Thank God I’m Not Like Other People
One of the advantages of track and field as a sport is that I could tell you, at any given point in time, exactly how good I was. There are numbers still etched into my brain from track meets that took place when I was a teenager. I can tell you, to the hundredth of a second, my fastest-ever mile time, or how long it took me to run the only half marathon I’ve ever run, both fifteen years ago.
I hear the same thing from friends who have taken up power lifting: they know exactly how much weight they can lift, and how that compares to six months or a year ago. And the same is true, I think, for golf, although—do we have any golfers here?— I try to avoid golf as much as possible.
The same thing is true with variations for some other pursuits: maybe for you, it’s when you’ve mastered a new knitting stitch, or learned a new recipe, or picked up a new instrument that you’d never learned before. There are times in life when we know how we measure up against ourselves.
But there is no easy way to calculate a “moral handicap,” to look at your life and know exactly how close you come to being on par for the course. You can’t measure your strength of character like you can measure the strength of your limbs. It wouldn’t make sense to say that fifteen years ago, you once prayed the rosary in 4 minutes and 36 seconds flat.
In the most important parts of our lives—in the questions of ethics and character and faith that really matter in the end—there’s no easy way to measure how good we are. And if we don’t trust that we are good enough, there’s always a temptation to prove that at least we’re better than someone else.
Consider our Pharisee today. He’s so desperate to be good that he’s willing to settle for “better than.” Jesus doesn’t tell this story the Pharisees were especially hypocritical or bad. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Jesus tells this story because the Pharisees were widely known to be good. They were the 20% of every society who do 80% of the prayer, the hard core of people who set aside the time to think about how to serve God and their neighbors while everyone else just goes about their business. The Pharisees stood in the same relationship to their society as the people in this room do to ours: they were the conscientious, spiritual people of the day.
The tax collector is another story. Tax collectors made their living on the backs of their fellow citizens by collecting taxes and tolls on behalf of the emperor in Rome. The tax collector was the government agent who most clearly symbolized the injustice and immorality of the regime. For many of Jesus’ fellow-citizens, the tax collector’s profession alone would have marked him as a bad man.
The Pharisee certainly feels that way. And so he prays, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” (Luke 18:11) And let’s be honest. In my heart of hearts, I have often prayed this prayer. Thank God I’m not like those other people: Bible-thumping fundamentalists, members of the other political party, or even like this guy who just cut me off by turning left through a red light and then honking his horn! I’m guessing that I’m not alone, many of us have probably said this prayer. We come to church. We serve the community. We give tithes of everything we get. (Right?) Most of us are decent, thoughtful people, and it’s easy to look at the world around us and compare.
And the Pharisee is right. The tax collector even agrees! There’s no political polarization here, where Pharisees hate tax collectors and tax collectors hate Pharisees. The tax collector knows he’s in the wrong. And all he has to say for himself is, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13)
And it’s this man, Jesus says, who returns home justified.
The moral of the story seems clear: We should be humble, not boastful; compassionate, not judgmental. We shouldn’t be like that Pharisee, who puffs himself up: “I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.” (Luke 18:11) Don’t brag about how great you are. Don’t put other people down.
Do you see the problem here? It’s so easy for us to read this story about this contemptuous, self-right man, and end up thinking to ourselves, “God, I thank you that I am not like those other people, who are so pious but so judgmental, so critical of others’ lives—or even like this Pharisee!”
It’s a trap! It’s so much easier for us to walk away thinking, “Don’t be like the Pharisee” than it is to really embrace, “Do be like the tax collector.” It’s so much more comfortable for us to look at someone else and say, “Okay, well at least I don’t have that flaw,” than it is to look honestly at ourselves and admit our own shortcomings.
It might be uncomfortable even to hear the tax collector’s prayer, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” as a model for our own prayers. So many of us are used to hearing this kind of language used to divide people into two buckets—they’re the sinners, we’re the saints—and to exclude them from the circle of God’s grace and love. And that is wrong. That’s the Pharisee’s mistake.
But there’s a real freedom that comes from the tax collector’s prayer. Most of us conscientious people never quite feel we measure up. Mother Teresa herself wrote to her closest friends of the deep sense of hypocrisy she felt, enduring decades of spiritual emptiness while publicly sharing God’s love. And I’m no Mother Teresa! The temptation is strong, for all of us, to hold fast to the belief that even if we aren’t perfect, at least we’re better than someone else.
But in this parable today, Jesus offers us relief. We do not have to be perfect to be worthy of God’s love. We do not have to be better than anyone else. In fact, there’s nothing we need to do to be worthy of God’s love—we are already loved. And that’s not to say that we are off the hook. We aren’t perfect as we are. But it’s God’s love, not our constant comparisons, that enables us to grow and change. To begin the process of growth, we only need to admit that we need help to get there.
And God sets us free from trying to prove ourselves to God, and invites us to start accepting his mercy instead. God sets us free from trying to pretend that he doesn’t know the deepest secrets of our hearts, and reminds us that God loves us even in our darkest moments. God sets us free to be ourselves, as we are right now, and to admit to the people around us that we are still works in progress. And God promises that if we turn and ask for help, the Holy Spirit will complete God’s work in us; “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 18:14)
