The Paradoxical Sayings of Jesus
To Be Righteous, You Must Be a Sinner
Luke 18:9-14
Well, I had another chance to share the Gospel this week. As a pastor, it's an occupational hazard!
Actually, the opportunity came as a result of a benevolence call. It has become our policy at Risen King that if you accept our financial help, you automatically agree to accept our spiritual help—that is, if you come to our office and we help you out, you agree to hear the Gospel—the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And so it happened that my assistant received a call from a man who is literally in a world of hurt this week, and was careful to arrange his coming to our office with my availability to share the Gospel with him. As it turned out he had just had a near-death experience—five weeks ago as he was on his motorcycle turning into his driveway, he was hit from behind by a car, thrown 20 feet in the air and came down with broken bones in his back, broken ribs and a broken wrist. So he showed up encased in a plastic girdle, with a cast on his wrist, in desperate need of gas money, which we provided.
But not before I asked him my favorite question: If you were to die tonight and meet God at heaven's gate and he were to ask you why He should let you in, what would you say?
His response was the response I almost invariably get from non-Christians. Well, I'm a good person; and then he began to cite the various ways in which he showed his goodness in relationship to other people.
But in the course of our conversation, as I asked questions and as he offered more information,t he admitted that yes, he was actually a liar and a thief, and that he had even spent some time in prison.
And so it has occurred to me that this person who was depending on being a good person to get to heaven when there is actually a mountain of evidence which he readily admits to that he's not a good person, or he's not been a good person. And somehow he is expecting that the life he has lived is going to deserve going to heaven before a God who is absolutely holy and just and says if that if you keep the whole law and break at in one point (James 2:10), you have become guilty of all.
Now the truth of the matter is that this man's attitude is absolutely typical of almost all Americans who are not true believers, wherever you find them. As I recently mentioned, one poll found that 76% of Americans believe in heaven, but only 1 percent of them believe they're not going there. Lest we think this prejudice toward our own goodness and deserving heaven is a new thing, the Bible actually states that this is endemic in the human race, for Proverbs 16:2 tells us that for all time and in all places, this is typical: "All the ways of a man are clean in his own sight."
In fact, the Bible, and in particular Jesus, tells us that we are not very adept in our own wisdom at assessing anyone's chances of getting to heaven, and especially when it comes to assessing our own chances.
And one of the places which makes this most obvious is another of Jesus' paradoxical statements, actually a paradoxical parable in which it seems that Jesus says, to be righteous, you must be a sinner.
Now, yes, that statement needs a little refinement. But that's just about what he said. To be a bit more complete, we could put it this way: To be righteous in God's sight, you must admit you're a sinner in desperate need of God's mercy.
So this morning we come to Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the Tax-Gatherer in Luke 18. It was not only a paradoxical parable in Jesus' time, it was an absolutely shocking parable, a parable that absolutely contradicted the typical Jewish person's assessment of who was likely to go to heaven and who was not.
And ultimately the issue addressed in this parable is a critical one. Who or what are you trusting in to get you to heaven? What precisely is it that you are depending on as the reason God will welcome you into His holy domain, the Kingdom of Heaven? So as I pose that question, I'm asking you to answer that for yourself. What are you depending on?
Because having the right answer to that question will make all the difference in eternity!
And it's the issue that Jesus focused on, according to Luke, as He began to tell this parable. He had just been talking about prayer, and in the context of prayer, certainly the question came up about exactly whose prayers might be heard. Undoubtedly, in the midst of the crowd that day were some of the very people Jesus would refer to—the religious elite, the religious establishment, the very people that virtually everyone in Israel thought had the best chance of going to heaven.
And so Luke introduced the parable in this way in verse 9: "And He also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt."
Now there are two things to notice here. Jesus deliberately told this parable directly to the very people kind of people the parable would be critical of. In that crowd were the very people who needed to hear this, and Jesus aimed this parable directly at them.
And what kind of people were they? They were people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. And, in addition to that, they viewed other people, the rest, with contempt. They counted others as nothing in comparison with them.
So the issue from the outset of this parable is this: What are you trusting or depending on? What are you counting on to be right with God, and to get to heaven? And at this point it's not looking real good for anyone who is trusting in themselves, in their goodness or good works on the basis of how they're doing in comparison with someone else.
Now who are the kind of people Jesus is talking to here? The very people I encounter all the time in my ministry. People who are trusting in themselves, that they're good enough to be right with God and get to heaven.
Once again what Jesus says here is a spiritual bombshell, a shock to all who heard, and likely an insult to the very people He intended it for. And He tells the story of two men who went up to pray in the temple in Jerusalem, apparently at the same time. They are two very different men, who pray two very different prayers with two vastly different outcomes. And the outcome is precisely the opposite of what most people in that day, and in our day would think. The one most of us think would be headed to heaven is not; the one most of us think is assured of not going to heaven is! How could this be?
Verse 10: "Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector."
At this point, we need to understand the kind of men each of these people were.
In one corner, we have the Pharisee: The Pharisees were the strictest sect of religious Jews, according to no less an authority than the Apostle Paul, in Philippians 3. Paul would know, because as Saul, before he became a believer, he was a Pharisee of Pharisees. The Pharisees were so strict that the 613 commandments found in the Old Testament Law were not sufficient for them. They came up with hundreds, even thousands of other laws, which were their own inventions, which were called the traditions of the elders, or man-made rabbinical laws, which they scrupulously followed. On top of that, Pharisees required themselves to be ceremonially or ritually clean all the time, which required various kinds of washings and ritual cleansings, something that the Old Testament Law only required of men on certain days and in certain situations. The Pharisees also considered those who did not do these things to be "unclean"—that is defiled by sin, and would have nothing to do with people like tax-collectors or known sinners who were unclean. And they were extremely critical of anyone who associated with tax-collectors or sinners, including Jesus and His disciples. On top of this, Pharisees were highly respected in Israel. They were the teachers of the Law, the examples of those who kept the Law, and made up part of the religious establishment—the ruling religious class of the Sanhedrin who under the Romans ruled Israel. And so they were the epitome of the ostentatious self-righteous who looked down on others—on the rest, as nothing, as Luke had already explained. They were the religious hair-splitters who went way beyond what the Law required to display their self-righteousness, and in fact, as Jesus stated in Luke 20:46-47, they loved the chief seats in the synagogues, walking around in their long robes, respectful greetings and made long prayers for appearances sake.
In the other corner, was the lowly tax-collector, who in the eyes of the populace spiritually and religiously, amounted to the scum of the earth. They were universally despised by the Jews for both their political, religious and social compromises. Tax collectors were those Jews who paid the oppressing Romans a sum of money in order to collect taxes on behalf of the Romans from their Jewish countrymen. In other words, they were considered traitors. They betrayed their countrymen by collecting taxes which supported the armies of the Romans who occupied their nation and cruelly ruled over them.
Now if this wasn't bad enough. There were also a few spiritual and religious issues with this. They were associating with unclean Gentiles. Therefore, by even associating with them, much less cooperating with them, they were considered to be unclean religiously, and so Jews, generally as Jesus in Matthew 18:17 indicates, had nothing to do with them other than to pay their required taxes.
On top of this they were permitted by the Romans to charge whatever "the market would bear." In other words, they did not merely collect the taxes which the Romans required, they made their living from whatever they charged in addition to the taxes, and the Romans did not limit them regarding this. And so they typically became greedy extortioners, who by the authority and military force of Rome required their fellow Jews to pay surcharges way beyond what the Romans were taxing, and were becoming rich at the expense of the Jews on behalf of the Romans.
So now you understand why tax collectors were despised. When people assessed who might go to heaven and who might occupy the lowest echelons of hell, guess who they put in heaven, and who they assigned to hell.
So the Pharisee stood in the temple and as he stood Jesus tells us he prayed to himself. Literally, the Greek puts it this way. The Pharisee prayed to himself. In other words, his prayer was all about himself, it was a self-centered prayer, and it literally, with respect to God, got no further than himself.
Now it's clear that as the Pharisee is praying he's fully aware of the other man who is also praying in the temple at the same time. For the issue of comparison comes up. The Pharisee will compare his righteousness to the tax-collector's sin. Listen: "God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers or even like this tax collector. Who was the swindler he was thinking of—likely the tax collector, known for their swindling people out of money. Who were the unjust he was talking about? Likely the whole company of unjust, unrighteous tax collectors. He's not like these other men, the rest of mankind, who sin so freely. He's not even like that sordid tax collector over here.
And here's how I'm better than them: “I fast twice a week.” Now the Law only required Jews fast once a year. It certainly wasn't wrong to fast more. But this Pharisee took pride in it. Because what He was depending on in his relationship to God was his self-righteousness, and how he was better than others. That was the problem—he took pride in his self-righteousness in comparison to other men. And then he goes on to say, "I pay tithes of all that I get." In other words, I give 10% of absolutely everything that comes my way. And even Jesus testified to this fact, in Matthew 23, that the Pharisees were scrupulous when it came to tithing—they tithed even on the minutiae, their spice, mint, and dill and cummin, but He also noted at the same time that they actually neglected the weightier matters of the law. And so he's thinking, Lord, look at what I give, and here we have this greedy swindler over there trying to get your ear. I'm so much better—thank you that I’m not like him and based on my goodness that you hear my prayer.
Now in the course of this prayer, notice, the Pharisee mentions God only once. After that He congratulates and praises himself with the first person pronoun "I" five different times. The prayer is all about himself. It is a self-centered, self-righteous prayer which is really all about congratulating himself on his righteousness in comparison with the tax collector and other men rather than praising God.
Now I find this very interesting. Because this is precisely the basis upon which most people I talk to describe themselves as good. It's in comparison to other people. Their standard is based on their comparison to other people, and based on that, as though God is grading on a curve, they're going to make it with God.
However, what I'm careful to point out is this: that other people are not God's standard. In fact, the short verse I use to make this point says it all. Romans 3:23: "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." What does God say here? He is saying that not only that we have all sinned, but He tells us exactly how we have sinned. We have sinned in that we have fallen short of God's glory. What is God's glory in this context? It's his own perfect righteousness, his own absolute holiness. It's the perfect character which Christ displayed when on this earth. In other words, God's standard for righteousness is not other sinful people. That's not the issue at all. His standard is His own absolute holiness. And by that standard, in God's sight, we all fall short, we are all sinners, and all our righteousness in comparison to Christ's is literally filthy rags.
And so at about this point, we begin to get Jesus' point. Don't count on being good enough to get to heaven. You can't do it. No one can do it. For as James 2:10 points out, even if you keep the whole law and yet stumble in one point, you have become guilty of all.
Whoa. Think you're good enough for God, and especially in comparison to other folks. Then, think again!
Now Jesus tells us about the tax collector's approach to God.
First, his body position is telling. Verse 13, "But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven," God's dwelling place. No, where he stands in the temple, I suspect at a distance from the curtain and the most holy place, which represented God's manifest presence, demonstrates his humility. He recognizes he does not deserve to stand in God's presence.
And then rather than looking proudly up to heaven, he is unwilling to even lift his eyes to God. It's as though he is cognizant that He is not even worthy to look upon the Most Holy.
And then there's even more. He beats his breast. He beats his breast in utter humility and contempt for the life he's lived. He recognizes he's blown it.
And all of this is evident also in what He says. There's no comparison with anybody else in the temple. This conversation is completely between him, a sinner in his own sight, and God, too holy to even be looked upon or drawn near to.
There's one reference to God, and one reference to himself, the third person pronoun me, with, for once, an accurate description of himself, an apt description before all of us in God's sight. He describes himself as the sinner. That's no accident—he's not just a sinner; he literally defines himself as the sinner—the perfect definition of all that is repugnant to God's holiness.
And as G. Campbell Morgan memorably once described it, he flunga single gasp into eternity just one desperate, humble and repentant request: “Be merciful to me, the sinner!”
Wow. This man's self-assessment was right. It was right not only for him, but for all of us in our Holy God's sight. We are sinners. We don't deserve anything good from God. We deserve hell for our sins. And the only shot we've got with God and getting to heaven is God's mercy—his willingness not to give us what we deserve.
No, don't depend on your goodness to get you anywhere with God. You aren't good by His standards. Depend rather on His mercy with humble repentant prayer. And then, and only then, will your prayer be heard, and answered.
And then the verdict of heaven, of the only begotten Son of God who would give His life to pay for this man's sins, and every man's sins is delivered.
Literally, Jesus says emphatically, Truly I say to you. Again, listen whenever He says truly.
This man, not the Pharisee, this man, the sinner in his own estimation, the lowly despised tax collector, went to his house justified, declared righteous, his sin removed from him, rather than the other—rather than the one who counted the rest as of no account. Because by His humble, repentant faith He demonstrates that He was depending on the right thing to get him to heaven—not His own righteousness, but God's abundant mercy for the humble and repentant sinner.
If that wasn't explosive news to all who heard. An insult the religious self-righteous, and a sign of hope for us all, who recognize we deserve nothing but God's wrath. God is merciful, and that's the very reason He sent His only Son—to demonstrate that mercy, and to give grace to those who recognize they are sinners, and they need a Savior, and that they cannot save themselves. Only Jesus can.
You know what this tells us today? The humble repentant mass school shooter gets to heaven before the self-righteous parent of one of his victims. The humble repentant prostitute gets to heaven before the self-righteous virgin. Even the humble repentant molester gets to heaven before his self-righteous victim. It’s shocking, but it’s the grace of God—these are the words of Jesus Christ who died for our sins!
And then Jesus delivers another zinger—one we would do well to never forget. Listen to this very carefully, because this is the very thing that most people in this world do not get: Jesus concludes the parable now with this wide-sweeping, universal principle. Notice that he includes everyone in this principle—no one is excluded from this spiritual law. "For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted." In other words, come Judgment Day, every single person you and I know who exalts himself, who thinks in his own heart he is good enough for God and deserves heaven, will be humbled. Will perhaps even be shocked and surprised at the verdict of heaven upon their lives. And every single person who humbles himself like this great sinner, and casts himself upon God's mercy, recognizing that only Jesus death could pay for His sins and qualify Him for heaven, only that kind of person will be exalted on Judgment Day.
So this morning, I have a question for you. What are you trusting in? Who are you depending on? Yourself, and your righteousness? Do you tell yourself and God how good you are in comparison to other people? Are you, by your own assessment, qualified for heaven?
Or do you recognize as this great sinner recognized, that no one deserves heaven. That all our righteousness, in comparison with God's holiness, is as filthy rags, and that it is only those who depend on God, and His mercy, shown through Jesus' death for your sins, that you have a chance.
Jesus was the only one who was just, not us. And I Peter 3:18 tells us depend on Christ’s mercy, not our own, to bring us to God: “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God.”
Let's bow in prayer.
And Father it's because of what Jesus said that we sinners can know that we have more than a chance. Because Hee said He who believes, He who trusts in you and in Jesus, has eternal life. That's a promise. And because we are sinners and Jesus was and is God, we believe Him, and we cast ourselves on Jesus, and what He did for us, rather than what we can for ourselves, as the only way we can be guaranteed heaven. For as Jesus said, He is the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through Him. Thank you for forgiving our sins. Now may we truly and humbly repent of them just as this tax-gatherer did, for your glory, in Jesus' name. Amen.
