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
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