A sermon on Luke 18:9-14 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

I was recently thinking back to the first sermon I ever preached. It was in a little independent church in St Kilda that no longer exists, though I don’t think my sermon was to blame for that. The sermon wasn’t on the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector that we heard in our gospel reading this evening. It was actually on a verse that we heard read last Sunday: “All scripture is inspired by God.”

I was about eighteen or nineteen at the time, and I full of righteous zeal and passion for the Bible. My sermon that day was a strident defence of the absolute infallibility of the Bible. I argued that not only was the Bible entirely without error, contradiction or inconsistency, but that it was very important that we Christians believe that and teach that and behave accordingly. I wouldn’t preach that now, but at the time, I was very pleased with myself and with the correctness of my sermon, and it probably showed. 

Underneath what I actually said there was some self-talk that was saying something like, “Thank you, God, that I am not like other people: liberals, and backsliders, and wishy-washy academics. I stand firm for the truth and absolute reliability of your holy Word, and I reject anything that undermines trust in its authority. I am especially not like some of these people right in front of me who have swallowed the dangerous lies of so-called progressive theology and have fallen into error and are leading others astray. I pray that this sermon might break through their hard hearts and turn them back to the path of your truth before it is too late.”

Fast forward about fifteen years, and I had grown into quite a different person. People now saw me as one of those ‘progressives’ who I had previously despised, and I had completed a theology degree and ministry training at a so-called ‘liberal’ theological college. I was in my third year as pastor of this church when I was recruited onto a Baptist Union Taskforce that was investigating the place of homosexual people in the life and ministry of our churches. I was recruited to represent the LGBT affirming end of the spectrum of opinion. My views were only held by a tiny minority of Baptists at the time, but by the time the taskforce completed its work, the final report was more progressive than I had initially imagined possible. That meant that at the special assembly gathering that received and debated the report, I was on my feet a lot, because all the questions and challenges were coming from hard line conservatives.

People who were there tell me that I was amazing that night, and I certainly felt amazing. By the end of the night, every challenge to the progressive elements of our report had been defeated. It was a triumph. And throughout it all, I was thinking, “Thank God I am not like these people, these homophobic, legalistic, judgemental, purity obsessed, compassionless people. I have come to understand God’s love so much better than them, and learned how to read the Bible with eyes open to God’s expansive and inclusive agenda. I have listened to the pain of those who have been despised and excluded, and I have become their champion in the churches. But these people are stuck in the past, in narrow-minded and pharisaic ways. Thank God I am so much better than these people.”

Another two or three years on, and a big change had taken place in my prayer life, and was beginning to work itself out in the liturgical life of our church. Thanks mainly to a four day retreat that I spent at the Holy Transfiguration monastery, I had begun a pattern of contemplative prayer that completely undid me for a while, transforming the way I understood myself, the way I encountered God, and the way I practiced prayer. As that journey connected with my studies in liturgy, it transformed my understanding of Christian worship, and as many of you folks graciously joined me on that journey, a new liturgical and sacramental style of worship emerged among us in this church.

I can’t tell you how often since then I’ve found myself visiting another church and thinking, “What is it with these people? Have they never sat in silence to allow God to speak? Don’t they understand anything about the liturgical structures of worship? Don’t they know anything about how to practice full congregational participation? Thank God I am not like these people.” 

I heard that same voice in my head just a couple of months back during the opening worship at the Baptist World Congress in Brisbane. “Who the hell chose that as the opening song of the opening worship on the opening night? Didn’t they think about the words and about how weird they sound in this context? Sure it’s a great piece of music, but don’t they understand that in worship the words need to be right too? What were they thinking? They clearly needed someone like me on the planning group. Thank God I am so much better than these people.”

Looking back to that Baptist Union taskforce on gay issues, I realise how much has changed since then. The understandings I had then might have rated as pretty enlightened at the time, but they’d seem thoroughly dated today. We wouldn’t even refer to gay issues now, but to LGBTIQQA issues, or maybe even a few more letters, and then we’d add a plus to the end to show that we understand that there is no end to the range of variation. 

Similar developments have occurred on a whole range of other issues too. I think the common thread is that, as a society, we have become way more conscious of the victims of our systemic structures. We have become much more aware of the wounds inflicted on first nations peoples by the processes of colonialism. We have become more aware of how racism is not just individual acts of prejudice, but deep-rooted structures of privilege that exclude and suppress. We are starting to become more aware of how LGBT+ folk are not just affected by individual acts of hostility and prejudice, but by a bigger and largely unconscious privileging of hetero-normal perspectives and expectations. And most of the women among you will recognise that there is equally a privileging of patriarchal or masculine perspectives that fails to honour you as equal bearers of the image of God.

Much of the time nowadays, I bump around in groups where these understandings have become normal and accepted. In those circles, we know there are a few people out there who dismiss us sneeringly as “woke”, as though that’s a bad thing, but we feel pretty secure about being on the right side of history and all that. After all, Jesus consistently sided with the victims and the persecuted, and calls us to do the same. 

But every now and again, news from outside our bubbles breaks through and reveals that there are millions and millions of people out there who see the world very differently from us. Maybe it is the re-election of Donald Trump – I mean, they clearly knew what they were voting for this time. Maybe it is the ‘no’ vote in the Voice referendum. Maybe it is the New South Wales Baptist Association kicking out churches who support same-sex marriage. Maybe it is the sudden public adulation of Charlie Kirk, who is now being held up as a martyr and saint of Christian nationalism. 

Whatever it is that bursts my bubble and unsettles my confidence that we are evolving into a more compassionate society, I nearly always find that voice piping up in my head again: “Thank God I am not like those people. Talk about dinosaurs! They boo when there is a welcome to country. They want to cancel all funding for medical help for troubled trans kids. They want to wind back the clock on pronouns and even force married women to take their husband’s name. They deny climate change and burn all the fossil fuels they can. They are clearly a danger to the future of the planet, let alone to the health and well-being of various minorities. And then they keep claiming that it is them that are being persecuted and having their rights trampled over. Talk about blind privilege. Can’t we just cancel the lot of them? Thank God I am so much better than those people.”

As we heard earlier, Jesus told a parable to people who were sure of their own goodness and despised everybody else. “Once there were two men who went up to the Temple to pray: one was a Pharisee, the other a tax collector …”

Just in case you think I’m being a bit harsh on myself, and perhaps on you, by the way I have illustrated this parable so far, identifying myself with the Pharisee, let me point out a couple of things about it.

Those of us who have been reading the gospels for a long time have been conditioned to feel sympathetic as soon as we hear a gospel reference to a tax collector, and to feel hostile and suspicious as soon as we hear reference to a Pharisee. To Jesus’s hearers in his day, it was the exact opposite. They would have heard “a Pharisee” like we might hear Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama, and they would have heard “tax collector” like we might hear Tony Mokbel, Jeffrey Epstein or Rolf Harris. So to his hearers, the punch line of this parable was like saying that a convicted sex trafficker had as much chance of going home with God’s approval as our most respected spiritual leaders.

The second thing to note is that the Pharisee’s prayer was not unusually arrogant by the standards of his day. Prayers thanking God “that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, and adulterers”, were actually part of the standard liturgies of the synagogue. He was just praying in the normal prescribed way, and we are not given any reason to doubt his résumé of his own piety and good deeds. He was probably just stating the truth. And equally we are not given any indication that the tax collector backs up his cry for mercy with real repentance, with a change in his behaviour and his lifestyle. For all Jesus tells us, the tax collector could be back week after week making the same prayer but completely unreformed.

In the end, Jesus really only gives us two clear points of difference, two closely related points of difference, that can explain his conclusion that the tax collector is more likely than the Pharisee to go home that day in the good books with God. 

The first is their attitude to other people. The Pharisee doesn’t stop at listing his own virtues, all of which may have been true. Instead, he looks around for someone to look down on, someone who he can look on with contempt but whose existence and presence can serve as a point of comparison to draw further attention to his own virtue. Another person’s sin and brokenness do not elicit any compassion from him. He just calls it out contemptuously and shames the person as a form of virtue signalling.

The tax collector, by contrast, does not compare himself to anybody else, either favourably or negatively. He doesn’t say, “Well I’m nowhere near as bad as Jeffrey Epstein, so I’m probably an okay person.” He just looks into his own heart and sees his own brokenness and sinfulness, and acknowledges that he needs God’s mercy.

That’s the second and related difference: where they look for sin. The tax collector is painfully aware of his own sin, which of course is the only sin he can really do anything about. Any attempt to tackle the sin in the world has to start with tackling the roots of it in our own hearts. By contrast, when the Pharisee feels concerned about the prevalence of sin, he looks around to identify it in others. He doesn’t recognise any need for repentance or forgiveness or change in his own life. To his mind, the problem of sin is always a problem of other people.

So, when I stood before that Baptist Union special assembly all those years ago, and thought, “Thank God I am not like those people,” my assessment of my enlightenment and their prejudice and judgmentalism might have been entirely accurate, but that’s not relevant to what Jesus is saying here. The point is that I looked on them with contempt and I didn’t for a moment feel any compassion or think “These poor people are traumatised and frightened of social changes that feel dangerous to them; how can I love them and help them to heal and grow?” And nor did I look into my own heart and ask, “Where am I also hurting and frightened of change, and how can I address the sin that that spawns in me?”

What Jesus is saying here turns out to be a stinging critique of the exact attitudes that are increasingly fracturing and polarising our world. And certainly I, and perhaps some of you, need to take a good hard look at ourselves as a result. Because I don’t think I was exaggerating any of those depictions of my own attitudes and behaviours. They all happened, and I had a much longer list that didn’t make it into the sermon, and many of them are so recent that I can’t claim to have mended my ways. Every time I do that, every time I look on other people and their failings with contempt instead of with compassion and empathy, and fail to look for the roots of such sin in my own heart, I am feeding the fires of polarisation and societal breakdown that Jesus came to save us from.

That doesn’t mean that God loves me any less or that God loves any of us any less. Jesus does not say that the Pharisee is going to hell, and he doesn’t say that about me or you either. In fact, there is an ambiguous word in the original language of this story which means that the last line could be intended not to mean “this man went down to his home justified rather than the other,” but “this man went down to his home justified along with the other.” And even if “rather than” is the intended meaning, it probably only means that one went home in a better or improved state, and the other was no better off because he saw no need for change.

God loves the pharisee and the tax collector, and you and me, and the Dalai Lama and Tony Mokbel without distinction. God does recognise that some of us contribute more to the pain and division of the world, and some of us more to healing and reconciliation. But if you think you’re okay because you don’t cause as much pain as Tony Mokbel, you’ve fallen into the trap of this parable. Because when we are fully transformed in the image of Jesus, as we are called to eventually be, we will look on Tony Mokbel and grieve for him over his entrapment in a world of horrors, and the only time we will go looking for sins to call out and tackle will be when we are looking into our own hearts. That is the Jesus path to the healing and salvation of the world. Let’s be walking that path together.