[CatherineTorpey]

Hello Bible in the Middlers!

Sunday our Ben will be preaching on “Perfection” Poisons Progress. Ben’s text is Luke 18:9-14. A little birdy told me that the theme of the next few Sundays is whiteness. So I’m intrigued about how Ben will talk about this passage.

In chapter 18, Jesus is nearing Jerusalem. He had “set his face toward Jerusalem” in chapter 9, and tension rises as he walks closer and closer to his fateful entry into Jerusalem, which will happen in chapter 19. Along the way, Luke at times gives us a somewhat random assortment of parables, which are not clearly located in space or time. So, the parable in today’s pericope is something Jesus once said to some people (who knows who) who were “trusting in their own righteousness and despising others.”

I found this commentary on this passage here:

Perhaps the most significant and simplest thing we might observe about the prayer is that it is nothing like the one Jesus teaches his disciples to pray in 11:1-13. That prayer is entirely God-centric, opening with God’s name, kingdom, and will, then moving to our need of him for daily bread, forgiveness, and deliverance. This prayer is the prayer of one who has no need of anyone or anything because he is already in himself perfect, especially with respect to the wretched tax collector.

Tax collectors are associated with sinners throughout Luke, and the tax collector of the parable, a picture of shame, makes the association himself in a prayer of few words: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

Just as tax collectors are hopeful characters in Luke (for example, 3:12; 5:27-30; 7:29-34; and especially 19:1-10), so are sinners. Simon Peter identifies himself as one (5:8); the woman who anoints Jesus’ feet is another (7:37). Sinners are often grouped with tax collectors as joint objects of the Pharisees’ grumbling and contempt. So we can feel sure that this man, like the sheep and the coin and the prodigal, is about to be saved by grace, as indeed he is.

He goes home justified, Jesus tells us. This verb has the same root as the adjective for righteous used in the first verse of the parable (18:9). The person who is justified is proclaimed righteous, so the use of the verb here echoes the use of the adjective in the introduction to the parable. The contrast between the Pharisee and the tax collector is between those who trust in themselves that they are righteous and those who trust in God to justify (or, we might say, to righteous) them….

The challenge for us perhaps is to notice that we rather like being exalted. We might think of it as the satisfaction of a job well done or a duty fulfilled. And we might begin to believe that things we do (giving money to the church, doing religious or charitable activities, being upstanding members of society, making a well-deserved salary) or don’t do (being thieves, rogues, or adulterers) really might justify us, at least a little, might make us a bit better than those who fail where we succeed. But until we let go of that notion, the parable suggests, we will not go home justified. We will be prisoners to our own small righteousness. And we as a church will present a face to the world that does not invite it in.

On the other hand, we may need to challenge an assumption in ourselves that because of our failings, because we do not measure up to the standards of the Pharisee in ourselves, we are in some way secretly stained beyond redemption.

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