Luke 18

1. 1 AND he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and 2. 2 not to faint; saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither re- 3. 3 garded man. And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, 4. 4 Avenge me of mine adversary. And he would not for a while: but afterward he said 5. 5 within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man; yet because this widow 6. 6 troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. And the 7. 7 Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge saith. And shall not God avenge his own elect, 8. 8 which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth? 9. 9 And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were 10. 10 righteous, and despised others: Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a 11. 11 Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself,

God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

At the hour of prayer in the temple courts, one stands forth for all to see, and speaks aloud—and what is his prayer? It is a thanksgiving, not a confession: a thanksgiving for his own virtues: a boastful self-vaunting, and comparison of his good with others’ evil! Afar off, as unworthy to draw near where God is, there stands a sinner—one whom men point at as an outcast from Israel—and he dares not to lift so much as his eyes toward heaven, but can only smite upon his breast, and say, “God be merciful to me a sinner!” The pent-up sins of years are gathered into one single utterance, and he plunges in, as all-defiled and all-guilty, into the fountain opened in the blood of Jesus for sin and for uncleanness. And it is he—it is the poor sinner—who goes down to his house justified! The other came and returns, self-complacent, self-satisfied, self-admiring: but this one, the altogether sinner, has upon him the hand of blessing, has within him the answer of the divine forgiveness. This is the gospel of the sinner. He who thus spake is of right the sinner’s Friend. V.

While the Pharisee enumerates his merits, his abstinences and proprieties and almsgivings, the publican does not pretend to enumerate his offences. Now, goodness that can be measured and counted off is not enough. Goodness is a principle, and that is measureless. Christ would show this publican as knowing that down underneath all particular sins there lies the one worse sin of a wrong soul, from which all the little ones spring and take their energy of mischief—the parent-sin of Satanic self-love that brings the whole vile progeny forth. It is not so much sins as sin that we have to confess and deplore. Some acts of evil will ever remain to be renounced. But the state of sin, nothing but a Christian renewal or a regeneration from the Spirit of God in the cross of Christ will change that. A mere indifference to the right, a mere unfilial forgetfulness of God, the mere coldness of disregard to Christ’s compassion, makes up that godless condition. The Father asks a filial spirit in his child; the Saviour asks a disciple’s affection. We cannot veil that deep gulf which stretches always between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not with any brilliant mist of kindly instincts or graceful accomplishments. This is life eternal—to know thee and thy Christ! “Thou shalt love thy God.” F. D. H.

1. Men ought always to pray. That men must needs pray always, if they would escape the things coming on the earth. It is not so much the duty or suitableness, as the absolute necessity, of instant persevering prayer that is here declared. T.—To pray always, and to speak but little, is one of the paradoxes of the gospel: this duty requires little of the tongue, much of the heart. A man may be justly said always to pray, when he has God always present to his mind, and always desires him; whether he do it standing or kneeling, in rest or labor, in grief or joy. Q.—It becomes us to be earnest and fervent, to testify our confidence in his goodness, and the deep sense of our own weakness, wants, and unworthiness; also to show that we set a true value on his blessings, as worth all the importunity we can use: and in this sense the success of our prayers may be truly said to depend on our importunity; not that God is to be moved to grant our requests, but that it becomes us to have these dispositions, in order that we may be more fitly qualified for the grace and mercy which God is willing to bestow upon us. Tillotson.

7. Part of the teaching here is that God often seems to man to be acting as this unjust judge, to be turning a deaf ear to the prayer of his people. For even the elect are impatient under suffering and affliction. The parable is intended to meet this very difficulty and temptation, to which the faithful, suffering long under sore earthly trials, are exposed. If the unjust judge acts thus, shall not the just God avenge his own elect? If a bad man will yield to the mere force of the importunity which he hates, how much more certainly will a righteous God be prevailed on by the faithful prayer which he loves! . . . Prayer is the calling in of a mightier to aid, when the danger is felt to be urgent lest the enemy should prevail. And the words in which the need finds utterance, “Avenge me of mine adversary,” wonderfully express the relation in which we stand to the evil of which we are conscious as mightily working within us: that it is not our very self, but an alien power, holding us in bondage—not the very “I,” as Paul (Rom. 7) is so careful to assert, for then redemption would be impossible, but sin which, having introduced itself, is now seeking to keep us in bondage. And this is the same petition that we make daily, when we say “Deliver us from evil,” or rather, “from the Evil One”—from him who is the source and centre of all evil. T.—To long for a revelation of divine justice before all the world, and for the time when he shall judge between the good and the bad, is not at all inconsistent with prayer for the salvation of the enemies of his kingdom, as enjoined both by Christ’s teaching and example. The combination of the two is a thoroughly Christian one. N.

8. He may be slack in avenging his people as “men count slackness,” as compared with their impatience; but “he will avenge them speedily,” not leaving them a moment longer in the fire of affliction than is needful. T.—When. The Saviour finally put the question whether, under the delays of divine justice, all that believed on him would hold fast their integrity; whether the Son of man would find faith remaining in them all when he should reveal himself a second time. N.—The point is not that there will be then few faithful or none, but that the faith even of the faithful will be almost failing: the distress will be so urgent, the darkness so thick, at the moment when at last the Son of man shall come forth for salvation and deliverance, that even the hearts of his elect people will have begun to fail them for fear. All help will seem utterly to have failed, so that the Son of man at his coming will hardly find that faith, the faith which does not faint in prayer, with allusion to verse 1—the faith which hopes against hope, and believes that light will break forth even when the darkness is thickest, and believing this continues to pray—he will hardly find that faith upon earth. The verse stands parallel to, and may be explained by, those other words of our Lord’s: “For the elect’s sake,” lest their faith also should fail, and so no flesh should be saved, “those days shall be shortened.” T.—From this we learn—1. That the primary and historical reference of this parable is to the Church in its widowed, oppressed, defenceless condition during the present absence of her Lord in the heavens; 2. That in these circumstances importunate, persevering prayer for deliverance is the Church’s fitting exercise; 3. That notwithstanding every encouragement to this, so long will the answer be delayed, while the need of relief continues the same, that all hope of deliverance will have nearly died out, and “faith” of Christ’s coming scarcely be found. But the application of the parable to prayer in general is so obvious as to have nearly hidden its more direct reference, and so precious that one cannot allow it to disappear in any public and historical interpretation. B.

10. The Pharisee, a specimen of that class of men, who, satisfying themselves with a certain external freedom from gross offences, have remained ignorant of the plague of their own hearts, and have never learned to say, Deliver me from mine adversary, who do not even know that they have an adversary; the other, the representative of all who, though they have much and grievously transgressed, are now feeling the burden of their sins, and heartily mourning them, who also are yearning after one who shall deliver them from those sins, and from the curse of God’s broken law. 11. Stood and prayed. To pray standing was the manner of the Jews (1 K. 8 : 22; 2 Chr. 6 : 12; M. 6 : 5; Mk. 11 : 25); though in moments of a more than ordinary humiliation or emotion of heart, they changed this attitude for one of kneeling or prostration (Dan. 6 : 10; 2 Chr. 6 : 13; Acts 9 : 40, 20 : 36, 21 : 5).

Not as other men. Dividing the whole of mankind into two classes, his arrogance reaches even to such a pitch as this; he in one class, all the world besides in the other. And as he can think nothing too good for himself, so nothing too bad of them. 12. He would lay claim to doing more than might strictly be demanded of him; he would bring in God as his debtor. Acknowledgment of wants or confession of sin, there is none in his prayer, if prayer it can be called, which is without these. T.—Besides doing all his duty, he did works of supererogation; while sins to confess and spiritual wants to be supplied he seems to have felt none. What a picture of the Pharisaic character and religion! B.

13. In the publican we are to see one who at this very moment was passing into the kingdom of God, who had come in the fulness of a contrite heart, to make, as I think evidently is meant, the first deep confession of his sins past which had ever found utterance from his lips. How horrible a thing does the Pharisee’s untimely scorn appear, when we think of it, mingling as a harshest discord with the songs of angels, which at this very moment hailed the lost which was found, the sinner that repented! He “smote upon his breast,” an outward sign of inward grief or self-accusation, as one judging himself that he might not be judged of the Lord; at the same time “saying, God be merciful to me a sinner,” or “to me, the sinful one;” as the other had singled himself out as the holy one. T.—He smites upon his breast, as conscious of the pollutions which lodged there; alleges nothing in his own behalf; feels no refuge and seeks no comfort, except in the mercy of a forgiving God; brings no motive to incline that mercy but a sorrowful sense of his own unworthiness, and a humble hope in God’s unbounded goodness. He casts himself entirely on this saving, this only supporting attribute. Stanhope. — Be merciful. Be propitiated, a very unusual word in such a sense, only once else used in the N. T., in the sense of “making reconciliation” by sacrifice. B.

This expression of conscious unworthiness is simply the irrepressible confession of sincerity, pressed out of the soul by a longing for forgiveness —short, because so terribly sincere. The straitened spirit in its anguish has no room for particulars. The very sound of the words, the downcast look, the withdrawn position, the agonized gesture, as well as the character Christ puts upon these things, betray the reality of his repentance. The thing they expose to us is human sin—its self-conviction, its wretchedness, its way of relief. F. D. H.—This unearthly experience has ever had one beginning. Its first step has ever been one of self-abasement. There may be different degrees and intensities of feeling; but in every case there has been something of the emotion or state of soul that called out the prayer of the publican, “God be merciful to me, the sinner,” as though all else was lost sight of in the sense of the soul’s distance from God and holiness. He who has known nothing of this has never entered upon the Christian life. He has no right to speak about it; and nothing that he says about the soul, its culture, and its aspirations, its soaring or its expanding, its progress, its destiny, its “sweetness and light,” is entitled to the least consideration. T. L.

14. Every one that exalteth himself will be abased by his own vanity, which blinds those whom it infects, and draws them into many errors and indiscretions pernicious to their worldly interests. He will be abased by men, who seldom miss any fair opportunity of humbling vainglorious persons. He will be abased in the sight of God, who abhors the proud; for pride of every kind is a direct offence against God: it is to forget, or practically to deny, that we receive everything from him. Jortin.

—He that humbleth himself shall be exalted. This great law of the kingdom of God is, in the teaching of Christ, inscribed over its entrance-gate. And in many different forms is it repeated. To be self-emptied, or “poor in spirit,” is the fundamental and indispensable preparation for the reception of the “grace which bringeth salvation:” wherever this exists, the “mourning” for it which precedes “comfort,” and the earnest “hungerings and thirstings after righteousness” which are rewarded by the “fulness” of it, will, as we see here, be surely found. Such therefore, and such only, are the justified ones. B.

He “went down to his house justified,” with a sweet sense of a received forgiveness shed abroad upon his heart; for God’s justification of the sinner is indeed a transitive act, and passes from him to its object. The other meanwhile went down from the temple, his prayer being finished, with the same cold, dead heart with which he had gone up. The whole parable fitly concludes with that weighty saying, which had already formed part of another of the Lord’s discourses, and which, indeed, from the all-important truth which it contains, might well have been often uttered: “For every one that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted;” words which here form a beautiful transition to the bringing of the children to Jesus, the incident next recorded by this Evangelist. T.

Section 111.—Divorce and Marriage. Little Children blessed.

Perea.