Two Men Went Up to Pray

Self-righteousness is the hardest sin to feel, because it comes disguised as its opposite — as gratitude, as diligence, as simply being one of the responsible ones. It can even sound like prayer. It is the one sin that feels most at home in a religious heart.

So Jesus tells a parable "to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt" (Luke 18:9). Tim Keller notes that those two things are one root system — the confidence that trusts its own record and the contempt that looks down on everyone else's grow from the same soil.[1] Two men go up to the temple. The Pharisee is no cartoon hypocrite; he really does fast and tithe and steer clear of gross sin. But his prayer is an inventory: "God, I thank you that I am not like other men... or even like this tax collector" (Luke 18:11) — a prayer that opens by addressing God and closes by measuring a neighbor. The tax collector, a man who really has sold out his own people for Rome's coin, "standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!'" (Luke 18:13).

His cry is barer than our translations let on. "Be merciful" is, more literally, be propitiated toward me — the language of the altar, of blood carried to the mercy seat. He does not ask to be graded on a curve; he asks God to deal with his sin the only way sin can be dealt with. And Jesus hands down the verdict that turns the room over: "this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other" (Luke 18:14). The man who came with a full ledger went home empty; the man who came with empty hands went home righteous.

What the tax collector begged for, Jesus came to be. The parable is told by the very one who would become the propitiation the man reached for — "whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith" (Romans 3:25) — so that the plea 'be merciful to me' now has an answer with a name and a wounded body. The Pharisee's error was not the fasting or the tithing; it was that he leaned his whole weight on them. Paul knew that Pharisee from the inside — "as to righteousness under the law, blameless" (Philippians 3:6) — and came to count the whole résumé as loss, longing instead to "be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own" (Philippians 3:9). The tax collector had nothing to lean on but mercy, and mercy held. On the cross the only truly righteous man was numbered with sinners, so that self-confessed sinners could be sent home wearing a righteousness they had not spun for themselves.

Two prayers, one temple, and only one man walked out lighter than he came in. The gospel's odd arithmetic has not changed: it is the empty hand that goes home full. We can pray the Pharisee's prayer in a hundred quiet dialects, or we can pray the other one — stop keeping the inventory, beat our breast, and find that mercy was made long ago, and is still, this morning, sending sinners home justified.

[1] Tim Keller, "The Pharisee and the Tax Collector," sermon, Gospel in Life.