“Justified”
Luke 18: 9-14
October 24, 2010
First United Church – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
In a recent episode of This American Life called “Crybabies,” correspondents Adam Davidson and Jane Feltes take a trip to a few bars on Walls Street. Bumping elbows with the folks who work day in and day out in the financial sector, they ask a few questions about the recession.
There are a lot of things about the economic downturn that are complicated and mysterious. But there are other things that are pretty clear-cut. At this point, I’d say it’s pretty clear that greed, corruption, and incompetence by Wall Street employees was a major factor – and some would say THE major factor – in our country and world marching steadily toward the edge of a huge cliff. And, whether you think it was the right thing to do or not, I don’t think there’s much of a question that the government’s decision to pour billions of dollars into economic institutions that failed was a major factor – perhaps THE major factor – in pulling us back from the edge of worldwide economic collapse.
So you’d expect that these Wall Street guys in the bar might feel a little sheepish and grateful about the government bailout. You’d think they might even say thanks, right?
Turns out you’d be wrong if you thought that because these guys are pretty mad at the government. In fact, they think the government is out to get them. When pushed to explain how they even still have their jobs when their institutions failed, they were all pretty confident that it’s because they’re smart. In fact, they said it’s because they’re smarter than everyone else.
Jesus told the parable we just heard to “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” He told it to these guys on Wall Street.
Sometimes when I’m in my car and I’m at a stoplight, I take a minute and look at the people next to me. Do you ever do that? A few days ago, I was sitting there in my fairly fuel efficient car, taking home some organic tree-hugger type food from Bloomingfoods. I was feeling pretty good about supporting our local economy. I glanced at the guy next to me – giant SUV, smoking a cigarette with his daughter in the backseat, and they were both shoveling fast food into their mouths. I sighed and thought, “boy, if everyone could just be like me, the world would be a better place.”
Jesus told this parable to “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” Turns out he was talking to me, too. Might I be so bold to wonder aloud if he might have been talking to you?
Unlike a lot of other parables, this one is fairly straightforward. The two characters would have been pretty transparent to Luke’s hearers. First, the Pharisee.
Now you and I have been trained by years and years of anti-Jewish thought to regard the Pharisee with contempt, but that wouldn’t have been the case during Jesus’s time. The Pharisees were simply the religious leaders. Good, hardworking folks who did their best to keep an authentic Jewish faith alive during the Roman era.
Luke’s hearers would have expected the Pharisee to be at the temple daily, but they would have been shocked when they heard the words of his prayer. His prayer is all about himself – I mean, really, don’t we assume our religious leaders can come up with something better than, “God, thanks that I’m not a dirtbag like everyone else”? It’s a long, sanctimonious prayer. He stands by himself – I imagine it’s because he was probably too good to stand with the other folks.
Luke’s hearers would not have expected the tax collector at the temple, though. Oh, no.
We hear tax collector and we immediately think, “Ooh, I’d like to play that part because I know Jesus love tax collectors!” But the original hearers would have thought no such thing.
Tax collectors were the lowest of the low – taking hard earned money away from the Jews on behalf of Rome. Corruption was rampant and they did pretty much whatever they wanted – exploiting the poverty of those around them to make a quick buck.
The fact that the tax collector is even at temple is shocking. The quality and posture of his prayer is outrageous.
He comes to the temple, but stands far off – perhaps he knows he’s not welcome there. He beats his own chest – a prayer posture only used by women at this time. And then, having assumed this position of humility, he says just a few short words, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”
He doesn’t sugar coat it. He doesn’t go into details. He doesn’t make empty promises about how he’ll do better tomorrow. He doesn’t try to wheel and deal with God asking for favors in exchange for better behavior. He doesn’t try to make himself feel better by pointing out that there are, in fact, worse people on the planet. He just lays it all out, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”
And as the two characters leave the temple, they exit much as they came in – in totally different worlds. Only now, after these two prayers, their roles have flip flopped. In a typical Lukan reversal, the man who should be exalted – the Pharisee – is humbled. And the man who came in humble – the tax collector – leaves exalted. And the key actor in this reversal is God.
God justifies the man who beats his breast, begs for mercy, and admits his sin.
What exactly does it mean to be justified? It’s not a word that gets thrown around much these days.
When you hear it, you might think in theological terms. Or you may think of a court of law.
Another direction your mind could wander is into the world of typesetting. Now I’m sure most folks don’t head this direction right away, but, for some reason, mine does. Maybe it’s because I spent too many hours working on the yearbook in high school. Or maybe it’s because I have a ridiculous love of fonts. Regardless, I think we can learn something about what it means to be justified if we think about typesetting.
Back before typing was just a matter of firing up your laptop, professional typesetters were the ones who created print materials. They did so by carefully lining up letter and spaces along lines and then printing the text onto a page.
Traditionally, Western eyes have preferred the look of text that has a clean and even vertical line along the left and right-hand sides of the page. This is especially common when the text is in two or more columns. To see what I’m talking about, open up a pew Bible. See how the text magically lines up so that there is an even vertical border along the left and right sides? That is called justified text. It’s different than how you write with a pen, where you just write until the end of the line and then move down. When you write that way, you end up with left-aligned text and it’s not as neat and tidy.
On a computer, we can change the alignment of pages and pages of text with one click by telling the computer to justify the text. But before computers and word processors, this all had to be done manually. Typesetters would painstakingly insert blank metal pieces between words to carefully stretch lines so that the left and right sides were both flush to the edges.
Working with this type of justification as a metaphor for God’s justification in the parable, what can we learn?
The Pharisee and the tax collector start to look like individual words to me. They bump up against spaces and other words, struggling to figure out how they fit within the rest of the page.
The Pharisee doesn’t fit well at all – he stands off, aloof. He has no clue that he should even contemplate the other words on the page, except to disdainfully claim to be better than them. He doesn’t seem to understand that unless he figures out where and how he fits into the whole, he’s pretty useless – just a single word on a page that no one will notice.
The tax collector, on the other hand, is struggling to understand himself. He has noticed where he does and does not fit. He knows that his actions have caused others pain. And he knows that the only way to figure out how to fit in again – how to be justified – is to ask for God’s mercy.
The key to justification in typesetting turns out to be a lot like the key to justification in humanity – an awareness of where we truly fit into the larger whole of reality. An ability to humbly adjust ourselves so that we can work in harmony with the other pieces and parts to create something beautiful and useful.
Of course the trick is that it’s a lot harder to create a page of justified text than it is to just let those words do their own thing. The typesetter has to plan carefully, work with great patience, and be willing to back up and start over again when mistakes are made.
How many of us have the forethought, patience, and humility to be justified? How many of us know that the first step is realizing things are out of whack and we need to seek mercy in order to get there?
Jesus told this parable to “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” He told it to those guys on Wall Street. Hearing the parable, they regarded themselves as a part of the whole. They did the hard work of saying thanks. Thanks for bailing us out. Thanks for saving our jobs. Thanks for taking care of us. And they went away justified.
Jesus told this parable to “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” He told it to me – sitting smugly at the stoplight, juding the man next to me. And I did the hard work of realizing I don’t know as much as I think I know. I don’t know much of anything about the guy in the SUV next to me. And I’m not perfect, either – far from it! So maybe I should stop looking down and look up to those around me who are riding their bikes to work, growing their own food, buying less junk they don’t need, and teaching the rest of us to do the same. And I went away justified.
God wants us to go away justified. God yearns for us to figure out where we fit in the great printing press of life. And if we find ourselves, like the Pharisee, getting it wrong from time to time, there is always another day. Who knows? Maybe the Pharisee came back the next day and got it right.
