Jesus Encounters the Pious

Sermon for Sunday, October 26, 2025. Text: Luke 18:9–14 “Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others.” (Luke 18:9) Too much with us today is this virulent contempt for others. A great many people seem to feel that violence against people who hold different opinions than them is justified according to the degree of intensity with which they feel this disagreement. They dehumanize their targets, calling them names such as “fascist,” “nazi,” etc. The idea seems to be that applying one of these labels to someone proves he is one, and that in turn justifies personal violence against him. People fail to hold sympathy for others not only because they do not understand them, but because they do not want to understand them. Those who indulge in intemperate statements about roughly half their fellow Americans who made different choices at the polls than they did, have a personal interest in not understanding them. You and I might never do this. I hope not. But we undoubtably face the temptation offered by our present moment to hold our fellow human beings in contempt, especially when we feel ourselves subject to that same contempt from others. As a Christian, I cannot react in like manner. I must continue to know all persons to be fellow human beings and objects of God’s unfathomable mercy, and speak and act accordingly. That’s the only way to break the cycle of contempt. In Luke’s introduction to the parable, he shows that this outward sin of contempt is rooted in another, deeper sin. “Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others.” Despising others is the outward sin that results from the inward sin of self-righteousness. Self-righteousness certainly describes the Pharisee, the man of religion in the parable. Luke’s introduction reminds us that he is telling this story to people who resemble that character. The Pharisee, despite his exaggerated and self-congratulatory piety, is not a hypothetical person over there. He is the audience. The parable is a mirror for them—and for us. An inherent difficulty in identifying self-righteousness is that it’s always easier to see in others than to recognize in oneself. It’s a self-concealing tendency. The agrarian thinker and poet Wendell Berry has this great line in one of his essays, where he responds to criticism of his choice to not buy a computer. “Two others accused me of self-righteousness,” he writes, “by which they seem to have meant that they think they are righter than I think I am.” When we think we are better than others, we actually fail to understand both them and ourselves. So before I begin to see in that Pharisee those others whom I identify as self-righteous, contemptuous, judgmental, I need to recognize this Pharisee in myself. Now, by his account, this Pharisee is a good person. He would like God to know this about him. First of all, there are all the sins he does not commit: theft, adultery, injustice. He also maintains regular spiritual disciplines (fasting) and is scrupulous about giving a tenth of everything he gets back to God and his community. To be honest, it would help our budget if we had a few more such people in the congregation. But God doesn’t see things the way we do. It is not for some secret hypocrisy, unmentioned in the parable, that this Pharisee is rejected by God. It is for the sin he is committing right there in public, standing in the courts of the Lord. He justifies himself and despises others. And for that, God will not justify him. On the other hand, there is this tax collector, who, by his own and everyone else’s account, is a sinner. Speaking of calling people naughty names, this man, one could say, is a Quisling, a collaborator with the hateful and repressive Roman regime—and a corrupt one to boot, extorting extra fees to line his pockets. Unlike the Pharisee, he isn’t standing there proudly in the middle of the Temple courtyard. He is standing awkward and ashamed, at the edge of the crowd, over there by the wall just inside the doors, as if contemplating a quick getaway from his angry countrymen. Yet his presence has not gone unnoticed by the Pharisee, who makes him an object lesson for his own moral superiority. Unlike that worthy, the tax collector has no catalog of virtues, no list of sins he hasn’t committed. He knows only one thing: that God is merciful, and he sure is in need of that sweet mercy. God, be merciful to me a sinner. And for that, Jesus says, this man went down to his house justified. Not necessarily with peace of mind, justified in his own mind and heart—the Pharisee has peace of mind, for all the good that does him—but the tax collector is justified where it really matters: with God. Theologians speak about the righteousness of God as being both “imparted” and “imputed” to us. Imputation is a legal declaration of righteousness, whereas imparted righteousness is the gift of righteousness that changes us, makes us actually righteous before God. The grace of God, I think, should have some effect on us. Having encountered his salvation, we should not be as we were before. And so it is tempting for me to assume of this tax collector, that he returned to his home a changed man—like the real-life tax collectors, Matthew and Zacchaeus, who had a life- and heart-changing encounter with the Lord. But as we so often have to ask, what does Jesus actually say in the parable? Not, “This man went down to his house totally changed, generous, upright, a credit to his community.” He doesn’t say any of that. Only, “This man went down to his house justified .” Full stop. When we repent of our sins, we can be tempted to think that God’s forgiveness and grace are conditioned on not only our repentance but also our future performance. We can’t believe that he would simply justify us with no strings attached. And yes, it is dangerous, having received his grace, to fall back into our former sins. Sin has a way of hardening the heart, and there is the danger that we will find it more difficult to repent again. God’s free and unconditional forgiveness should make the continued presence of sin in our lives seem more grave, not more trivial, and so in our Christian life we should take frequent opportunities to repent. Our tradition gives us three such opportunities. First, is the daily prayer of repentance in the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. When I pray this myself, I add back in the phrases that were abandoned in our most recently revised prayer book, because they express so well the truth of our spiritual state that we would rather forget. “Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against thy holy laws, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have left undone those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us . But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders , spare thou those who confess their faults, restore thou those who are penitent, according to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord; and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.” I think the phrase “And there is no health in us” was omitted because we’d all like to think that there is a little health in us. We’re not as bad as we could be (we’d like to think), and so we deserve a little credit for that, at least. But this prayer orients us to the truth that whatever good there is in us is not of ourselves, but the work of grace, and so, miserable offenders that we are, we cannot take credit even for our good works, as the Pharisee does. Those last phrases, “that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life” is not a prayer that we will be so good as to not need repentance hereafter. It is a prayer that the goodness of God which comes to us in his free and full forgiveness will be manifested in our lives, not to our own self-justification, but to his glory. We don’t want the world to see us as it sees that Pharisee. What a righteous man, what an upstanding citizen. No! We want the world to see us and say, What a testament those people are to the wonderful, unmerited, and, yes, transformative grace of God. Now real briefly, the other two opportunities for repentance. One is the general confession we will pray in just a moment. Its language is similar to that of the prayer in the daily office; the main difference being the priestly absolution afterwards. One of the things that I treasure about being a priest is that Jesus has given me the authority to forgive the sins of others on his behalf. I want to regularly exercise that privilege and authority for the benefit of the church and the world. I hope when you hear me speak those words, by the grace of God, Jesus himself is drawing near to declare his pardon and forgiveness over you. By the way, as a priest, I can’t absolve my own sins. I also need to confess and repent of them and receive the forgiveness of God and others, which is one reason why I from time to time take advantage of the third opportunity our tradition offers us for repentance, which is the rite of reconciliation or auricular confession, which begins on page 447 of our prayer book. I commend it to your attention. If it is something you have never done, or something you have not done in a long time; or if ever you feel, despite your ongoing repentance, the weight of sins past or present, Jesus offers to you through his Church the full and personal declaration of pardon, forgiveness, and absolution. By his grace, let it be said of each of us: “This one went down to his house justified.”