Luke 18:9-14 * Ash Wednesday 2009 * Pastor Leyrer

Dear Friends in Christ,

As printed on the cover of your service folder, the general theme for our midweek devotions this Lenten season is “Father Forgive Them.” Each week we will travel with Jesus on His road to the cross and consider some of the different people and events He encountered. We will have the opportunity to discuss these matters in light of their history, their spiritual significance and the meaning they have for us in our lives today.

This series, along with our traditional reading of the Passion History, will begin next week. But tonight, on this Ash Wednesday, we’d like to begin the Lenten season by considering our Gospel lesson for today; Jesus parable of the two men in the temple.

Perhaps we can introduce what Jesus is doing for us in this way…

If you have ever gone to the eye doctor (I suspect most of us have) you’ve been through this little exercise: you are asked to rest your chin and press your forehead on the pad of a machine, look through two eye openings and report what line of letters you can see on the screen on the wall. Hopefully you can see the big E and then you work your way down from there.

While you are doing this the doctor or the assistant begins flipping different lenses over the holes and asks which one is clearer: number one or number two. Or they might say, “this one or this one.” And with each answer you move on to another set of lenses.

We might call this an exercise in comparisons. The intended result, of course, is to bring as much clarity to our eye sight as possible. God willing we walk out of the office with a prescription to either see better or a confirmation that we haven’t lost any ground.

In a spiritual sense that’s really what Jesus is doing for us today. Jesus provides us with

CLARITY THROUGH CONTRAST

as He compares

1. Two men

2. Two prayers

3. And then makes two pronouncements

And what He has to say on this provides us with a wonderful way to sharpen our focus as we enter Lent.

“To some who were confident in their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.” Let’s first talk about the two men.

The first was a Pharisee. If you are familiar with the Gospels, you know something about these guys. At Jesus’ time they had been around for approximately a couple hundred years. At first their reason for existence was entirely honorable because they rigidly held to the Word of God at a time when many of their fellow Jews were abandoning it due to worldly influences. The Pharisees separated themselves from such Jews. In fact, “separated” is what the word Pharisee literally means in Hebrew.

Unfortunately, down through the years came some not so good changes. Their separateness became a source of pride. They began adding their own rules and traditions to God’s Word. Rather than looking to the coming Messiah, they looked to their own personal performance as the way of salvation. They were the religious elite of the day, and they looked down their noses at everyone else who wasn’t in their club. In fact, they had a generic name for them: “sinners.”

So when Luke mentions that this parable was addressed to “some self-righteous people who looked down on everybody else,” he was talking about the Pharisees.

In the other corner we have the tax collector. For a goodly price the Roman Empire granted those Jews who could pay for it the privilege of collecting taxes for them from their fellow Jews. You can guess how that went over in terms of popularity. Not only that, many tax collectors used their relationship with Rome as a license for legalized extortion. They overcharged their own people, gave Rome what it had coming and pocketed the rest.

As a class of people, then, tax collectors were pretty much considered the dregs of society and as a life form were generally ranked a notch or two above pond scum. Consequently, in the Gospels we often hear “tax collectors and sinners” lumped together as the lowest of the low.

Those are the two men, a Pharisee and a tax collector. It would be hard to overstate the contrast between them. The same could be said of the two prayers that follow…

“The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: God I thank you that I am not like all other men – robbers, evil-doers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.”

What do you think? The first thing that strikes us is that this is a not really a prayer. Outwardly this Pharisee addressed God but what followed was a very flattering description of himself. There was nothing he really needed to ask God for because in his own estimation there was nothing that could be improved upon. We see no confession of sin, no sense of awe, no recognition of his unworthiness before a just and holy God…

Rather we see just the opposite. He took pride in what he thought he was, he elevated himself by comparing himself to those he believed to be his inferiors, and he essentially informs God that He should be tickled pink to have someone like him on His side.

And what is not said is the accompanying sense of entitlement and expectation that, of course, God will hear and answer all my prayers because look at what I all do for Him…

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Again, the contrasts could not be more striking. First thing to note, this was a prayer and not a trumpeting of virtues, as was the Pharisee’s. And within this prayer was a heartfelt confession of sin and the recognition that our relationship with God is based on His mercy and His grace.

It is the prayer of a repentant man who makes no attempt to elevate himself at the expense of others (“God I thank you I am not like those other tax collectors”), but humbly understood who he was – an unworthy sinner – and who God is – a gracious and merciful Lord.

It is the prayer of a man who understood that forgiveness of sins and eternal life does not come as the result of what we do for God, but depends entirely on the grace, mercy and love of God which manifested itself in the doing, the dying and the rising of Jesus Christ.

And most importantly, it is the prayer that was heard and answered as Jesus now makes two contrasting declarations: “I tell you this man, rather than the other, went home justified by God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Two men. Two prayers. Two declarations. But only one man went home “justified” – that is, redeemed, restored, forgiven, declared righteous – because only one man truly understood himself and truly understood God.

And for the eyes of faith this contrast provides clarity. That’s what Lent does better than any other time of the year. It helps us see clearly who we are and who God is

And we need this yearly vision check, because I have a confession to make: I think I’ve got a little Pharisee in me. In fact, I’ve got a lot of Pharisee in me.

And if it is true of me I’m pretty sure it’s true of you as well.

We live in a world that would much rather redefine sin that confess it; a world that often handles sin by very deftly minimizing, sanitizing, glorifying or even justifying it. Sometimes we buy into this. Even we as Christians don’t always like to consider ourselves as “poor, miserable sinners.” Seems so negative; not good for our self-esteem.

So sometimes we get defensive about our sin. Sometimes we deny it and continue to not take it nearly as seriously as God obviously does. Sometimes we like to compare ourselves to others and make ourselves feel superior like the Pharisee did.

When that becomes the case we must remember the words of the hymnist,

If you think of sin but lightly, nor suppose the evil great

Here (the cross) you see its nature rightly, here its guilt may estimate

Mark the sacrifice appointed; see who bears the awful load

‘Tis the Word, the Lord’s Anointed, Son of Man and Son of God.

Lent reveals us for what we are. Sinners deserving of a punishment meted out to someone else. Lent does not let us get around this. We are the cause of Christ’s crucifixion. And that makes us – or at least, should make us – very sad.

But, of course, Lent also reveals God for what and who He is. And that makes us glad. And not just glad, but grateful. What the tax collector prayed for has been graciously and generously granted to us through Jesus Christ: God has been merciful to us.

So it is with sad but grateful hearts that we enter into another Lenten Season and walk the road to Calvary with Jesus once again.

Today through His parable Jesus has allowed us to examine the eyes of our faith and has provided us with clarity by contrast. We see two men, we hear two prayers and we witness two declarations. Jesus pronounces who is right and why, and who is wrong and why. And we rejoice that through the lens of this teaching we can see clearly.

May this season serve to only sharpen our vision even more. Amen.