GOOD NEWS FOR
RECOVERING PHARISEES
Text: Romans 4:1-5; Luke 18:9-14
March 13, 2005, Dave Philips
Hi! My name’s Dave, and I’m a Pharisee. I feel comfortable letting you all know that, because here we are in church, and the Church is a society for recovering Pharisees. We’re Pharisees Anonymous. We Pharisees know that tasting the smallest sip of self-righteousness may get us right back into the vicious cycle of thinking we’re the center of the universe, that God is in our hip pocket, and that we’re in a position to look down on our neighbors who are not as good as we.
So, we recovering Pharisees stay away from the self-righteousness cocktails. Instead, we get high on grace. We know that we’re saved by grace, we get hold of this grace through the channel of faith, and even the channel of faith is not something we built for ourselves: it’s the gift of God, not our invention, so none of us is in a position to brag.1
Last week we hit the climax of the book of Romans in the third chapter, the 21st verse. We heard the first clear articulation of the Great News in the letter, and we began an emphasis that will last for the rest of the letter. Paul gives us three chapters of mostly bad news, and then he tells us of this amazing deal that God offers us: God is willing to forget our past, he’s willing to forget our rebellion and selfishness. He is willing to give us a clean slate. He himself does this, personally, through Jesus Christ, by taking on himself our burden of sin. Jesus Christ who knew no sin becomes sin for our sake so that in union with him we might have his sinlessness before God.2
No one is righteous, no one is free from sin, all have sinned. There is no way that we can get ourselves into God’s good graces by being good, or by achieving great things, or by getting our names into the history books. We have no hope of eternal life by depending on our own goodness.
“But now,” says Paul in Romans 3:21, “a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Old Testament testifies. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and, AND (!!) are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Jesus Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.”
So the effect of this Great News is the justification of the sinner. All of us are sinners, all of us deserve God’s anger and punishment, but God offers to let us off scot free and to justify us so that our slate is wiped completely clean, we have no sinful past as far as God is concerned, we can look forward to eternal life, and en route to eternal life God’s Spirit is shaping us and causing us to grow to be more and more like Jesus Christ.
Wow, that’s quite a load! It’s hard to believe that God would do such a thing. It also grates against one of our very strong tendencies: to think that we’ve got to bring something to the transaction. Surely we must do something, surely we must have a part in this process of justification. Surely we must achieve something if we are to have God’s grace. When you’re a Boy Scout you don’t make Eagle Scout the first day you join! You’ve got to work hard and get a lot of merit badges before you make Eagle Scout.
But the clear message of the New Testament is that in the matter of our salvation we do nothing, God does everything. You may have heard the observation of the late Senator Hayakawa that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is that when a Republican sees a drowning man who is struggling in the waves one hundred feet from shore, he’ll throw him a fifty foot rope and say, “Show some initiative by swimming the fifty feet until you reach the rope. Then I’ll pull you in.” A Democrat, by contrast, will throw two hundred feet of rope to the drowning man and then wander off and forget to hold onto the other end to pull the man in.
In Romans there’s no hint of either of these approaches. God swims to the drowning man, pulls him out of the water, lays him down on the beach, and gives him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The drowning man is absolutely helpless to help himself. He hasn’t even got the strength to reach out and grab the rope. So God does the whole work of rescuing this drowning man. God does it all, the man does nothing.
Even so, we sinners are absolutely helpless in our sin. Our attempts to save ourselves are laughable and pathetic. We fail absolutely. But God rescues us, breathes new life into us — his own life — and we become new creatures. Now, by his grace, even though we are still prone to sin, we can grow up into Christ and become what God wants us to become.
I’ve gone back to the words of Jesus to reinforce this teaching of Paul. I do so for a very important reason: there’s a myth circulating that Paul is tough and Jesus is easy. There’s a myth that Paul is legalistic and moralistic and Jesus is soft and permissive. There’s a myth that Paul (with a little help from Martin Luther and John Calvin) invented the doctrine of justification by faith alone, while Jesus is indifferent to such a teaching.
Read your gospels! Jesus is much tougher than Paul when it comes to being serious about morality!3 And Jesus is THE One who first articulated the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
We find that doctrine clearly taught in the story of the tax collector and the Pharisee. Notice Luke’s explanation of the reason Jesus told the story. Jesus tells the parable to people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.
We can multiply examples of people like this. They are mostly Southern Baptists, never Presbyterians. They are mostly ignorant red-necks, never cultured, educated, distinguished people (like ourselves). They are the ones who have the programs on channel 32, never the people on channels 2, 4, 5, 7, and 13. In other words, they’re the fundies, the holy rollers, the fanatics, the lunatic fringe, the people who bomb abortion clinics, the ones who say that only their brand of Christians have access to the hotline to God, and only their prayers are heard by God.
But hold the phone! Stop! What do we catch ourselves doing when we indulge such criticism? Go back to Luke’s explanatory sentence: Jesus tells the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector to people “who trust in themselves that they are righteous and regard others with contempt.”
Boy, do I have to watch it at this point! How about you? I’m a recovering Pharisee, remember? And did you just see me bellying up to the bar to pour myself one of those intoxicating self-righteousness cocktails and drink it down? It’s easy to despise the fundies and the holy rollers! They’re an easy target! But when we despise them, what’s happening?
Right! We’re being the Pharisees! Let’s play with this parable of Jesus just a bit and see where it takes us. Let me offer this reverent reconstruction:
An I.R.S. agent and a Southern Baptist preacher went into a bar for a drink. The tax man ordered his favorite micro-brew beer, took a pull, and then looked down the bar at the preacher who was drinking a coke. And he said to himself, “Look at that loser! He’ll probably never earn more than $30,000 a year in his life. Look at his hayseed clothes and his Barney Fife haircut. Look at him sucking away on that coke. He probably never had a beer in his whole life.
“I’m certainly glad I’m not like him. I wear fashionable clothes, I’m advancing in my career, when I’m through working for the I.R.S., I’ll write a book and make a lot of money. And when people see me coming, even the heads of corporations tremble with fear. I know where it’s at: life is about looking out for number one, and I’m doing better than average in looking out for myself.”
But the preacher didn’t even raise his eyes from his coca cola. Instead, he prayed, “God, I’m out of place here, I look like a hick, and I wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t told me to come and share my faith with somebody. I don’t feel like I’m going to be able to succeed in what you’re asking me to do. So please be merciful to me, a sinner.”
Who’s the Pharisee in this little reconstruction? Right! It’s not the hick preacher, it’s the tax collector! The tax collector is the one who trusts in himself that he’s hip, and smart, and powerful, and he looks with contempt on the preacher.
When we, for any reason, look down with contempt on another human being, when we justify ourselves that we’re good, or smart, or hip, or with it, we’re the Pharisees.
But when we realize that our hipness amounts to nothing, when we realize that our smarts are paltry compared with the knowledge of God, when we realize that we’re in the same category with all other human beings, whether the Hitler’s of this world, or the Jimmy Swaggert’s, or the Saddam Hussein’s, or the Michael Jackson’s, or the Robert Blake’s then we’re in a position to receive God’s amazing grace.
Jesus ends the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee by saying that the tax collector, who could only beat his breast and say, “God, be merciful to me a sinner,” went to his home justified rather than the Pharisee.
That word “justified” is the same one we find all through the book of Romans. When Paul says as he did in our lesson from Romans that God “justifies the wicked”4 that’s the word he uses.
Jesus and Paul are teaching the very same thing about justification. In Luke what Jesus says, literally, is the tax collector “went to his home having been justified.” The tense is past perfect.5 It refers to action that has been completed in the past. It is also passive: it refers to action done to the tax collector by a third party, namely God. The tax collector’s justification is done, it’s finished, it demands nothing more from him. Furthermore, the tax collector did nothing to deserve his justification or to earn it. He acknowledges his unworthiness and begs for God’s mercy. He receives God’s mercy plus a bonus: he is justified by God.
Remember, when I am justified by God, it’s just as if I’d never sinned. So, here’s the Great News for Pharisees, whether these Pharisees are religious or secular, whether they are highbrow or lowbrow, whether they are moralistic or licentious: God’s love is a gift. When sinners ask for God’s mercy, he justifies them, people who are big league sinners as well as bush league sinners. There is no one who is beyond the reach of God’s love. And there is nothing we have to do to earn or deserve God’s love.
Hi, my name is Dave, and I’m a Pharisee. But I’m a Pharisee justified by God’s grace. God has given me the gift of faith. When I exercise that gift, I can live in utter relaxation before God. My faith tells me that God loves me, he has delivered me from the dread of death, he has assured my future so that I need not fear it, he has given me the gift of eternal life, he has given me the peace of God that passes all understanding.
Wow! What great news for Pharisees! What a relief! What peace! What a way of life! I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Why do I tell you this? Because I’m a beggar who has found the bread of life. And Jesus tells us beggars who know where the bread of life is to tell other beggars where to find it. I tell you this because I’m the man who almost drowned, who didn’t have the strength to reach out and grab the rope so that I could be pulled to safety. But Jesus Christ my Savior swam to my side, pulled me out of the water, gave me mouth to mouth resuscitation, breathed his Spirit into me, and I received his life. And so, because of him, not because of me, I have available to me at all times the peace of God that passes understanding. Any time I turn my thoughts to him and think of what he has done for me, I can experience that peace.
In coming weeks we’re going to be exploring the benefits of that divine peace that comes through faith in Jesus Christ. There are many hymns that express this marvelous good news: Amazing Grace is one great one that we sing a lot. Another favorite of many is “Just As I Am.” We’ll sing it one of these times, but for right now, I’d like to conclude my sermon with its words, and I’d like you to open your red hymnbook to #260 and take a look. It’s written by a recovering pharisee and expresses the faith of all recovering Pharisees.
Take a look at verse 5: “Just as I am thou wilt receive, wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve, Because . . .” [I was such a good boy or girl, and I did so many good things, and I ran with the right crowd, and I got my name in the papers, and I got elected deacon, and then elder. Is that why? No way!] “Because thy promise I believe, O Lamb of God, I come, I come!”
Let the prayer of gratitude and commitment expressed in this hymn be your prayer as we end our worship.
PRAYER: God, thank you for the message of Jesus that Paul understands so well and communicates so clearly. Thank you that we are loved. Thank you that we have done nothing that puts us beyond your love. Thank you that what Jesus did for us on the cross has more than paid for our redemption. Thank you that all our sins: past, present, and future, are covered by the sacrifice of Christ. And thank you that we can live every day of our lives with the peace of God that passes understanding. In Jesus’ name. Amen.