The Jesus Prayerable & God's Favorite ~ Luke 18:9-14 (Short Stories Jesus Told)

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
Misunderstandings. They can be ridiculous. A misheard word, a funny autocorrect, and a once boring conversation becomes quite spicy. A couple of days ago a friend texted me that she was making “ham sanitizer.” But sometimes misunderstandings can be painful, even potentially deadly. Like when the climber Craig DiMartino misunderstood what his belayer wanted him to do and fell 100 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 to prayer and our relationship with God?
So I would like to start with what I believe is a misunderstanding with respect to pride and humility and show how our parable seeks to define and promote a humble, prayerful life.
Misunderstanding: The problem of pride is loving oneself and the cure is humility, which is self-loathing.

We need to acknowledge that the sin of pride has an uneasy legacy among Christians. 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, believe 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 funny cartoon:


But I think pride and the problem of our Pharisee is something else. Self-love is not inherently wrong nor sinful. In the Greatest Commandment and the Golden Rule, Jesus taught us that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves and to treat others as we would wish to be treated (Matt. 22:39 & Matt. 7:12). So we have not told the story of the Gospel rightly nor understood our parable correctly if we tell others or ourselves: “I’m dirty, awful, wicked, terrible, nasty, abhorrent, trashy, a loser – BUT God still loves me.” Being loved and forgiven by God does not demand poor self-esteem. Being loved by God doesn’t require anything. So you are not prideful if you like yourself.


And 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 to define you than God’s own love and grace. To the Pharisees among us who delight in fasting and giving – Great! There’s nothing wrong with that and these are good things. God loves obedient givers! 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 being unlovable when we should come to think of it as 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”. Here the word “haughty” best captures the meaning. In vss. 9 and 11 we discover that pride glories in competitive spirituality. 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, Jesus teaches us, is that the prideful person imagines the love of God to be a few lifejackets 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 in which someone has to lose. To deal with pride is not to imagine that you are terrible but 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.

 

The Pharisee can’t see that he is both loved and broken like everyone else, which is why his prayer asks nothing of God. Notice that the text emphasizes that he “stood by himself.” He imagines he has everything he needs 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 Mother Theresa, 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. The Pharisee imagines that he has 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. The danger of pride is it encourages us to ask God for nothing, to believe that we have no need whatsoever – to find ourselves in the car of our spiritual lives utterly lost and yet refusing to ask for directions.

The Pharisees overblown sense of self seeks to build a wall between himself and sinners. But because God is always found with the humble his wall is what keeps him out. And if you cannot acknowledge your need, you leave yourself unwilling to receive.
 
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 pray, “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 on our lives. And there’s a place for that. Sin is destructive toward others, harms our world, must not go unchecked. But perhaps it’s more correct to think that 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.” (Accidental Saints, Nadia Bolz-Weber) We beg because we need help, because we’re broken much more so than we’re bad. And we beg for others because we remember how much it hurts to hurt.
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. But what about the Pharisee? Who is this parable for? What is this parable about? Both the prideful and the humble are disciples. How do we know this? Well, first this parable is not for Jesus’ detractors but believers. The audience is told to us back in vs. 17:22, “the disciples.” Second, this is not a parable about salvation but about the danger of pride for kingdom people. Look at 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 wisdom and grace. 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, acted pridefully, 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 as is everyone else and he will either raise you up or bring you down because he loves you. Let that truth lead you into prayer.

This sentiment is best captured by Mary Oliver’s poem,

Praying
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.”