03.24. THE PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN

THE PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN

Luke 18:9-14 The purpose of this trenchant Parable is explicitly stated. It was leveled at those who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others.” Such a temper is offensive in whatever field of conduct it is displayed. It must not be confounded with humble self-reliance. It is quite possible to have a correct estimate both of one’s own merits and of other people’s. A military commander frequently conjoins with entire self-confidence a salutary respect for the skill and strength of the force that opposes him. But a self-confidence which exhibits itself at the expense of other men, and counts its merits exceptional, is offensive, and if not empty and delusive is at least foolish. Self-admiration effectually excludes a man from the admiration of others; and although self-confidence will often carry a man over many of the ordinary difficulties of life, it almost certainly betrays him into greater difficulties. That religion, whose function it is to render men humble and loving, should actually in many instances make them self-satisfied and contemptuous, calls for explanation. And the explanation is not far to seek. Human nature displays itself in religion as in everything else with which men have to do. The men who in the ordinary walks of life seek a cheap success carry their slothful ambition into religion, and crave an eminence that costs them little. The shallow characters that are content to have the appearance without the reality, reputation without worth, applause without desert, priority and high station without superior excellence, are content to be accepted as godly, although void of the love of God. And this lack of integrity and downright thoroughness, this craving for appearance and reputation irrespective of reality and excellence, is so common in every community that morality and religion tend to be dissociated. There are always persons who wish to be recognized as eminently religious; their desire for recognition exceeds their craving for that which deserves it, and unconsciously they erect a standard of judgment which is at once easy of attainment and out of the ordinary reach.

Pharisaism was the ripest historical manifestation of this constant tendency, and has therefore given its name to similar manifestations in all ages. With a single touch our Lord brings out in the Parable the two characteristics of all Pharisaism — its ambitious motive and its false standard. The Pharisee of the Parable thanks God he Is not as other men; his religion has been rather an affair between him and other men than between him and God. His object in cultivating religion has been to surpass other men and win their favorable judgment; and now that he has made good for himself the claim to be a religious man he is satisfied. Further, the standard of comparison which he uses, and by applying which he fancies himself superior to others, is one not of morality but of superficial purity and formal observances; he is not an adulterer, nor an extortioner, and he fasts twice a week.

It is this tendency to judge by outward acts rather than by the essential character, and to substitute observances for righteousness, which constitutes the danger of Pharisaism. Anxious rather to have the credit of being righteous than actually to be so, the Pharisee thinks it enough to maintain an outward purity of life. The letter of the law he knows he must satisfy, and in all matters to which that letter applies he is careful and exact. But while attending to his conduct so far as it meets the eye, he is careless of the state of his heart. The man, the real nature and permanent dispositions, are overlooked, and nothing is thought of but the conduct. The idea grows that good actions make a good man, and it is forgotten that unless the man is good the actions cannot be good. The Pharisee holds that good fruit makes the tree good, and does not believe that only if the tree is good can the fruit be good. His own eternal character he is little concerned about, if only he has a good reputation: the real good of men is not the object of his moral endeavors, and so he is satisfied if he seems to be fulfilling the law. There is thus propagated a misconception of morality all round; a misconception of its nature, of its use, of the means of its attainment. Morality being thus misconceived, religion also is misconceived. The Pharisee, aiming only at a superficial and selfish morality, feels no need of coming into a living fellowship with the root of all goodness in God. It is impossible, therefore, he should understand what religion is. But seeking to have a conspicuous religion, he finds this in a routine of observances which can be performed irrespective of character, by good men and bad men alike. Certain observances are added to the moral law, and by degrees these observances take a higher place than the common duties of life. These extras come to be considered the distinctive mark of a religious man, so that each person’s status or rank in the religious world is determined by his observance of these, and not by his regard to justice, charity, truth, purity. And when Pharisaism dominates in any community, men are actually judged irrespective of character, and their position as religious or irreligious persons is determined by their observance or non-observance of certain outward forms and practises which have no necessary connection with morality. If inquiry is made regarding a man’s religion, if it is asked whether he is a religious or an irreligious man, such features of his life are cited as, that he has prayers in his family night and morning, that he is regular in his attendance at church, that he takes an interest in ecclesiastical affairs, but not that he is honorable and straightforward in business, helpful to his relatives, careless of display and of gain. It is obvious that a man of no character can fast twice a week, and will do so if he can thereby secure his own ends. Of all such observances we may use Paul’s language and say, “Meat commendeth us not to God: for neither, if we eat, are we the better; neither, if we eat not, are we the worse.” The Pharisee thus misapprehends the meaning and use of religious observances, and distorts the relation between morality and religion. The great end of religion is to bring us into perfect harmony with God, a harmony which is not the merely apparent and temporary alliance which can be effected by compulsion or outward arrangement, but the thorough unanimity and eternal fellowship which result from identity of will and similarity of character. In a word, the great end of religion is to make us like to God — to make us just and loving, truthful and pure. Religion has not done its work until we are in very truth the children of God; and we cannot be called religious men, in any but a most superficial and misleading sense, until we are morally like God. In order to accomplish this great end of religion a certain training is needful, and this training is aided by the observance of certain practises, rites, and forms of worship. Prayer, worship, attendance on ordinances, and so forth, are requisite as means for the attainment of the knowledge and love of God out of which holiness springs. Unfortunately, the practise of these observances is much more obvious as a distinctive mark of religious people than the result of them in exceptional holiness of life. Not all who profess religion become more upright and less worldly than their neighbors, but all who profess religion do attend church and maintain certain appearances of godliness. And in consequence, these observances become identified with religion, while a high and pure morality does not become so identified; and in determining whether a man is or is not religious, attention is turned to a few habits, whose real importance lies solely in what they accomplish and not at all in themselves. And thus Pharisaism is encouraged; and men who would not for the world go to bed without saying their prayers, or who make a great scruple about it, make no scruple at all about slandering or cheating their neighbor, about being cold and sullen and tyrannical at home, greedy in business, vindictive and violent in their dealings with men.

Evidently no perversion of religion could be more fatal than this substitution of the means for the end. To make religion consist in repeating prayers, observing fasts, attending ordinances, upholding rites, is to reduce it to a pernicious, delusive, deadening, worse than useless burden, which reasonable men must and ought at once to abolish. To encourage men to imagine that they have attained the summit of human excellence when they can fast twice a week is plainly to burlesque religion. To induce men to measure their religious attainment by their diligence in any kind of ritual observances is simply to fatally delude them. Religion, instead of being the very life of the spirit, giving it its true place in the universe and imparting to it eternal principles, is transformed into a mere matter of external performances, which might be as accurately discharged by a soulless automaton. The character developed by such a conception of religion is obnoxious alike to God and man, offending God by a superficial homage and alienating men by self-satisfied pride. The God of the Pharisee is not the loving Father of all men, but a distant, self-seeking Sovereign who must be propitiated by rites and ceremonies and sacrifices, and who cares little for the love of men and has little interest in their genuine spiritual growth. The Pharisee’s religion is a mere tax paid to this unattractive and impossible Being, and not an essential of human life. And the more diligent in his religion the Pharisee is, the less capable does he become of cherishing any rational and large views of God’s relation to the world and of His work in it.

Such a religion stunts his humanity as well, and instead of softening him and widening his sympathies and expanding his heart and his life, by the consciousness that God is his and will control the future, it contracts and hardens his whole nature. He is recognizable by his “despising others.” A just estimate of the difference in natural advantages which makes that easy to one which is impossible to others; an intelligent comparison of the various difficulties with which different men have to contend; a perception of what perfectness of character really is, tends to make good men slow to pronounce upon their neighbors. They know something of their own frailty, and how much depravity lies hid under a fairly righteous conduct; they know how obstinately the heart clings to natural vices of thought and feeling, and how insecure the attainment already made seems to be, and how remote from a state in which sin is impossible, and feeling how slight and hardly won their own victories are, they have sympathy with the defeated and are slow to condemn them. Besides, the chief element in true growth is growth in love: no man is making permanent growth in character who is not growing in sympathy, in pity, in helpfulness, in all that connects him with his fellow-men. To be perfect is to be able to add much to the good of the world, that is to say, to have the disposition and the ability to help weaker men against vice and its consequences. The attainment in godliness which is content with looking down on sinful men and keeping its own garments clean is no attainment at all. And any true discernment of the actual terms on which the battle of right and wrong has actually to be fought out by men in this world makes it impossible to despise those who fall. Pharisaic contempt can only result from a total misapprehension of what human virtue consists in and of how it is attained.

Foolish, hateful, and fatal as these views of religion are then, we must beware lest we ourselves be infected with the leaven of the Pharisees. We are so, when we allow our attention to the forms of religion to hide from us our neglect of its inward spirit; when we can detect the slightest disposition to judge our religious life by its manifestations in worship rather than by its manifestations in conduct; when we allow ourselves in a self-satisfied comparison with those who do not carry so many of the external marks of religion as we do, but who surpass us in generosity, in honor, in kindliness, even in a self-abasing consciousness of sin. We are infected with the leaven of the Pharisees when we in any way mistake means for ends; when we read the Bible or pray as if these occupations were duties to be done for their own sakes and not for the sake of the result they have; when we are satisfied with having attended church, though it has done us no good; when we allow religious service to be an end in itself and not a means towards something beyond itself. We are infected with the leaven of the Pharisees when we look more to the duties we do than to the spirit and motive from which they spring; when we become satisfied with ourselves because we do certain things which other men do not, and when in place of lowliness and charity our religion is producing in us self-complacency and either a hard contempt or a compassionate patronage of other men.

This, then, is the type of religion our Lord exhibits in the Pharisee of the Parable. He sets before the mind’s eye of His hearers a person they were very familiar with and secretly abhorred, though they feared to express their abhorrence. They daily saw the man enter the temple with scrupulous conformity to every prescription of the law of Moses and of the traditions of the elders — having undergone all the required ablutions, with phylacteries fastened in the most approved fashion, his face shining with sanctimonious self-satisfaction, or, on fast days, carefully left un. washed and untrimmed, that it might be seen he had been fasting, pompously and decorously approaching the place of prayer, and with measured phrase, disturbed by no agitating emotion, uttering his unwitting self-condemnation. The prayer our Lord puts into his lips looks at first sight like a caricature, and we find it difficult to believe that any man, however dyed with Pharisaism, could be so absolutely self-complacent in his superiority as this prayer indicates. But not only are there actual prayers on record which rival this in blind self-adulation, but it is certainly not an overdrawn picture of the Pharisaic mind. In contrast to the superficial religion of forms, our Lord sets true heart-religion. Over against the Pharisee, satisfied with himself and despising others, stands the publican, so occupied with his own sinful state that he cannot think of other men. There is no comparison instituted between the Pharisee and the impenitent sinner, though even such a comparison might not be altogether to the advantage of the clean-living Pharisee; for self-satisfaction is a more obstinate bar to progress than the vices of men who make no pretensions to virtue. But between the Pharisee and the penitent publican the comparison must be wholly in favor of the latter. Here is a man who unconsciously goes direct to the heart of religion. By a simple recognition of his actual condition he shoots at a bound far ahead of the Pharisee. The very circumstance that his sins are gross and undeniable is in his favor. Condemned as he is by the judgment of men, he feels himself to be inexcusable; and aided thus by the conscience of others, his own conscience loudly accuses him. The true penitent is identified by every mark of humble and sincere contrition: he stands afar off, his shame will not suffer him to lift up his eyes; in his misery he beats his breast; he cannot, so deep in his sense of guilt, even address God directly, but merely ejaculates, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” It is the picture of a man thoroughly alive to all the shame and misery of sin. His sin is past apology, extenuation, or explanation. It is the grand feature of his life: he has nothing else to speak of; it occupies his thoughts. He has not the remotest idea that anything acceptable to God can be found in him. “A sinner”— that is the term that describes him. Mercy is the only attribute of God he dare appeal to. He does not buoy himself up with any remembrance of almsdeeds or prayers in the past, nor with any promise of amendment. His is a case that it is in vain to disguise; he does not attempt to give any account of it: he can but utter the one cry that is left to the man who knows his whole life has been wrong and that no power of reparation is now left to him.

Such a condition is probably not rare. Rare it may be in instructed and religious circles, where penitence is urged as a duty; but probably not rare among those who have not put themselves much in the way of religious instruction and whose penitence is the sincere and genuine growth of their own experience of the fruits of sin. Life is the most effective teacher; and where elaborate doctrinal instruction often produces only Pharisees, life produces true penitents. And plainly our Lord means to shed a ray of hope into those dark regions which lie outside the pale of ecclesiastical teaching; for though both men were praying in the temple, the impression is left on the mind that the publican was a somewhat unfamiliar visitant of the place of prayer. The ignorant cry of the sinner, almost crushed with despair, has in it, our Lord would say, the germ of a new life. The moment of heart-broken hopelessness is like the sinking in death of the old life, which makes way for a new hope in God and a new life in Him. To be absolutely broken in our own self-confidence and stopped in our own way is the turning point which brings us to God’s everlasting way. It is an experience full of wretchedness, but only by a clear recognition of our actual state can amendment be begun. If we are to find our life in God, life in self must be proved futile. If we are to use intelligently the helps God affords us, we must see our dangers. If salvation from sin is to be rational and real, it must meet us where we are and be applied to us as we are. We must face the actual truth about the relation which our life holds to perfect holiness. We must fairly judge ourselves by a perfect life and own to all actual derelictions of duty. We are not summoned to penitence as a seemly and suitable acknowledgment of God; we are summoned to own and face the truth, to touch and take to do with reality, to look at life as it really is and ourselves as we really are; and if the truth about our own life and character does not compel shame and humble us before God, we are not asked to force a penitence that is not natural and reasonable. The circumstance that the humble, brokenhearted publican went down to his house justified rather than the Pharisee, shows us that there is no true religion without a consciousness of sin; that the consciousness of God involves a consciousness of sin, as the strongest light casts the darkest shadows. God is so subtly interwoven with all things, and especially with all that is moral, that we cannot know Him until we know human life, and cannot know human life until we know Him. The two grandest parts of knowledge go hand in hand and grow together. And you can always tell how much a man knows of God by ascertaining how much he knows of his own sin. By the knowledge of God he is lifted into quite a new point of view. When he knows something of the love, patience, and sacrifice of God, he finds himself in anew moral world, in the presence of principles and purposes infinitely exalted above those he has been familiar with, and applying to all things a scale immeasurably higher. When the life of Jesus Christ is taken seriously as the one standard or mirror for all human life, when it is seen to be the Divine idea for us all, we cannot but sink in shame at the contrast it presents to our own. And to which of us is the prayer of the publican unsuitable? Which of us has not sinned without excuse? Who among us can invite God’s strict judgment? Would it not be the part of candor and honesty to go to God as frankly and humbly as the publican, and supplicate God’s mercy? Must we not be living an altogether delusive life if we are living with sin unconfessed? Is it possible we can be satisfied with our life while we have been at no pains to ascertain how sin is to be dealt with? And is it possible we can leave a sinful past behind us and pass on to the future with principles unchanged, with no certainty that the future will be better than the past, with no real hope or assurance that we are advancing towards a sinless and perfect condition? To the real penitent this Parable is meant to bring encouragement. It plainly says that God will not despise the prayer of the contrite. When the heart fails under a sense of sin, when the whole of life is filled with darkness, then God is near and accepts the penitent. To be hopeless is at all times mistaken and wrong. To be hopeless is to be godless, and no man is godless however he may have denied God and forsaken Him. He has a God still, a God ready to forgive, delighting in mercy; and if nothing else convinces him of God’s nearness, his own sense of sin ought to do so, proving, as it does, the supreme importance of all moral relations. THE END