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
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