Who is The Villain?

Luke 18:9-14

 

One of the criticisms the teenagers in my chapel would make is that all Christians are hypocrites; that is they say one thing and do another; that they make demands on others they are unable to keep themselves. They got a shock when I agreed with them and stated very clearly that I too was a hypocrite.

 

At my peak I am very ordinary, and I am not at my peak at the moment. This is something I remind myself of daily. I am a work in progress and like all works in progress I am not complete and I am working toward that day when I will be as close as possible to average as I can be.

 

In todays Gospel we are given another insight into prayer which is too easily trivialised as the distinction between the righteous and the sinner here represented by the Pharisee and the tax collector. We always seem to come down on the side of the tax collector and disparage the Pharisee as the villain of the story.

 

The Pharisees are always the villains, not necessarily in the parables as Jesus tells them but in the retelling of the parables by Christians after the birth of the church. We always need villains, some one to blame and in our modern society this has become an art form. We have replaced Pharisees with “them” who ever we wish them to be. They are always the reason everything is going to custard. It is never our fault.

 

John Meier suggests an interesting insight:  “Jesus would have interacted more with them than with any other Jewish movement or party (because) both Jesus and the Pharisees shared a consuming desire to bring all Israel, not just an esoteric sect or a privileged elite, to the complete doing of God's will as laid out in the Law and the prophets. Jesus and the Pharisees agreed on many basic points: God's free election of Israel, his gift of the Law, the need to respond wholeheartedly to the Law's demands in one's everyday life, God's faithful guidance of Israel through history to a future consummation involving the restoration of Israel, a final judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and perhaps some sort of eschatological or messianic figure as God's agent in the end time. At the same time, disagreements were inevitable”. They were not the villains but became so because of how the stereotype of the Pharisee (and the adjective, "Pharisaic") has played out in Christian history. This can be seen in the way that Jewish faith has been represented by Christians as legalistic and hypocritical, in contrast to the heartfelt and authentic faith of Christians."

 

 

What is the Pharisees sin as portrayed in this story? William Loader suggests "The message of Jesus is quite sharp: bolstering one’s sense of identity by disparaging others (even when they are terrible sinners) so easily leads to illusions of grandeur and a failure to see ourselves as we really are." Are the Pharisees alone in this or is there a sense that the story, as retold by the Gospel writer or editors joins in such a sin? Are they not disparaging the Pharisees to make a point? That point being that one should see oneself for who one is – a sinner, a hypocrite as my students would say, for we are all in the same leaky boat.

 

The difference here is that the real villain in the story is the tax collector. According to Kathleen Corley, “ tax collectors are connected in Greco-Roman literature with those who trafficked in prostitution and slavery, particularly to brothel keepers and pimps, those responsible for supplying women and slaves for banquets”. This particular tax collector is self aware and honest, at this point any way, about his situation. The challenge for him and his cohort is what happens next. Do they remain part of the problem or become part of the solution to the systemic injustice they are a key part of? Our eagerness to condemn the Pharisees gets in the way of a realistic response to the entrenched behaviour of the tax collector and his acquaintances.

 

Neither of the protagonists get off easy. Both have some work to do. Both have to have a realistic look at their behaviour towards others and neither can claim the moral or spiritual high ground.  

 

Yes, the Pharisees and those of us who see ourselves as privileged and entitled need to get it into perspective – at our peak we are very ordinary and we are rarely at our peak and therefore can not claim to be better than others. The tax collector reminds us that we have indeed behaved badly, more than we often wish to see, in ways that have diminished others and need to admit such before both God and others.

 

• Prayer is about honesty – about being honest with ourselves and with God – but with ourselves first. Then and only then can we take the steps to put right what we put wrong and continue to strive for the best.

• Prayer is about enough – in this case about the fact that our ordinary efforts to live out the way of Christ is enough. We do not have to disparage others to bolster our own standing. We are enough, even with all our faults we have many positive moments where we do get it right.

• Prayer is about being ok – I’m  O.K – You’re O.K. despite the fact we are conflicted with passions and wounds, loss and  grief and a history that speaks into our life today. The Pharisee was O.K. and didn’t need to disparage another; the tax collector was O.K. but he had some more work to do.

• Prayer is about humility, but it must be an honest humility. The Pharisee and those like him are challenged to be humble and the tax collector is challenged to prove his humility is real. It is not enough to say I am a sinner, one must take steps to conversion, the complete change in behaviour required as part of such humility. 

• Prayer is about God’s grace – God knows and understands us, and although God seeks us to be the best we can be, is able to work with our humanity. That is the great truth of the incarnation. God so trusted the human form that God became one with it in the form of Jesus of Nazareth.

 

This parable is another difficult story and is as relevant to the church today as it was to the religious of Jesus time. The church, you and I, is being asked to stand where the tax collector stood, moving away from the position of the privileged and the powerful as we were in the past, and to admit that our arrogance has been responsible for great sin.

 

Like the tax collector we are to recognise this and be transformed into the body of Christ, the disciples of the way. Amen.

The Way of Kindness

Luke 18:1-8

 

Over the last few months I have noticed the power of  moral outrage to distract humanity from the larger questions facing society. Footy grand finals hype, Pauline Hanson’s outrageous statements, the Buddgy 9’s outrageous behaviour in Malaysia, the theft of Kim Kardashians ring and the outrageous words of Donald Trump, have all been effective in shifting the focus of humanity, you and I, from the big issues needing to be seriously addressed. We are entranced by the stupidity we hear and fail to focus on what really matters – the big issues.

 

The problem may be the size of the big issues. They seem intractable, out of the scope of our responsibility, beyond our personal experience. These are questions we know exist – the genocide of the relentless bombing of Alleppo by all sides including Australia, the limitless killing of citizens in the Phillipines, the continuing imbalance in wealth and opportunity that favours certain classes in society and the unnecessary detaining of children and others in refugees camps and detention centres. And that’s not all. Here at home we have the question of how we engage with the sovereign nations who were here before western occupation, marriage equality, unemployment, homelessness and more.

 

Our reading of the gospel story today often stays firmly in one place. We read it as teaching us about persistence in prayer, how we are to be faithful and continuing to pray for what we need until we are heard by God. 

 

William Loader  observes:

“... it is missing the mark if we treat the passage as a general teaching about intercessory prayer. It is primarily about the yearning for change. It was very appropriate that the story told of a poor widow. She represents a behaviour, but she also represents the poverty and vulnerability which is the point of the parable’s message. The story has been shaped in the cruelty of exploitation and the arbitrary abuse of power. It belongs in the world which Jesus is addressing. Jesus is reading the signs in the wounds of the people. The contours of their devastation shape the structures of his thought, because this is where he belongs and these are the people whose cries he hears.”

 

Reading this as a treatise on prayer ignores the social context in which Jesus sets this story. Here we have a marginalised woman, a widow who has no man to look after her and still needs to find accommodation and sustenance. She knocks on her neighbours door. If she is marginalised she probably has no home and is living rough. It is hardly likely that she has a house and lives next door to a wealthy and titled person such as a judge. In our terms she is a beggar knocking on doors looking for help.

 

Jesus has the judge first ignore the pleas for help and only out of this persons annoying behaviour does he finally throw a loaf or two her way. There was no compassion, no sense of duty, no understanding of the plight of the widow. It was simply throwing crumbs to the dogs to shut them up.

 

This passage of scripture shows how we ignore the real issues and deal only with the presenting problem – annoying woman who needs justice. Much of our responses to the pressing needs in society take this form. Charity hand outs, welfare doled out as if we are being used, unfair restrictions on the provision of employment support or accommodation for refugees or assistance for the disabled or the granting of recognition for the first nations people in our constitution instead of negotiating a treaty with the sovereign nations we live amongst.

 

The judge is confronted by the social ills of society. He is confronted in this story as one who is part of the problem but one who has the capacity to solve the problem. Poverty is not, and still is not, a private issue. It is systemic and finds its source in the ego self who sees entitlement and aloofness as a right. The much vaunted failure of Donald Trump to pay taxes and others assertion that we all should strive to pay as little tax as possible are only possible because we have a system which encourages and allows such actions.

 

Jesus is challenging those listening to address the plight of the poorest of the poor, to do more than the paltry efforts of the judge. The image of the judge brings to the front of mind one who is responsible for dispensing justice, yet the best he can do isa response out desperation to get her off his back. Perhaps this raises the question: can the system actually reform itself or are those within the system so entangled that they are unable to step back and see what is needed?

  

Is the widow the only source of hope in this story? The actions of the poor are needed to wake up those in power. The voice of the poor must be heard and to do so one must never give up proclaiming God’s preference for the poor. We have no choice but join with those on the outside to find a way to reform what is broken. It is the mission Jesus took for himself at the beginning of his ministry from Isaiah and it is the foundation of the great commission -  “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28)

 

This is not about personal salvation but about the institution of the Way of Jesus and the way of Jesus is the way of kindness – justice – compassion.  We as disciples of the Way are to join hands and voices with the poor and advocate for change. We are to reflect on how complicit we are in this system and what we can do to live more justly the way of Christ in our daily living. We are challenged to avoid the sensational distractions and return again and again to the issues needing resolution. We are to ask why this is so and to avoid the easy answers of those who want to maintain the status quo. We are to join hands with those of different faiths, ideologies and political allegiances who are working to institute kindness – justice – compassion (or the Way of Christ) in the world. The Spirit of Christ is already at work in places and people, philosophies and ideologies , faiths and practices different from ours yet committed to the way of Christ in word and deed.

 

This is a troublesome parable, no wonder the authorities finally got sick of Jesus and dispensed with him. Drawing people away from the bread and circuses and reorienting them on the real issues is disturbing, to say the least.

 

The Way of Christ remains a troubling practice but one we have no option but to follow. Amen.