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
