Last Sunday after Trinity: 28.10.07 – Luke 18.9-14 – St. Mary’s and Ayot: Revd. Canon Dr. Alan Winton

It’s a sobering moment in life when you come to the realisation that you’ve become your parents. Many of us go through our teenage years and adolescence if not in outright rebellion, then at least trying desperately to define who we are over against our parents. Even when we love our parents and have had a basically good and loving home-life, a lot of energy goes into showing ourselves that we are our own person, that we have our own tastes and preferences, our own direction to follow in life, that there are things we’ve observed about our parents that are definitely not going to be a part of how we will behave when we’re older.

But there comes a time, particularly if you go on to have children of your own, when you start to notice that you’ve changed, that the fire that burned inside has cooled down a bit, that things you didn’t used to like start to become more appealing. And children are quick to point these things out for you, usually with brutal honesty.  This can all hit home through the most trivial things. I used to get really quite agitated about my parents obsession with tea drinking – we didn’t seem to be able to go five minutes without the kettle being put on and hearing reference to ‘a nice cup of tea’. And now, when Pippa and I come into the house, the first thought is always to rush to put the kettle on. And of course, I joined a profession for which the catchphrase is the question: ‘more tea?’  It never feels so at the time, but most of the roles we have in life are temporary: the child becomes the parent, and then in time and with good fortune, the parent becomes the grandparent.

Now the way in which our lives go through such changes is not limited just to these sorts of formal roles within the family. Throughout our lives the roles we take on are in a constant state of change: we might, for example, be healthy for a time, but then later find ourselves among those who are sick; we might be the carer or we might be the cared for person; we might be poor or we might be rich; we might be weak or we might be strong; we might be married or we might be single; we might be a worker or we might be out of work; we might be able-bodied or we might be disabled; we might be self-sufficient or we might be dependent on others; we might be good or we might be bad.

Whatever we are at any one time in our lives, the chances are it will change, and we do well not to get tricked into thinking that the different roles we take on are permanent. Life is a journey and our identity on that journey will go through many changes – the one thing I know with some certainty is that who I understand myself to be is in constant need of revision and evolution.

One of the problems I have with religious people, and let's be honest, Jesus is a good case in point here, is that they have a distinct tendency to seem to want to put people in boxes, to assign roles that sound very fixed and definite: the sheep and the goats, the good and the evil, the first and the last, the righteous and the unrighteous. And if we’re not careful we can fall into the trap of starting to imagine that these designations are permanent, that these descriptions are final – they often sound like that. At its worst, this way of looking at the world and dividing it into what can sometimes seem pantomime goodies and baddies can cause real damage to people’s lives.

Jesus often used these sorts of stark oppositions between the goody and the baddy to populate his parables and his teaching, and you can understand that this was done for dramatic effect, but we have to be careful how we read them. The collect for today is for Bible Sunday, and the subject matter of this sermon reminds us that the Bible can be a dangerous book if we read it without really engaging our minds, without reflecting critically and carefully on what we read, or in Cranmer’s words, without inwardly digesting it.

Now how many of you have ever been encouraged to feel good about yourself when, on a beautiful day, someone has walked by with the greeting “the sun shines on the righteous”. Of course, as you all know the actual quote from the Sermon on the Mount reads “he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous”. Jesus was making the point that in many respects God treats people the same, whatever their moral status. In some ways, Jesus is trying to deconstruct, to demolish the neat categories into which we put people, because he wants to teach people to love their enemies. In a sense he is saying that we shouldn’t put people into neat and convenient boxes; instead we should be prepared to have our categories disturbed. If we show them love, then maybe our enemies can become our friends. Here in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus seems to recognise that the roles and descriptions we assign to people need not be permanent.

But then we come to the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector, and here we seem to be in prime caricature territory, it feels as though we are back in panto land with the goodies and the baddies, as we often are in the parables. And this is a good case in point when we need to be wise and imaginative readers of the Scriptures.

One way to read this parable reflectively and to engage with its themes more deeply is to ask what happens to the tax-collector after the action of the parable has ended? Where does the tax-collector go after this encounter with God, does he stay defined simply as a humble and penitent tax-collector for ever, and what of the Pharisee also?  In this familiar parable we know for sure that the tax-collector has made a good start, but what for him would be the next steps in his journey of faith? He’s shown a deep
understanding of his need of God, so how is his relationship with God going to develop now? Of course, it wouldn’t be enough for him to carry on in sin and just come back regularly for these acts of humble contrition: such a faith would lack integrity and honesty and would not be commended by Jesus unquestioningly for ever. So presumably for the tax-collector to go on positively he must start to build upon his initial insights, he must start to cultivate his relationship with God, he must start to pursue the path of holiness.

He has already made a start with prayer in coming to the temple on this occasion, and now he needs to build on this experience and grow deeper into the life of prayer, that daily practice of dependency on God which is at the heart of faith. So we might find him coming much more regularly to the temple to pray: no longer the occasional visitor but a seasoned worshipper. Perhaps he will begin to learn from those who have been practising the faith for many more years, cultivating their relationship with God day by day, week by week, year by year. I wonder what advice they may have for him. At some point, someone might talk to him about the value of fasting in helping him to focus his mind on God, through helping him to approach prayer with a discipline and rigour that can be helpful.

As a tax-collector, he may well have been a wealthy man, and the practice of his faith might lead him to think about the use to which he puts his wealth. Out of a deep gratitude to God for his grace and mercy and generosity, so the tax-collector might be moved to think about the stewardship of his money, he might begin to give regularly to God and God’s work as an act of thanksgiving and dedication.

Of course, before long, the tax-collector will have to move on from the moment that the parable describes and start to develop all the habits and practices that other people of faith have found helpful over the years. Before long he may well come to resemble the Pharisee whose life had been shaped by the tradition into one of fasting and tithing as an expression of his devotion to God. And of course the person who teaches him these lessons might just be the Pharisee himself. Perhaps he overcame his initial desire to see the man beside him as a worthless tax-collector and came to see him as a fellow pilgrim, a fellow traveller on the journey of faith, and set about encouraging him to go further.

Well, you might think it fanciful, but we do well to remember that each of the characters in this parable will move on: they are not frozen for ever in this moment of their lives, both the Pharisee and the tax-collector have a journey to make and will not find that their identity or their destiny can be summed up definitively in this moment in time.

The Bible often presents us with these black and white either/or choices, but we do well to remember that they are just snapshots, moments in time, and we are to respond to them in the moment and allow them to help us to move on.  Caricatures can be helpful for a moment, as they often are in the parables of Jesus, but we must remember that they are just caricatures: our true identity is known to God alone.

Let me leave you with two thoughts to consider.

When the Bible offers such stark contrasts between good and evil, I wonder whether we sometimes avoid identifying with the darker side, exploring whether there is something truthful about our behaviour contained in the image of the Pharisee for example, because we are too scared to go there. But if we recognise that our identity need not be fixed forever in this moment, if we recognise that change is always possible under God, then perhaps we can be a little bit more honest with ourselves and allow the parable to challenge us deeply. We mustn’t be frightened to enter fully into the world of the parable, in case the wind changes and we find ourselves stuck there forever.

An finally, my wife is very good at reminding us in our family that we should never label the person, we should only label the action. In the moment captured in the parable, the tax-collector performs a good action and the Pharisee one that is unworthy, but we should not go on from there to say that one is a good person and the other a bad person. That is to slip into unhelpful caricature, to put people in boxes from which it is always hard to escape: what we should do is allow the Scriptures to judge our actions in the hope and faith that by God’s grace there is always scope for us to move on to find a truer, better identity before our loving heavenly Father.  Amen.