Luke 18:9-14

My mother used to be the Chief of the Grammar Police, taking great pleasure in critiquing the grammar of folks on TV. Then she had a revelation. She realized that you always end up looking good when you judge other people according to your successes. As my mother put it at the time, we all pass our own tests. She never stopped correcting my grammar, mind you, but she became more charitable toward others who mangled the King’s English.

Most of us fall into this trap at one time or another. We want to feel good about ourselves and so we congratulate ourselves for things we’ve done well, like the Pharisee in this parable in Luke’s gospel. This parable would have shocked Jesus’ audience because the Pharisees were the good guys. They tried to be impeccably faithful to all 613 laws in the Torah. They were honest and upright. Tax collectors in first century Judea, on the other hand, were traitors. They collected taxes only for the occupying Roman government. What’s more, the colonial tax system encouraged fraud. You had to collect a minimum, but then it was up to you how much money you could collect on top of that.

The Pharisee arrives at the temple to pray, and he begins by giving thanks. It’s a good start, but his prayer quickly becomes a catalog of his own achievements. It’s as if he’s trying to impress God with his worthiness, but then he goes a step further. Someone else has to be bad in comparison, and the tax collector is an easy target. When he judges himself and the tax collector against his own successes, the Pharisee comes out smelling like a rose. He’s passed his own test with flying colors. You have to wonder what it is he thinks he needs from God.

The tax collector’s need, on the other hand, is easy to see. He’s in dire need of God’s mercy. He makes no comparisons. Jesus says it is this man who went home “justified.” “Justified,” in this context, means “made right with God.” By trusting in God’s mercy and relying on God’s grace, rather than on himself, the tax collector, not the Pharisee, becomes the example of a right relationship with God.

If we imagine that in order to be righteous, in order to impress God, we have to do something, accomplish something, achieve something, the fact is that we can never, ever do enough. If God’s holiness is the standard, then that is a test we can never pass. We might be very good. But when we compare ourselves to God’s goodness, none of us can boast.

Grace is the word we use to describe the fact that we are “justified,” that we are made right with God in any event, not because of what we’ve done, but because of who God is. Think about the firefighters in our now-annual wildfires in California. They didn’t go door-to-door to ask, “Do you deserve to have your house saved? Do you pay your bills on time; are you faithful to your husband; did you ever cheat on your taxes?” No. They try hard to save every home because that is who they are and what they do. So it is with God.

Martin Luther, much like the tax collector, had seen himself as a contemptible sinner, and at first it made him angry with God. But through his study of Paul’s letters, Luther came to understand that he was justified – made right with God – as a gift of God’s grace through Jesus Christ. The phrase he borrowed from Paul is “justification by faith.” To most people today, “faith” means believing – believing that God exists and that Christ is God’s Son. If you think of faith that way, “justification by faith” sounds as though believing the right things is just another way to earn God’s love. But to both the apostle Paul and to Martin Luther, believing in God wasn’t ever questioned. What faith meant was trust – trusting in God, relying on God, saying “yes” to God and to God’s desires for you and for the world. This is what the tax collector does that the Pharisee does not.

Grace is not like a get-out-of-jail-free card in a Monopoly game. Grace is a relationship. It is a relationship with God. It is a relationship that frees us to interact with God and with our fellow human beings with hope. Some people don’t like the idea of grace because they can’t stand the thought that they might actually need it. They hate to think that they might have done or be doing something that God might find objectionable. It’s ironic that it’s in the very earnestness of our quest for holy living that we might actually refuse God’s grace. As we strive to do good, which is what we are supposed to be doing, we can easily become impressed with our own goodness. Once we start thinking of ourselves as having accomplished something, we want credit for it, and there you have our Pharisee.

While the Pharisee may have passed his own test, God has other, more important tests, at least one of which is the loving kindness test. The Pharisee was proud of the fact that he wasn’t lying, cheating, or stealing, but he failed miserably at risking to love the unlovable, in himself and in others. Over and over Jesus commanded people to love – to love God and to love one’s neighbor, and not just the neighbors that are easy to love, but the ones that are really hard to love, too. Love is the only mark by which Christ’s disciples are known, and yet there is not one among us who can say we always love, perfectly, everybody, all the time. And that very truth is why I’d guess that few of us actually have a hard time understanding our need for grace – because everyone has been on the receiving end of less than perfect love.

In the movie, “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” the title character, Bridget, is painfully aware that she is not perfect. She can’t quit smoking, she drinks too much, and she has a knack for saying exactly the wrong thing. In one scene, as she leaves a dinner party where she has once again put her foot in her mouth, she apologizes to a man, assuming he thinks as little of her as she does right at that moment. But the man surprises her. He says, in his dignified, English way, “No, I quite like you, just as you are.” When Bridget tells her usually cynical, urbane friends, they are dumbfounded. “You mean, just as you are…not thinner, or prettier?” they ask in wonder. They all know that Bridget has encountered something rare; something precious; something that speaks to the core of human longing.

God’s grace speaks most ultimately to that human longing. God loves you. You. Just as you are. Both because of and in spite of all that you are. That’s grace.