This sermon was preached at a retreat of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Synod and West Virginia-Western Maryland Synod Joint Candidacy Committee in mid-October 2025.
This parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector comes up in the lectionary at the end of the month, though I imagine many Lutheran churches end up replacing it with the texts for Reformation Day. It is itself, though, a very timely reading in the context of Reformation Day for its reflections on good works, justification, and grace.
As many parables do, this one takes the hearers’ expectations and flips them on their head. If you were to set two people side-by-side - one a church leader who reads the Bible every day, serves at the food bank, gives to the church, and the other, someone struggling with addiction who has stolen from friends and family and burned every bridge - and asked who was righteous before God, I think most people would think you were addled for even asking the question. We, like all humanity before us, default to equating good works and righteousness.
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Pharisee and the Publican
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But, as we hear in Luther’s Lectures on Romans, our nature is so deeply curved in upon itself that it turns the finest gifts of God in upon itself. Even these good things that the Pharisee lists are, as evidenced by his prayer, corrupted. Instead of being actions that connect him to God and neighbor, these good things are twisted, leaving the Pharisee with two misconceptions: one, that these actions make him righteous and justify him before God, and two, that the goodness of these actions sets him over and above his neighbors.
The main thing that separates the tax collector and the Pharisee is not their actions - good, bad, it doesn’t matter. Neither is sufficient for justification. As my third grader might say, they are both cooked. What separates the tax collector from the Pharisee is an awareness of sinfulness, of this curved-in state, and the recognition that only God can do something about it. We see it in the Tax Collector’s posture - eyes downcast – and in the words of his prayer, which, unlike the Pharisee’s prayer, are centered not on his own actions, but on God’s. “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” And so, Jesus tells us, it is this man who walks away justified - not because of his humility, of course, but because of God’s action.
For as much as we talk about grace, I think often what we really think is that grace is great for other people. You know, people who are visibly and without question sinners, in the sense of breaking the commandments and living contrary to God’s way. Now, don’t get me wrong - we still see ourselves as in need of God’s grace, but only as a sort of top-off, to get us the rest of the way to justification after we’ve done most of the work ourselves. Since it seems like mostly our work, it’s easy, then, to compare ourselves to others, looking at them with disdain and contempt. I’ve done it, we might think, if they haven’t had the decency to try to be good, what do they expect? A handout?
But, of course, this “top-off” isn’t how grace works. In worship we confess regularly that we are in bondage, captive to sin, and it doesn’t mean a shackle loosely dangling from one wrist while we go about our day. Instead, we are captive, our whole selves, to sin, and in need, our whole selves, of Christ’s redeeming grace - not only when we’ve screwed up royally, but also when we’re trying our best and seem to be doing well.
If you’ve found a quick and easy way to overcome this posture of self-righteousness, please let me know! Perhaps the tax collector’s prayer is a good enough place to start - if we repeat often enough that we’re sinners in need of God’s mercy, maybe we’ll start to believe it.
However well or poorly we acknowledge our sinfulness, the good news for us is that Jesus died and rose for sinners. God’s grace does not wait for us to be sinless, but makes us so.
Our assurance, our hope, is not, will never be in our own righteousness, but in the wonder and mystery of God’s grace. We return to the promises of baptism, dying and rising daily to the new life Jesus promises. In the baptismal waters, we are joined also to our siblings in Christ - not as people to compare ourselves to, but as fellow sinners, people made in God's image, co-laborers in the kingdom, and fellow recipients of God’s powerful, transformative grace. For this gift, we give thanks.
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