He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Luke 18:9-14
I am not on Facebook very often these days, but there is an old Facebook setting that so many people noticed it became something of a joke. Someone could upload a picture and tag you in it, but obviously sometimes pictures that are not very flattering. So you could remove yourself from the photo and tell Facebook, “I don’t want to see this.” To which Facebook would ask, well, why? And you could say, “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.”
That’s how I feel about this story of the Pharisee and the tax collector. I’m in this photo and I don’t like it. That’s how I imagine many disciples felt about so many of Jesus’ teachings. This very week, I’m working on a piece that makes me feel like such a Pharisee because I’m pointing out some harms being done.
Part of the problem for the Pharisee is that there are tax collectors. That is, there are people who are exploiting our neighbors, who only get and keep their positions if they are willing to be in bed with the empire and cheat people. There are people who are doing harm in the world, and we shouldn’t want to do that harm in the world. Moreover, we should want to be serious in our faith and do things “the right way” like the Pharisee.1 We should want a world where evil is pointed out. Imagine if nobody saw a problem with these tax collectors, and the Pharisee was the first to say, “Call me a jerk, but I don’t think it’s good to exploit people on behalf of the state.” That’s good. The problem is when they get into the temple and the Pharisee says, “Thank God I’m not like them.” No, no, no. The problem may even be worse for us Christians, who might say, “Thank God I’m not like that Pharisee!”
And we do have it even worse than him. We do not have a temple to go into God’s presence and be a hypocrite just in one place, but are told that our hearts are the very temple. So if we carry a self-righteous attitude anywhere with us, not just in the church on Sunday morning, it’s a problem. I think we know this, but we also don’t always act like we believe it, because it is truly countercultural today to be humble. It is truly countercultural to believe there is such a thing as healthy shame.
So why is the Pharisee’s attitude such a problem, and why is repentance so important? Because self-righteousness, or pride, is the motherlode problem, the problem that keeps you from seeing other problems. The tax collector has problems, but he knows he is sick and lost. The Pharisee is so certain that he wasn’t lost, he can’t be found. The problem that keeps us from seeing other problems is forgetting that we are all sinners, and “we” means “me.” The most righteous, correct, morally intuitive position can still lead to a path of destruction, especially when it has aggression. We forget.
We need to remember. Throughout Scripture and the long relationship between God and God’s people, repentance is not just saying you’re sorry, but is deeply tied to remembering: remembering who you really are in God, remembering who God is, remembering who he calls us to be, and remembering what it feels like to be fully home in God after living outside him. It is waking up from our amnesia that twists our good intentions into bad actions.
But you can’t remember the love of God if you have never really known it in the first place. You can’t remember how God has called us to live together if you haven’t first understood it.
To illustrate this, I saw a great analogy on the internet this week from a guy who is not a Christian but was trying to learn more about Christianity.2 He shared a view of his friend about imagining you’re a kidney cell, but you have no idea that you live in a Person. You simply cannot understand the person you’re a part of. So you often act out of discord with that person, even though your life depends on them. So, he says:
Imagine you are that greater Person. Your kidney cells are acting up, malfunctioning…You decide to send ‘down’ a messenger. This messenger is a kidney cell – it needs to be, to relate to the other kidney cells in a way they can comprehend…Now the message has to be simple. Remember, kidney cells have limited intelligence. There’s no way for a kidney cell to understand the complexities of its own functioning, much less yours. So you send your special cell to give two primary commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
In other words, love God to remember the bigger Person you’re a part of, and love your neighbor by cooperating with other cells, even ones you don’t like, otherwise you cause toxic problems. Repentance is coming to fully know, appreciate, and remember the full Person of God and the body of Christ that we are all living in together.
This said, I also don’t want to soften the concept of repentance, as many of us sinners would like to do. Part of what helps us fully repent and remember is realizing there actually are things we should be horrified about our own past and behaviors. We don’t want to pretend like the tax collector’s sins aren’t real; he sure doesn’t. The tax collector is horrified. Karl Barth said this is key to repentance, “Not to become indifferent to what we formerly were, to the former objects of our devotion and the former conduct of our lives, but to be horrified by it all: the assurance in which I lived is lostness; the light I had, darkness.” We should be horrified when the assurance we had was like the Pharisee's, only assurance in ourselves, of ourselves, using God as our cudgel to beat other people with.
If the Pharisee were a kidney cell, he’d say, “Thank God I’m not like that bloody lung” while he’s being toxic himself. What’s actually healthier to the body is for the kidney cell to say, “Man, I’ve really not been a good kidney. I need to listen better to what the Head of the body somewhere up there is telling me. I really lost myself there.”
That language of repentance in “Amazing Grace” that we know so well, “I was lost and now am found,” is so well-worn, but so good. For it is to remember that I lost myself in myself. I was lost partially because I was so certain I wasn’t lost. When we are living out of our sin, we are not home in our right mind of Christ, and we are not home in the heart of God. We want to fully return there in full repentance.
There are partial repentances, and they are only partial remembrances. I am pretty sure this is a universal experience: have you ever been in a heated argument, so adamant you were right, then gotten a little fact wrong, and it was pointed out, and it sort of throws you off for a second? “Okay, sorry, Columbus didn’t sail the ocean blue in 1493.” Did you leave self-righteousness, or did you go right back to arrogantly arguing? That’s not the repentance we want. We don’t want a repentance that keeps us in our pride, “Well, yes, I am technically a sinner, but it wasn’t that bad, I’m still a good Pharisee.” That’s not what Jesus teaches us. That’s not the standard.
Instead, we want a full remembrance and return that requires something scandalous in our time: healthy shame. I want to be careful when I say this, because we don’t want to be ashamed of things that don’t deserve shame which becomes abused by others. I know some people intrinsically feel a lot of shame; some people have overactive shames, and I’m not talking to you, especially knowing that religious trauma can cause unhealthy shame.
But the challenge Jesus is telling us is that even if you are doing all the right things, you are much farther from God when you’re arrogant than when you’re ashamed. Shamelessness is self-righteousness with no fear of God. Who in this story has it?
So part of the countercultural thing the Church all over does is practice healthy shame like our tax-collecting brother. We practice healthy shame because we all have things to be ashamed about. We all have ways in which we are lost from God, and we all have ways in which we think we’re not lost from God, where we say, “I don’t need to be found,” “Thank God I’m not lost like him.”
We all need to enter the temple where Jesus Christ dwells, deep in our hearts, and come as beggars. This story would also be wrong and wouldn’t work if the tax collector said, “My job isn’t so bad.” And we can also be like a reformed Pharisee out in the public square warning that the tax collectors are ripping you off and Rome is wrong, but remaining in the presence of God by saying, “But I am jacked up and all kinds of lost, too. We both know I got stuff to work on too. We both know Jesus gave me some homework that is late.”
Whoever we are in this photo, and whether we like that or not, Jesus doesn’t leave us behind, whether we’re arrogant you-know-what’s or people waking up to how awful we’ve been. Jesus had relationships with Pharisees and tax collectors for the rest of his ministry. He counted them as friends. And he called them to something better while he let them know they were always in the arms of God.
Because to fully repent is not to stop at the shame; that’s what would make it unhealthy. To fully repent, like its Hebrew meaning, to fully return to God, is remembering that when you return to the house of God, it is a place of truer love than you could ever find anywhere else. It is a true return to how God fully sees you and knows you can be. And if you can’t remember that, maybe you still need to fully know it. Maybe you still need to fully know and believe the depth of how God loves you, that his very being would rather die in disgrace than give up on you. Maybe you still need to have it fully marinate in your bones, “That neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”3 That goes for kidneys, for lungs, for Pharisees, for tax collectors, for scoundrels like me and you. The moment you realize you’re lost, don’t stop there, but remember that Jesus has already found you, and he will never let you go. Amen.
h/t Andrew McGowan.
Funny, but what he says about repentance here is misguided and isn’t just “go beyond your understanding,” and there are parts of this that are too New Age-y for me, but here is the link to the post.
Romans 8:38-39