The guy is not as nasty as you may think. I am talking about that Pharisee who stands and declares how great he is in his prayer.
It is easy to look at him as he stands there declaring how great he is because he is not like the thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like the tax collector who is standing nearby, and say to yourself, “What a self-righteous hypocrite. There is no way he has gotten this far in life without sinning.” But, I actually believe the fellow.
I believe that the guy was righteous. He probably, honestly, did fast twice a week and give a tenth of all his income. He probably has never stolen, beaten anybody up, cheated on his wife, sided with the wrong kind of people or cheated anyone out of their money like the tax collectors were accused of doing.
The guy is not obviously nasty. He is quite the opposite.
He is probably the kind of guy that you hope your daughter would bring home from her date with his well-groomed hair, door opening abilities, and a little in the wallet so that she does not have to pay for a date that he set up. Am I right?
You do not want the scruffy, odd smelling, town cheat walking through the door, asking to whisk your daughter away. You want the righteous guy.
Yet, even with all of that wholesome goodness beaming through the door onto your daughter’s future, Jesus has a problem with the guy.
The problem is revealed in the conversations that he holds. A lot of his conversations at the dinner table go something like this: “Can you believe that woman who stumbles down the middle of the street, drunk every night? Sometimes you have to be thankful that you don’t have that kind of life.”
Or he’ll say, “Wow, I’m glad I’m not like my neighbor. He can’t even keep his lawn mowed, much less care for his family.”
Somehow, the guy has taken God’s rules, God’s laws, intended to be followed so that our neighbors might thrive, and be loved, and turned the the laws around to be used as a stick to beat the neighbor. He has taken the law that says, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and rather than using it to love his neighbor, has used it as a weapon to say, “My neighbor doesn’t love enough.”
Somehow, righteousness (loving God and caring for the neighbor) has been misused and it has been turned into self-righteousness.
Self-righteousness is loving oneself and striving to make oneself perfect. Like so many before him, in the words of Dr. David Lose, the man has manipulated God’s law from “a device intended to help one’s neighbor to a standard by which to judge one’s neighbor.”
That is the real problem that Jesus sees in the righteous man: that he cares mainly about himself. He is a moral, thriving, self-made man who (despite his daily prayers) needs no one but himself. He is his own God. He is his own creation. He is the judge of his own world. He is righteous, but he is not justified.
His righteousness makes him well aware of the differences between he and his neighbor, and this awareness, this judging, moves him further from his neighbor rather than closer.
But, Jesus is about justifying. Jesus is about drawing people closer. He is about opening his arms wide on the cross to draw people, especially the sinful, together through forgiveness. Jesus is about “reconciling all things to himself” as Colossians 1:20 puts it. Jesus is not about driving creation apart.
Rather than requiring us to make ourselves right and noble and perfect, Jesus justifies us by the blood of the cross. Jesus makes us right through love and forgiveness.
Just in case we forgot, there is another man standing there praying. There is that tax collector who sides with the wrong people in society by collecting taxes for the Romans. On top of that horror, he probably takes too much off the top of his tax collecting for his own use.
He cannot even lift his eyes to God, but prays “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” That man, Jesus says, is “justified.”
As Dr. David Lose says:
“Justification, in contrast to righteousness, does not depend on our own efforts and, indeed, has nothing to do with them. We can take neither credit nor responsibility for our standing before God yet recognize that we are recipients of a profound gift. Looking around us, we see all others in a similar vein, people that God has created and loves and out of love has also justified.”
Love is what justification is all about. Think about your own relationships. You do not stay in relationships with people because they are perfect in all things. You do not base your relationships on perfect behavior. Rather, you base your relationships on love.
Do not forget, those who stick with you through life do not do so because of your amazing levels of perfection either. They stick with you because they love you. Love is a gift, and that gift of love draws us together.
Justification is about love and forgiveness, and that is what the second man has: love and forgiveness from God. The second man is not his own God. He is his not own perfect creation (far from it). He has no pedestal from which to judge the world. He is not righteous, but he is justified and loved dearly by God.
Though God smiles at all of the good things you do to love the neighbor, the volunteerism, the loving parenting, the caring friendships, the devoted citizenship, the devotion to the church, and all of the hard work for the sake of others, none of these things define your worth. Your worth comes from the fact that God loves you and decided to make you a part of God’s family as a gift. You do not need to do anything to deserve God’s love, it is something God wants to share with you.
That said, I do have to say that love does tend to be contagious, and love sprouts forth like a healthy weed as we do our best to be loving to people is all aspects of our lives.
Dr. Lose reminds us that "life is a gift to be treasured rather than accomplished."
Life is a living as a beloved person, rather than living as a self-made one. God holds you even now in a big pair of loving arms, and that is what makes all of the difference.
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