The 11th Sunday after Trinity – August 11th, 2024
Trinity Ev. Lutheran Church, Block, Kansas
Rev. Joshua Woelmer
Text: Luke 18:9–14
“Be Merciful to Me”
Theme: The works that we do avail for nothing, but Christ’s propitiation forgives all our sin.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
It’s common in stories nowadays to bend the good guys and bad guys. What some of these stories do is pull back the mask, so to speak, on the good guys and say, “well, they’re not so good after all.” On the one hand, I get tired of people trying to tear down anything that is good. And stories in movies or books are trying to do something different than tell us the way things are—they are trying to motivate us to do better or aspire to greater things. So it’s good for stories to have good and evil, white hats and black hats, John Waynes and Liberty Valances. On the other hand, as Christians, while we can be inspired by these stories, we also must deal with reality, and that involves knowing that everyone has a sinful nature, that even the best among us are fallen creatures who sin. Nothing epitomizes this more than the Pharisees, believe it or not.
Who were the Pharisees? We need to look at who the Pharisees were first of all. They come up many times in the Bible. Most of the time it is negative. For example in Matthew 23, Jesus has seven “woes” against the scribes and Pharisees, calling them “hypocrites” constantly. Just a few weeks ago, Jesus told a whole parable against the Pharisees because they were “lovers of money” (Luke 16:14).
However, I don’t want you to think of them as people who were evil all the time. There were some “good” Pharisees like Nicodemus, who sought Jesus out and later helped bury Jesus’s body. Secondly, they were generally good people from an earthly point of view. They were very upright people who cared about God, His Word, and acting according to it. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you would want your daughter to marry a Pharisee. You would know that she would be treated well, that her husband would be well thought of, and that she was moving up in the world. If there’s a little bit of greed or self-importance, well, that just comes with the job, right? Or so we might think.
The thing is, God sees the heart. He cares more about the heart than He does about outward actions. This is true throughout the Bible. We have an example of this in our Old Testament reading with Cain. God rejected Cain’s sacrifice but accepted Abel’s. Why? It’s clear when you hear what Cain says afterwards. His heart is not set on God. He doesn’t care about God, or his fellow man. Even after God punishes him, he’s more worried about the punishment than repenting for his sin or giving any concern about Abel.
Another example might be when God chooses David to be the next king to replace Saul. God passes over six sons of Jesse to finally land on David. Here is what God tells Samuel: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam 16:7). This is all over the Bible. Jeremiah 17:10, “I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.” Proverbs 21:2, “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart.” God cares more for what’s in the heart than the actions of the individual.
So when the Pharisee in this parable says, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get,” (11–12) God doesn’t see any good works. He only sees a self-righteous heart.
So what does God see?
God desires a humble and contrite heart. That’s the other person in the parable, signified by a tax collector. Tax collectors were considered traitors. They were hated by the population. They were the scum of the earth, the worst of the worst. And yet this tax collector, standing in the temple, says these words, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (13) He doesn’t even look up to heaven, but beats his breast in penitence.
Just a side note, this isn’t the normal word for mercy. Beggars who are blind and lame are always calling out to Jesus for mercy. This man uses a term that deals with the forgiveness from the mercy seat of the ark of the covenant. I could render it like this: Let the blood of the sacrifice cleanse me of my sin!
So even though this tax collector may have cheated people and done evil, what happens to all this sin? It’s forgiven! It’s covered by the blood of the sacrifice. God saw his repentant heart and answered his plea for mercy. He is justified. This happens to us as well, except we don’t need to ask that the blood of animal sacrifices would cover our sin. We have a far greater sacrifice that has atoned for our sins, and that is Jesus. Hebrew 9:14 says, “how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.” This is why you go home justified today, and why the tax collector did too.
Have you ever wondered what the rest of some Bible stories would be? Sometimes I wish we could have a sort of “Paul Harvey” to some of them. His famous line was “…and now you know the rest of the story.” Do you ever wonder what how the tax collector ended up? Do you ever wonder how the Pharisee lived his life? I think the Pharisee is the easiest to imagine. Without something shaking up his life, he would probably continue in his pride.
But what about the tax collector? What did he do after going home justified? Well, one thing to remember from our Epistle reading is that works follow faith. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph 2:8–10). What are the works that a tax collector could walk in?
Just a few verses later in Luke, we get the story of Zacchaeus. You probably know him from the song, “a wee little man was he.” He climbed up in a sycamore tree, For the Lord he wanted to see. That song is great for emphasizing Jesus speaking to him, to come to his house. But it misses what Zacchaeus promises to do. “‘Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost’” (Luke 19:8–10). This is the encouragement towards good works that we have. We don’t do them because they will save us. No. We do them because we have been saved.
So, in all the stories we tell, sometimes the good guys are really the bad guys because of their pride and arrogance. Sometimes the bad guys repent and become the good guys. No matter our own story, we recognize that God does forgive us when we sin and cry out to him that the blood of Jesus would cover us. He sets us on the path of goodness, that we would love our neighbor.
The peace of Christ, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amen.
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