READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 4:1-15
1 Corinthians 15:1-10
- St. Luke 18:9-14
Grace to you all and Peace from God our Father and our Lord
Jesus, the Christ.
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His Church, saying:
With this, Jesus introduces us to the Pharisees, a biblical word that is well known and overused. But they are given as examples for us, for God says, “you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach” (Mt 23:3). So what do they preach and what do they practice that earned them un-justification in today’s Gospel, even with this apparent endorsement from Jesus?
The real lesson, in today’s Gospel, is mercy. Not just mercy on a global scale, but mercy on a small scale, as in “I will show mercy”, saith the Lord (Ex 33:19). If the Lord is merciful, then we should be merciful, that is, fighting for the Truth, His Church, and His forgiveness in a world full of the opposite. This mercy the Pharisee, in our Gospel reading, forgot.
Yet, that fight is how the Pharisees are actually the heroes of just before Jesus’s time. They fought the good fight. Where the world wanted to forget God and become sinful pagans, they fought for the Word. Moses and the prophets are theirs, for they believe their words are God’s words. The existence of Angels and demons, the resurrection and judgment on the last day, the necessity for preserving and keeping the Law, and even waiting for the coming of a Messiah are all treasured beliefs, with which we agree.
And when the Greeks and the Romans came, conquering and threatening religious and civil life, it was the Pharisees who stood up and became vassals of those states, securing an appointed, intermediary role between their people and Rome. All they did was for the good of the people and for God. If not for them, their religion would have ceased to exist, allegedly.
Thus, among them come some heroes of Christianity: Nicodemus, Gamaliel, Nathaniel, most probably Simon of Cyrene, the apostle Paul, and even the historian Josephus were or had been Pharisees at some point. Now maybe you can understand why Jesus said, “Your righteousness must exceed the scribes and the Pharisees” (Mt 5:20), back on the 6th Sunday after Trinity.
With this example, the Christian in this world then, must be a defender of truth. The marriage of one man and one woman is the truth, not divorce or polygamy or any other deviation. Defending the dignity of women, not promoting pornography. Protecting children and raising them in truth, not pawning them off to others. Living with honor, high morality, and virtue.
This is what the Pharisees fought for, this is what Jesus proclaimed.
When exactly was it in our lives, that we traded honor for gaslighting, high morality for tolerance, and virtue for vice? When was it that we thought, “Cain wasn’t so bad, just misunderstood”? Or, “I can get by with my sins, God will have to forgive me in the end.”
“You hypocrites!”, says our Lord in Luke 12:56, “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” Do you not know that this day your soul is required of you? Do you want this to be the Day the Lord Returns and finds you, doing what, not what you are supposed?
Dear Christians, do not be proud of what you have made of yourself. Be thankful. Thankful that you have been passed over, thankful you have a Mediator, thankful there is Mercy.
Be like your heroes, the Pharisees. For, what did all the true Pharisees, in Jesus’s time, do? They listened to Proverbs 9:8, “Do not correct a scoffer, lest he hate you; Rebuke a wise man, and he will love you” and converted. Do not correct a hypocrite, but rebuke a Pharisee.
And what is rebuke, but teaching and preaching the truth. Show truth to a Pharisee and he will love and believe and be saved. “I am the Truth”, says Jesus and that is what He showed them.
We hear from Isaiah 30:18, “Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you; therefore He will rise up to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him”.
Wait for Grace to come upon you. Not just grace to hallow God’s Name, do God’s will, or let His Kingdom come in your own fashion. But wait for Grace and mercy to act in the flesh, on His own.
Thus, a true Pharisee converts from his Old Testament hypocrisy, to New Testament forgiveness when Jesus suffers and dies to institute the New Covenant promised by their prophets. That is, “the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jer 31:31-34)
Know the Lord? No. We all already do.
Believe the Lord. Believe that He has come in the flesh. Believe that He has come in Mercy. Believe that He is Grace, mediating between God and man for the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of all works.
For it was according to the Scriptures, our Epistle teaches, that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and raised on the third day. Not so that we could self-justify our actions, but that we could find healing in His wounds and mercy in His Body and Blood.
Since the true Pharisees are all Christian now, what we are left with are hypocrites. Hypocrites who not only trade God’s Word for man-made laws, but who trade the Lord’s Christ for man-made religion. They trade communion for lording it over others. They trade humility for the best seats in the house. They trade service for worldly honor.
But, Service is God’s business. When you trade that away, you lose. You cannot out-serve God. You can follow His example and mimic Him, but your service is in His shadow, in His wounds. First God serves, first God is wounded for your transgressions, first God is humbled on the cross, then, in His exaltation, you are exalted.
Not your service to Him, but His to you. There’s the lesson from the Pharisee, or hypocrite, and the Tax Collector. The Hypocrite relied on himself and declared himself the winner before the end. The Tax Collector relied on “not-himself”, “anything but himself”, because he knew that Jesus had come to seek and save the Lost. He believed that Jesus had come to give His Body and shed His Blood that he would live.
For the Voice is in the Blood, as Genesis 4 taught us today. The Blood cries out, not for vengeance, but for mercy. The God Who Justifies is the God Who bleeds for His creatures.
So the word and judgement we should be concerned with is hypocrite, not Pharisee. “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy”, says Jesus in Luke 12, “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops” (Lk 12:1-3).
That leaven we know is evil and malice toward our neighbor and toward God (1 Cor 5:8). Toward God Who, in our days, speaks to us through His Word alone and manifests His Glory and His Mercy in cross and Sacrament. The malice satan has is the malice of the hypocrite. They want to be like God, but they don’t want to do it God’s way.
The remedy to hypocrisy is humility. Humility towards God’s Will and actions. Not “thank you Lord for making me, me”, but “thank you for granting Your Holy Spirit through Your Word alone”. Not “thank you Lord it could always be worse”, but “thank you for uniting me to You in baptism”, “thank You for making me a part of Your Body in Communion”.
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His Church, saying:
“The Pharisee,
standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other
men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”
With this, Jesus introduces us to the Pharisees, a biblical word that is well known and overused. But they are given as examples for us, for God says, “you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach” (Mt 23:3). So what do they preach and what do they practice that earned them un-justification in today’s Gospel, even with this apparent endorsement from Jesus?
The real lesson, in today’s Gospel, is mercy. Not just mercy on a global scale, but mercy on a small scale, as in “I will show mercy”, saith the Lord (Ex 33:19). If the Lord is merciful, then we should be merciful, that is, fighting for the Truth, His Church, and His forgiveness in a world full of the opposite. This mercy the Pharisee, in our Gospel reading, forgot.
Yet, that fight is how the Pharisees are actually the heroes of just before Jesus’s time. They fought the good fight. Where the world wanted to forget God and become sinful pagans, they fought for the Word. Moses and the prophets are theirs, for they believe their words are God’s words. The existence of Angels and demons, the resurrection and judgment on the last day, the necessity for preserving and keeping the Law, and even waiting for the coming of a Messiah are all treasured beliefs, with which we agree.
And when the Greeks and the Romans came, conquering and threatening religious and civil life, it was the Pharisees who stood up and became vassals of those states, securing an appointed, intermediary role between their people and Rome. All they did was for the good of the people and for God. If not for them, their religion would have ceased to exist, allegedly.
Thus, among them come some heroes of Christianity: Nicodemus, Gamaliel, Nathaniel, most probably Simon of Cyrene, the apostle Paul, and even the historian Josephus were or had been Pharisees at some point. Now maybe you can understand why Jesus said, “Your righteousness must exceed the scribes and the Pharisees” (Mt 5:20), back on the 6th Sunday after Trinity.
With this example, the Christian in this world then, must be a defender of truth. The marriage of one man and one woman is the truth, not divorce or polygamy or any other deviation. Defending the dignity of women, not promoting pornography. Protecting children and raising them in truth, not pawning them off to others. Living with honor, high morality, and virtue.
This is what the Pharisees fought for, this is what Jesus proclaimed.
When exactly was it in our lives, that we traded honor for gaslighting, high morality for tolerance, and virtue for vice? When was it that we thought, “Cain wasn’t so bad, just misunderstood”? Or, “I can get by with my sins, God will have to forgive me in the end.”
“You hypocrites!”, says our Lord in Luke 12:56, “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” Do you not know that this day your soul is required of you? Do you want this to be the Day the Lord Returns and finds you, doing what, not what you are supposed?
Dear Christians, do not be proud of what you have made of yourself. Be thankful. Thankful that you have been passed over, thankful you have a Mediator, thankful there is Mercy.
Be like your heroes, the Pharisees. For, what did all the true Pharisees, in Jesus’s time, do? They listened to Proverbs 9:8, “Do not correct a scoffer, lest he hate you; Rebuke a wise man, and he will love you” and converted. Do not correct a hypocrite, but rebuke a Pharisee.
And what is rebuke, but teaching and preaching the truth. Show truth to a Pharisee and he will love and believe and be saved. “I am the Truth”, says Jesus and that is what He showed them.
We hear from Isaiah 30:18, “Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you; therefore He will rise up to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him”.
Wait for Grace to come upon you. Not just grace to hallow God’s Name, do God’s will, or let His Kingdom come in your own fashion. But wait for Grace and mercy to act in the flesh, on His own.
Thus, a true Pharisee converts from his Old Testament hypocrisy, to New Testament forgiveness when Jesus suffers and dies to institute the New Covenant promised by their prophets. That is, “the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jer 31:31-34)
Know the Lord? No. We all already do.
Believe the Lord. Believe that He has come in the flesh. Believe that He has come in Mercy. Believe that He is Grace, mediating between God and man for the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of all works.
For it was according to the Scriptures, our Epistle teaches, that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and raised on the third day. Not so that we could self-justify our actions, but that we could find healing in His wounds and mercy in His Body and Blood.
Since the true Pharisees are all Christian now, what we are left with are hypocrites. Hypocrites who not only trade God’s Word for man-made laws, but who trade the Lord’s Christ for man-made religion. They trade communion for lording it over others. They trade humility for the best seats in the house. They trade service for worldly honor.
But, Service is God’s business. When you trade that away, you lose. You cannot out-serve God. You can follow His example and mimic Him, but your service is in His shadow, in His wounds. First God serves, first God is wounded for your transgressions, first God is humbled on the cross, then, in His exaltation, you are exalted.
Not your service to Him, but His to you. There’s the lesson from the Pharisee, or hypocrite, and the Tax Collector. The Hypocrite relied on himself and declared himself the winner before the end. The Tax Collector relied on “not-himself”, “anything but himself”, because he knew that Jesus had come to seek and save the Lost. He believed that Jesus had come to give His Body and shed His Blood that he would live.
For the Voice is in the Blood, as Genesis 4 taught us today. The Blood cries out, not for vengeance, but for mercy. The God Who Justifies is the God Who bleeds for His creatures.
So the word and judgement we should be concerned with is hypocrite, not Pharisee. “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy”, says Jesus in Luke 12, “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops” (Lk 12:1-3).
That leaven we know is evil and malice toward our neighbor and toward God (1 Cor 5:8). Toward God Who, in our days, speaks to us through His Word alone and manifests His Glory and His Mercy in cross and Sacrament. The malice satan has is the malice of the hypocrite. They want to be like God, but they don’t want to do it God’s way.
The remedy to hypocrisy is humility. Humility towards God’s Will and actions. Not “thank you Lord for making me, me”, but “thank you for granting Your Holy Spirit through Your Word alone”. Not “thank you Lord it could always be worse”, but “thank you for uniting me to You in baptism”, “thank You for making me a part of Your Body in Communion”.
