9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’13 “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.’14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” ~ Luke 18:9-14
Yesterday I saw a man at the beach yelling “Help, shark! Help!”
I just laughed, I knew that shark wasn't going to help him.
Misunderstandings. They can be ridiculous. A misheard word, a funny autocorrect, and a once boring conversation becomes quite spicy. For example, somehow my phone autocorrects “tomorrow” with the word Gonorrhea – if that happens, I’m not accusing you of anything. But sometimes misunderstandings can be painful, even potentially deadly. Like when the climber Craig DiMartino misunderstood what his belayer wanted him to do and fell100 feet – losing his leg and almost dying.
Misunderstandings can have dire consequences. That’s true of our parable today – not that it aims to create misunderstanding but that its topic is one of much misunderstanding and pain – pride. What is pride? Why is it dangerous?
So I would like to address what I believe is a misunderstanding with respect to pride and humility and show how our parable seeks to create a better understanding. Psychologists often use the phrase, “Diagnosis drives treatment.” They understand that each problem has a particular solution. If you misunderstand the problem, misdiagnose a patient, you haven’t simply made a mistake. You have undermined their ability to recover. What is this misunderstanding?
Misunderstanding: The problem of pride is loving one’s self and the cure is humility, which is self-loathing.
We need to acknowledge that the problem of pride has an uneasy legacy among us. It has been used to rob others of feeling good about themselves or their accomplishments. I often find its wreckage among a younger generation that has so internalized this idea that they feel like they must hate themselves to be truly worthy of God’s love or, at least, that God hates them.
This misunderstanding of pride was exemplified by Augustine who defined it as “the love of one's own excellence.” It looks like this.
So humility is not captured by thinking poorly of yourself. Stating the reality that, “I am a sinner” is not a declaration of worthlessness, as if sin has more power to determine your destiny than God’s own love and grace. To the tax collectors among us who inwardly or outwardly beat their breasts or hang their heads in shame, God says, before you do or say anything, “You are loved. Now lift up your head.” Hear me – I’m not saying that there isn’t a deep brokenness in us – a sin that so easily entangles us, harms us, wounds us, hurts others, or undoes us. I’m saying that you were made in love, you are saved in love, you are even judged in love. We have made sin wrongly synonymous with unlovable when we should be associating it more closely with being incapable.
Better Understanding: Pride is the failure to recognize that love is not a contest in which I compete with others for God’s real affections.
So if pride isn’t so much the thought that “I’m awesome,” what is it? Another ancient Christian thinker from the Italian Renaissance, Dante Alighieri, defined pride as “love of self, perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor”. A better word is haughty because it captures the feeling of disdain. That’s what we find in vs. 9 – contempt for others - the clearest element of a prideful life. Pride glories in being better than others. It’s the belief that love is a limited resource, gives only select prizes, is manifested by comparison and competition. My son when he was very young would openly rank his friends and would introduce them by saying, “Dad, this is Carter. He’s my fourth best friend.” The idea was like, “We’re friends but if you want to move up you gotta put in the work. Spots are limited.”
The danger of pride is that the prideful person imagines the love of God to be a few life-jackets on a sinking Titanic that we must fight others for to truly stay alive. It’s the idea that to be worthy of God’s love is determined by some metric of comparison which manifests itself by “looking down on everyone else” (vs. 9). That someone has to lose.
The solution to pride is not being told you are not that smart or not that lovely. It is not simply doing what the Pharisee says from the other direction – “I thank you, Lord, that I recognize I am a worthless jerk.” To deal with pride is simply to realize that you are loved like everyone else – your boss who cheated on his wife, your cousin who can’t seem to shake that drug addiction, etc. Humility is recognizing that there is no love contest and that I have plenty of wounds.
The Pharisee’s prayer is prideful because it includes no supplication. He asks nothing of God. Notice that the text emphasizes that he “stood by himself.” He imagines he has everything he needs. He needs no one because he is better than other people, whom he characterizes as thieves, rogues, adulterers and tax collectors (He kind of stacks the deck, doesn’t he? He doesn’t mention Rabbi Hillel, for example). What more could he ask of God than the high standing that he already enjoys? This prideful attitude, of course, is the problem. His overblown sense of self seeks to build a wall between himself and sinners and sinners and God. But because God is always found with the humble his wall is what keeps him out.
So why wasn’t the Pharisee justified, vindicated or accepted? If it doesn’t depend upon anything we do, why wasn’t the proud one also loved. But you’re missing the point. The Pharisee is loved as well – just as the tax collector – the problem is he simply refuses to admit it. By building a wall, he’s not being punished. He’s punishing himself.
Read the parable carefully. It doesn’t say the tax collector was good or right by feeling so low. No, he needed help as well. He needed to be lifted up, vs. 14 tells us. And the fact of the matter is that he was – “justified” had already happened. The pain of pride is not God now hates you because think you are too good. The pain of pride is the scorning of the help that is ever-present that you believe you no longer need. It’s the dismissal of mercy, the refusal of the freely given kiss, the can-do spirit which admits to no help even though one desperately needs it. It is the belief that you have no wounds. The desert fathers of the early church often spoke of being visited by the devil who would seek to coax them into all kinds of sin by appearing as Jesus. But they said that one should never worry too much about this but because one could always tell it was the devil in disguise. You could tell, they said, because the devil appearing as Christ would never have wounds; he was too prideful to bear them.
Better Understanding: Humility is not self-loathing but the recognition of need.
In the Catholic Mass each week, Catholics all around the world join in a Latin prayer that anchors deep within the Gospels and the earliest church’s worship. They pray or sing: Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy). This, of course, comes from our Gospel text today. But what do we mean when we say, “Lord have mercy”? Some may say we’re asking God to not punish us for our sin, to not rain down fury and violent retribution. And maybe there’s a place for that. Or, maybe asking for God’s mercy is like saying: “We beg you for your mercy to be with us, because ours is not enough. We ask for your wisdom to be with us, your loving-kindness to be with us, because we just don’t have enough of our own. And we keep messing everything up.” We beg because we need help, because we’re broken much more so than we’re bad. And we beg for others because remember how much it hurts to hurt. The danger of pride is it encourages us to ask God for nothing, to believe that we have no need whatsoever. I recognized this week that I even talk in such a way that shows my lack of humility. When a waiter comes to ask if I need anything else, I often respond, “No thanks. I’m good.” Being prideful is when you assume that your own goodness absolves you of any need; that “being good” means never being in want.
In vs. 14 Jesus says, “I tell you, this man [the humble one] went down to his house justified rather than the other”. Jesus does not tell us that the tax collector offers to refund ill-gotten money, as Zacchaeus will do (19:8). He does not say that the tax collector will change his ways and become respectable. The tax collector makes no offer to play the personal-achievement game. He has nothing to commend him, and makes no effort to become commendable. His only virtue is his recognition of need, which allows him to ask for mercy. And God answers his prayer, and he goes home.
Did you notice that? It doesn’t say the tax collector was simply vindicated but that he went home. And I realized, so did the Pharisee – but the word’s absence is suggestive of the fact that his house didn’t feel like a home – not because he was kicked out – but because it could only be a place of competition rather than acceptance. Home is that place where you are loved without any metrics. Where you can be in need and be accepted, cared for. Without it, you may have a house (a temple) but never feel at home. That’s what our Psalmist captures vividly in 138:6 – that the haughty feels far away from God, even if theologically we know this isn’t the case.
But don’t worry. Both the prideful and the humble are loved by God in the end. How do we know this? Well, look how the parable ends in vs. 14. God doesn’t abandon one for the other but works with both to bring them to God’s intended end. God will raise up the humble and lower the proud so that they can be in right relationship with others, themselves and God. So that they can stand in the same place.
We have four children and like all children they wanted to know where they stood. Was there a hierarchy of love? How did they measure up? And my wife, Marianne, approached this issue with great grace and wisdom. I like to think that she answered the children with the mind of God. She would always end each conversation with one of our children, each moment on the phone, each snuggle on the couch or time of discipline, with the child by saying, “Always remember. You’re my favorite.” And sure enough the others would hear this declaration of love and know that it was true. It was true when they worked hard and made great accomplishments. It was true when they utterly failed, felt ashamed or lost or afraid. It was also true for their brothers and sisters. And friends, whether you stand here today a Pharisee or Tax Collector – this one thing is true. You are his favorite and he will either raise you up or bring you down. Come home.
We ended our time singing the following song:
Kyrie Eleison by Chris Tomlin
