“The Merciful One Smitten For Thee”
Saint Luke 18: 9-14
11th Sunday after Trinity: 27 August Anno Domini 2017
Father Jay Watson SSP
If you trust in yourselves you will die and go to hell. The Lord loves you and does not want you to be damned. Jesus rescues you and wants you to stay rescued “in Him,” not lost in yourselves.
Do not delude yourselves. You are not righteous. And, sadly, you do despise others. Be forgiven in your Washing + of Regeneration. Have your guilt done away in the eating and drinking of He Who is Righteousness in The Flesh.
Jesus’ parable informs you of truth. Jesus teaches you about yourself and about Himself.
The two men are not cartoon caricatures of the good-guy and the bad-guy. The Pharisee was in fact a devoted reader of Holy Scripture. He cared about what Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, and the Psalmist had written. His mistake was that he trusted in Himself to keep Moses’ Law. For Him the Messiah was a life-coach or enabler, just like today’s sectarians who are meeting right now in their gymnasiums, worship centers, and lecture/pop concert multi-use auditoriums. Sin was not understood or grasped by him. If that Pharisee died in his delusion that because of his works of tithing, not committing armed robbery, and keeping himself from fornicating with women not his wife that he was right before God, he would go perdition. He is your own “old nature,” of which you repent of and beg Christ’s daily forgiveness. If you lift up your arms, do so in remembrance of He Who had his arms lifted up and nailed into the hard wood of your trespasses--“for you!” When you thank God in your daily prayers, thank Him that The Christ was self-abased and humiliated for your own self-justifications and faux, pompous, self-coronations.
The tax-collector represents you as well. Tax-collectors tended to be black-mailing and “skimming” thieves who used their Roman authority to line their own pockets. They were despised by pious and religious Jews. The tax-collector looked down in shame and contrition over his sins and struck his breast. His beating of his black heart was not done to demonstrate liturgical and rubrical niceties. His actions simply reflected outwardly what The Holy Spirit had produced inside him…true repentance. His prayer is your prayer…the Kyrie to Christ to have mercy upon you.
You need the Mercy of Jesus because most of the time you are not imitating this faithful tax-collector. As much as your inward New Man desires to be like Paul, to be like the Blessed Saints of heroic faith, you find yourselves apathetic, cowardly, mean-spirited and Pharisee-pompous. You are not saved or given Grace because you try really, really, extra-hard to be “like” the tax-collector. You are loved, forgiven, and anointed with Faith, Grace, and Peace, because Jesus is your tax-collector. Jesus is the one Who had His eyes downcast in suffering and death on the Cross. Jesus is the one that had His own sinless flesh smote repeatedly until finally His breast was cleaved open by the blade of badness which your daily sins come to fruition as.
There is only one righteous and that is The Son…the God/Man Christ Jesus.
By paying back all of the debt which your daily tax-collecting, i.e. sinning, has accumulated, your account is wiped clean of the blood of your neighbors whom you’ve slain. By abasing Himself with your obligations to love perfectly and your obligations to be humiliated in suffering and death, you are “in Christ” exalted to Him, in Him, by Him, to the right hand of The Father. You have been brought to this house justified in Christ’s Blood and Merit.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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