After all these months with Luke, we’re pretty sure we have a bead on his message, but do we? Look how we wrestled with trying to understand the characters in last week’s Unjust Judge and the Persistent Widow. Can we assume that the tax collector in Luke 18:9-14 will be the predictable villain? Beware of Luke’s red herring. We know that Luke was writing to an elite audience whose rigorous adherence to the law revealed its position in society. We’ve learned that when we try to make a “black and white” distinction as to who's "in" and who's "out," as this parable implies, we can be fooled. God’s doesn’t operate in the black and white of life; that’s for those who subscribe to “conventional wisdom.” Life’s challenges are usually not black and white and God tends to meet us in our difficult “grey zones.” Once we fall prey to the temptation that divides humanity into groups, we have squarely aligned ourselves with the Pharisee.
This parable is not about self-righteousness and humility any more than it is about a pious Pharisee and desperate tax collector. Rather it’s about God…who alone can judges and “justifies.” Judgment is based on man’s rule of law and is subject to human interpretation and bias. God is all about Justice.
David Steindl-Rast writes in Deeper Than Words that Justice is rooted in love not law…and is not a matter of imposing strict laws like a cookie cutter on flattened dough. No God’s rule is more like the yeast in the dough, and works from within.
Justify does not mean punishing but setting things right. This story is at the very heart of the good news. God knows us better than we do ourselves and accepts us just as we are.
This story is at the very heart of the good news. God sees all about us, and knows all about us—good and bad--and accepts us as we are.
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