examine him, his confidence may have been rather diminished. 'Your blood pressure's a bit high,' the doctor might have said. 'And we must do some tests on that mysterious lump, and I would let the dentist have a look at that tooth if I were you. And did you know you were diabetic?'
But such is the man's complacency, he never invites such an examination. The absence of any felt need renders his attendance at the doctor's clinic totally redundant.
That is exactly the point Jesus makes in another saying: 'It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick' (Matthew 9:12). This Pharisee is a perfect example of that observation. He came into the temple to congratulate himself on his spiritual and moral health. Augustine wisely comments on him, Thou hast said thou hast all; thou hast asked for nothing. In what respect then hast thou come to pray?' He hadn't come to pray at all, but to prate. It was all exhibitionist boasting and nothing more.
I suspect that the tax man knew for whose benefit the Pharisee's 'prayer' was really intended. He overheard him, of course; how could he help it? 'God, I thank you', said the Pharisee loudly, 'that I'm not like other men, rogues, swindlers, traitors, or like that tax man over there.' It was a deliberate dig at him. But then he was used to such abuse. He didn't resent it; why should he? He knew he deserved it, he was under no illusions about his moral and spiritual condition, he was painfully aware of the disease of his soul. There was a mark of judgment set against his destiny, he knew.
And for this reason we hear no self-congratulatory expressions of mock gratitude from his lips. He feels his need. He beats his breast with the sense of it—a gesture no Jew made except in times of profound emotional distress. It bursts out of him in three staccato gasps of inner torture. 'God, be merciful to me, the sinner.' That's what he says literally; ‘the sinner’, for at this moment he feels like the only sinner in the universe. Yet, says Jesus, that's the kind of prayer God hears. That sort of worshipper goes home a different person, whereas the proud and complacent, for all their eloquent supplications, leave the house of God in exactly the same unacceptable state in which they arrived. One recalls Mary's words: 'He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty' (Luke 1:53).
This question of personal felt need may very well be the crunch issue for many. How hungry are we for God? How desperate are we for his grace?
Much has been said in recent years about the renewal of worship in the church; in fact it made the headlines when the present Archbishop of Canterbury was enthroned. But it does seem to me that much of that controversy is concerned with things of interest to the Pharisee but not to the tax man. It's preoccupied with matters of external form. What type of music—traditional hymns or modern choruses? What sort of atmosphere—quiet and meditative or loud and excited? What kind of congregational participation—passive and restrained or active and exuberant? What degree of predictability—fixed prayer-book liturgy or extemporary charismatic spontaneity? These are the issues we discuss. Frankly, while that sort of debate may well signal major changes in worship style, I'm not at all convinced that it has anything to do with renewal of worship in the spiritual sense at all.
Charles M. Schulz, the Peanuts cartoonist, suggested thirty years ago that most people attending church on Sunday do so with the same feelings as they attend the theatre; simply to enjoy what's going on. And he was absolutely right, in my view. The only thing he didn't take note of is that there are different kinds of entertainment, and how you express your enjoyment depends on the nature of the event. Schulz is quite right that some people come to church to sit passively listening as if at the theatre. But there are others who come with the same attitude with which they would attend a football match. And there are others who come with the same attitude with which they would attend a disco. With whatever attitude they come, however, they all come to enjoy what's going on. The worship style in which the church engages is no ground at all on which to judge the spirituality of those who are participating. Indeed, those of us who have travelled know that worship style is largely culturally determined. You go to a black Baptist church in the southern states of the USA and then to a Free Presbyterian in the Scottish Highlands and compare the difference! But the difference has nothing whatever to do with the spiritual authenticity of the worshippers. It's a cultural difference.
What determines whether we have real dealings with God when we go into his house to pray is not the music or the atmosphere, or even the degree of our physical participation in it. To think of worship in such terms is to think like a Judaistic Pharisee and not like a Christian at all. It is the hallmark of new-covenant religion that it is indifferent to cultural forms. 'A time is coming and has now come', said Jesus, 'when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks' (John 4:23).
You want to know why that tax man was heard? It was because he had a heart for God. He felt the need for God. Worship for him was a matter of spirit and truth. That's why he went to church; not to be entertained, or, like the Pharisee, to entertain others. He went there as a sick man goes to a doctor, because he felt a profound personal moral desperation. God always hears the prayers of people like that, whoever they are: crooks, rogues, adulterers. Why, he even heard the eleventh-hour appeal of a thief on a cross. But he ignores, he snubs, those who come to his house as if they were attending a circus, simply to enjoy what's going on. After all, it's not as though they come to meet him, is it?
We will never have real dealings with God until we get beyond religious entertainment, until we reach this point of felt need which the tax man had reached. Then we will pray and get answers.
That brings us to the second thing Jesus highlights for us in this paradoxical little story: two kinds of guilt. The more you think about it, the more ironic it is: there was the tax man feeling guilty, yet Jesus says he went home acquitted; and there's the Pharisee feeling innocent, and Jesus implies he went home condemned. That pinpoints for us a very important distinction, between guilt as an emotional experience and guilt as an objective fact. And this little story points out that the presence or absence of the former doesn't necessarily imply the presence or absence of the latter.
We all know that there is such a thing as irrational guilt, guilt which feels out of proportion to any wrong we've actually committed. Psychiatrists have to deal with that kind of anxiety all the time. But what many people forget today is that it is equally possible to feel no guilt at all when in fact we should feel guilty. A complacent conscience may be psychologically innocuous. It may reduce our stress levels. I'm sure the Pharisee was far more relaxed and at ease with himself than this tax man was. And yet in ultimate spiritual terms, such a complacent conscience is dreadfully perilous.
For there is such a thing as real guilt. Guilt isn't just a feeling; it is a fact. Unfortunately the feeling and the fact don't always run together. In our increasingly psychologically aware generation we must not allow that objective reality of guilt to become obscured.
Some years ago I had a discussion with some GCSE English students who were studying Shakespeare's Macbeth. We were discussing the scene where Lady Macbeth, after the murder, is racked with anxiety about the image of blood which she sees indelibly clinging to her hands. What struck me was that their reaction was almost unanimous: not 'Here is a vicious criminal dreadfully convicted of her sin, who badly needs to find a sense of forgiveness,' but 'Here is a pathetic nutcase, seriously mentally disturbed, badly in need of a psychiatrist.'
Guilt has ceased to be an acceptable part of normal human experience in the twentieth century. It has become pathological. It's a symptom of emotional illness or mental abnormality now, rather than an appropriate moral response to personal sin. No longer do we send the guilt-stricken individual to the priest for absolution as we once did; we send them to the psychiatrist for treatment. And increasingly people think of the church itself as nothing more than an alternative form of such treatment. They go to church in order to feel better about themselves, in order to feel that they are OK people.
That, I suggest to you, was precisely the function of the Pharisee's piety. His religion was just a form of psychotherapy by which he got rid of his guilt feelings. Notice the three very obvious techniques he uses.
First, he majors on negative obedience. I commented on this in relation to the behaviour of the priest and the Levite in the story of the good Samaritan. Here it is again. Our Pharisee comforts himself with all the sins he had not committed, like robbery or adultery. This is always good for the peace of our conscience, because of course such negative obedience forms a convenient smokescreen behind which we may conceal the many sins we have committed.
It's the kind of attitude which, as we said in our second study, lies behind a great deal of evasion of social responsibility today. It enables people to see a murder committed on a city street and do nothing about it, because they aren't personally holding the knife.
It's also the reason, incidentally, that religion has such a killjoy image in many people's minds. All those 'thou shalt nots'. Many think of God as a prohibitive spoilsport who wants to stop us doing all the things we want to do. Joy Davidman tells a lovely story of a missionary trying to convert an African chief. On being told that a long list of sins were indeed prohibited by Christian morality, he remarked that he was much too old to commit any of them anyway. 'So to be old and a Christian, they are the same thing!'
For many, that is exactly what being a Christian is: being old, being past it, giving oneself to God when the devil wants nothing more to do with us. They picture Christianity as something sapless and joyless, the enemy of ah delights. And they think that way because so many religious people are trying to escape guilt by defining obedience in purely negative terms.
Secondly, he majors on legalistic obedience. He lists all the unnecessary good works of supererogation which he doesn't really have to do at all. Like fasting twice a week, when Moses said once a year was quite enough; or giving a tithe of absolutely everything he had—even the herbs in the kitchen which he used for flavouring his food—when Moses said a tithe of one's income was adequate.
Once again, legalism of this type is a classic method of guilt avoidance. By accumulating a record of this kind of superfluous piety you can deceive yourself into thinking that you're compensating for any real sins that you may have committed. It's quite illogical, of course. You can never really make up for anything by subsequent penances of this sort. It's like going to the magistrate and saying, 'Yes, I did drive at 100 mph down the High Street yesterday. But unlike some people I never park on a double yellow line. Surely you can take that into consideration.'
Yet there are thousands of religious people whose minds work essentially in that fallacious fashion, preoccupied with the trivial details of their lives in a desperate attempt to camouflage, and compensate for, a formidable monster of moral corruption that they know secretly lurks within. Some men take great pride in the fact that they don't smoke or drink, others are perfectionists in their hobbies, or workaholics in their careers. Some women are fanatically house-proud. They try to purge their conscience by liberal use of disinfectant in the bathroom. And of course there are those endless numbers of religious people who salve their consciences by attending church, giving money to charity, saying prayers, and so on. There's a certain kind of obsessive personality that enjoys ritual, discipline, self-denial, and that sort of thing. An ascetic, puritanical lifestyle is a form of self-indulgence for them.
And that's what the Pharisees were like. All such behaviour is driven by the desire to avoid guilt. By concentrating on the observance of petty rules and regulations which we set ourselves—rules which, though irksome, we know we can fully keep if we really try—our attention is diverted from God's big rules, with regard to which our obedience can never be satisfactory and which therefore provide us with an inexhaustible source of potential moral anxiety.
Third, he majors on comparative obedience. 'I am not', the Pharisee says, 'like other men, that tax man for instance.' This strategy of self-justification never fails, for there are always people more guilty than ourselves. That is why we read the gutter press: to feed our own smug self-satisfaction. 'Tut, tut!' we say under our self-righteous breath as we read the salacious headlines. 'Who could imagine anybody doing such a thing?' The implication being, ‘I never would.’
Our moral censure of others is once again just a device to distract attention from our own guilt. We think that by adopting a tone of shocked indignation over the sins of others, our own sin will go unnoticed. As Jesus put it, we point out the speck in other people's eyes in order to distract attention from the great plank in our own (Matthew 7:3). Or as the apostle Paul says, we try to escape judgment by making ourselves into judges (Romans 2:3). By this type of comparative obedience many of us will probably succeed today in avoiding the chastening effect of this very parable upon our lives.
Have you heard of the Sunday School teacher who told this story to his class? Afterwards he drew what he thought was the obvious moral lesson. 'Now, children,' he said, 'let's thank God we're not like that proud Pharisee.'
The trouble is it's all too easy for Christians to slip into the Pharisee's shoes without even realizing we are doing it, in the very act of trying to distance ourselves from him.
By these three classic techniques our Pharisee succeeds, then, in feeling good about himself. By these means he coped with his guilt feelings very well. So very well that they had been completely repressed. No flutter of moral anxiety disturbed this man's conscience at all. And yet Jesus insists that for all the effectiveness of his self- administered psychotherapy, his real guilt remained. It had not been diminished one jot. He felt all right, but his feelings did not correspond to the state of his soul. He might have been more emotionally stable as a result of his religious exercises, but he was nearer hell.
Am I not right, then, to be concerned that there may be many today suffering from the very same delusion? Or that I myself may be falling into this very same trap by using this parable to critique the religion of others when I should rather be examining myself? How do I deal with my guilt? That's the issue. Am I content simply to ease the pangs of conscience by persuading myself that 'I'm OK, thank you very much'? Or do I, like that tax man, yearn for some much more radical solution than that to the pollution of my soul?
This issue of handling guilt was brought home to me some years ago with peculiar force. I had to counsel a young university student who had just had an abortion to avoid the inconvenience of a pregnancy that would have interrupted her degree course. To her surprise she found herself overwhelmed with guilt in the aftermath of the operation. So devastated was she by what she had done that she had even attempted suicide, and that's why I'd been asked to see her. What do you say to a young woman like that?
I'll tell you what a lot of her friends were saying. 'Don't be so silly. You're just suffering from a form of post-natal depression. It's your hormones. You've got nothing to be ashamed of. Snap out of it! What's the difference between an abortion and a spontaneous miscarriage?'
Some of her colleagues were studying psychology, and had gladly analysed her guilt feelings in terms of Freud and Jung. She herself was a social scientist and was well aware of the argument that all moral convictions are just the result of human societal conditioning. Maybe if she'd looked hard enough she could have found some culture somewhere that regularly procured abortions without any conscience about it whatsoever. But she still felt guilty. And no amount of rationalizing would take the feeling away.
She had discovered what her friends, employing the modern secular equivalents of pharisaical religion, had succeeded in hiding from themselves: that guilt is real. It's not just a mental state. She did not want to be sent to the psychiatrist to get her guilt neurosis erased. She didn't want to be reassured with the smooth talk of some nondirective student counsellor. She didn't want to be deprogrammed like one of Pavlov's dogs. She wanted to be treated like a responsible human being. What she wanted was not some therapy to make her feel better, but an answer to the guilt she had incurred; a guilt which she was persuaded was not a psychological aberration, but an objective stain on her life. In a word, she wanted forgiveness.
She'd reached the same point of personal desperation as the tax man. He wouldn't rationalize his guilt away either. He wouldn't persuade himself that he wasn't so bad after all, or try to cloak his sin with legalistic observances or unfavourable comparisons with others. He made no feeble excuses, pleaded no mitigating circumstances, offered no compensatory penances. He simply begged: 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner.' And, says Jesus, that man went home not just feeling better, but with his moral status dramatically reversed in the eyes of God.
I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God (Luke 18:14).
'Justified' is a word not from the vocabulary of the psychiatrist but from the law courts. It does not describe how the tax man felt. It describes how he stood legally before God's bar of justice. It means quite literally that God had declared him innocent. Just as a judge might acquit an accused person, so God had passed a verdict of 'not guilty' on this conscience-stricken man. And Jesus would have us learn from this story that the discovery of such justification is what true religion is all about. It is the spiritual remedy by which we are liberated, not just from guilt feelings but from the fact of guilt. It's not merely a method for easing our consciences. Justification is about the cleansing of our lives. It's not a psychological analgesic. It is a moral purgative.
Martin Luther wrote, There are only two sorts of people in the world: sinners who think themselves righteous, and the righteous who think themselves sinners.' It's a bold generalization, as Luther's so often are, and it needs qualification if it's not to be misunderstood. But essentially he's right. And the Pharisee and tax man epitomize the point he's making.
Fundamentally the difference between these two was the grounds upon which they sought acquittal in the eyes of God. The Pharisee was one of those who, Luke observes, 'were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else' (18:9). He could make it to heaven by his own efforts. He would have nothing to be ashamed of before God's tribunal. Why, he'd be able to boast about how hard he had worked to get there!
How many tragic people there are in church every Sunday who tread that path! I sometimes think this is going to be the greatest irony of hell, that it will be full, not of shame or even regret, but of self-righteous indignation. Many of those there will be convinced that they don't deserve it. 'How dare God damn me,' they'll be saying, 'after all I did for him?' Sometimes I shudder to imagine the shock that there will be on that last day, as they present their self-manufactured ticket at the gate of heaven and hear it declared a counterfeit.
Why do they try it on? Jesus surely puts his finger on the nub of the matter in that postscript:
Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted (Luke 18:14).
It was conceit that lay at the root of the Pharisee's religion. He wanted to get to heaven with his dignity unscathed. He wanted to go through those pearly gates with his head held high. He wanted a righteousness he could be proud of. But no such righteousness exists. For, as a matter of unvarying policy on God's part, everyone who exalts himself will be humbled.
This is the essential lesson of Jesus's own example. He accepts the title 'Lord', but he takes the role of a servant. He shares equality with God, but he hangs voluntarily on a cross. No wonder he offended and perplexed people. In those days humility was a vice, a despicable sign of weakness. Yet Jesus insists that not only must we be humble; he reveals in his incarnation and in his passion that the heart of God himself is humble.
No wonder this Pharisee can't go to heaven, then; he is contemptuous of humility. By contrast, for the tax man it was his only hope of salvation: 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner' (Luke 18:13).
Again, 'mercy' is a weak translation, for it's not the normal word for 'mercy' at all. In fact if we were going to translate it accurately in English we'd have to use an old-fashioned phrase like 'be propitiated towards me'. This word was associated with the sacrificial ritual of the temple and had to do with atonement for sins.
This tax man's hope is not just in God's loving and compassionate character, you see. Remember where he is. His eyes are on the altar where the temple priest at the hour of prayer has just offered sacrifice for the sins of the people. 'Please, God,' he says, 'I see the bloodstains there on the altar. Accept that sacrifice on my behalf, be propitiated towards me.' He's not just appealing to God's better nature when he says, 'Be merciful to me.' He's laying claim to God's own remedy for the sinner's plight. And in doing so, he highlights one more vital lesson that a morally complacent world too easily forgets: that there can be no real assurance of pardon without an act of atonement that satisfies God.
Some people think that forgiveness is easy for God. 'Of course God will forgive me,' they say, 'it's his business.' Not so. It's dreadfully hard for God to forgive sin. He's the moral governor of the universe. If he overlooks a sin it's as good as saying that sin doesn't matter. The integrity of his own righteousness means that he must disassociate himself from wickedness wherever he sees it. He can't lay himself open to the charge of moral indifference or moral inconsistency. If he did, he wouldn't be a righteous God any longer. And that's why in Old Testament times there had to be an altar, there had to be a sacrifice.
That sacrifice was first of all a symbol of the seriousness of sin in God's eyes. We human beings are squeamish about blood. Well, God is squeamish about sin. He is repulsed by its stench and stain. That blood sacrifice on the altar was the sign of his moral revulsion.
More than that, though: sacrifice was a symbol of the penalty for sin. For as blood speaks of death, so sin demands death. No less a price is adequate to express the horror and the indignation of a holy God. Forgiveness may be offered freely in the Bible, but never make the mistake of thinking it's cheap. The Bible knows nothing of cheap forgiveness. Our tax man realized that. 'Oh God,' he cried, 'be propitiated towards me, let my sin be atoned for. I don't minimize the seriousness of my crimes. I don't underestimate the penalty they deserve. I see the blood, I know the cost. So please, God, turn your anger from me; be satisfied that a sacrificial substitute has died on the altar in my place today. And so have mercy on me, the sinner.'
This may seem a strange question, but I fear I must ask it. Have you sought God's pardon the tax man's way, through God's merciful provision of an atoning sacrifice? Or do you seek a righteousness like the Pharisee's, built on your religious reputation and your moral achievements?
Extraordinary as it may sound, I find pastorally that there are an enormous number of professing Christians today who come to church regularly to pray and yet have never really made this most fundamental discovery. Deep down they know they are guilty, but instead of resolving their guilt God's way, they bury it.
The symptoms of that buried guilt are so easy to spot. A lack of self-esteem, a low self-image, an inferiority complex. They go around complaining, 'I'm no good at being a Christian. I don't feel excited about being a Christian, I've got no assurance of salvation, no joy in worship, no enthusiasm to witness. I'm a lame-duck Christian, that's what I am.' Countless people are burdened in this way. They say they're depressed, that they can't cope, that they always make a mess of things, that they're no use to anybody and it's pointless trying to improve themselves. What's wrong with these people? What's the source of this spiritual debility?
I don't want to oversimplify by generalization. The pastoral problems involved may be very complex. But I am convinced that a considerable proportion of these folk are suffering from unresolved feelings of repressed guilt. Christians though they are, or say they are, their attitudes are shaped by this guilt-denying world of ours. And as a result they have never been truly convicted of sin, never properly understood God's remedy for sin, and therefore have never really felt truly pardoned of sin. That's why they feel inadequate, that's why assurance eludes them. The one person you can never forgive is yourself. So long as this spectre of unacknowledged guilt deep within their psyche haunts them, they will continue to suffer the destructive consequences of subconscious self-hatred eating away inside them, destroying their motivation, their ambition, their assurance.
What's the answer? The answer is that they must come and stand where the tax man stood. Justification by faith must cease to be a cerebral article of their creed and become instead an experimental truth in their hearts. They must stand where the tax man stood, with all the defensive masks removed, all the illusions of moral respectability shattered, all pretence of self-righteousness abandoned. They must look where the tax man looked, to a sacrifice; but to a far nobler and more costly sacrifice than ever was slain on a temple altar. They must look to a cross where the Son of God himself shed his blood once and for all, to make atonement for the sin of the world. And they must pray as that tax man prayed, 'God, have mercy on me. I ask for no cheap forgiveness; I do not underestimate the seriousness of my crime. I know that the penalty of my sin is death, but please, God, be satisfied that a worthy substitute has paid the price in my place, and so be merciful to me, the sinner.'
And most of all, they need to hear that reassuring verdict of Jesus upon such a penitential prayer: 'I tell you that this man... went home justified' (Luke 18:14). He stood in the presence of God now not as a despised and condemned criminal, but as a beloved and accepted child. Justified by faith, he could now have peace with God. Not the peace of the Pharisee, that self-manufactured psychological fiction which would one day be stripped from him to his horror in final judgment. No, a peace with God based on God's own irreversible, incontestable declaration of pardon through Jesus' blood.
So much depends on how we deal with our guilt. Are we content merely with a little religious therapy that enables us to feel good about ourselves, or do we long for a radical cleansing of the real guilt that lies on our souls? It will depend on what sort of righteousness we seek. A righteousness of our own that comes through our own moral efforts, or a righteousness from God that depends on faith?
The theologian Karl Barth expresses the reason for our resistance to that divine remedy insightfully:
We dislike hearing that we are saved by grace alone. We don't really appreciate that God does not owe us anything, that we are bound to live from His goodness alone, that we are left with nothing but the great humility of a child presented with many gifts. To put it bluntly, we do not like to believe.
But believe we must. Believe in the greatness of the merciful heart of God. Believe in the sufficiency of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Believe most of all, perhaps, in the truth of that extraordinary promise, ‘Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.’
In the topsy-turvy world of heaven, it is the poor who are rich, the humbled who are great. In the paradoxical topography of the kingdom of God, the way up is down.