God's Accounting

Pentecost 20 Proper 25

October 23, 2022

Fr. Tim Nunez

I was never in the military but I have had a peek into it through our son Robert, who has just finished his 19th year in the U.S. Army as well as my brother, one sister and each of their spouses who were all in the Navy.

One aspect I’ve always admired about it is its focus on accountability. When a young man or woman enlists, for example in the Army, from day one they have what Rob calls his jacket. Everything they do in training, courses of study, field exercises and actual combat gets recorded and goes into their jacket. Awards and citations for merit, and if there were any trouble, it all goes in there.

That serves as the basis for promotions. That clarity of cause and effect, of being accountable for yourself and your role within your platoon and so forth is often a tremendous blessing to a young man or woman. There is a lot of positive reinforcement for achievement and motivation to avoid negative entries into your jacket.

Life holds that pattern for all of us, whether or not we work within a formal structure like that. We earn a living, earn trust, earn respect, earn appreciation, develop a reputation. The highlights of our life story may wind up in a resume, and eventually our obituary.

Do you see the snare that is always ready to catch us? We tend to own our achievements and actions, always tempted to neglect God’s sovereign lordship and role in all we are and do. That is why pride is not just one of the seven deadly sins, it is regarded as the worst one. C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:

“According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil:

Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind…… it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.”[1]

This isn’t the sort of pride which is mere satisfaction and happiness that you did well. It’s the pride of self. And it is so insidious. When we look at this parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, we are rightly repelled by the arrogance and self-aggrandizement of the Pharisee and attracted to the humility of the tax collector, despite the obvious disparity between their states of being.

The Pharisee has listened to his rector! He is praying. He tithes a tenth of his income. We are going to pass out pledge cards at the end of the service and mail them to those who are not here. Tithing a tenth of one’s income is the biblical standard. He’s right there. On top of that he fasts twice a week. I’ve never done that and I’ve never asked anyone to do that.

The tax collector is another story. He is, as we know, a collaborator with the occupying forces of Rome. Worse, recall that Roman coins had an image of Emperor Tiberius and proclaimed him as a god. This tax collector was up to his elbows in idolatry every day. Worse, they regularly used their position to extort money from the Jews. He is an idolatrous traitor and a thief.

But look at their hearts. The arrogance, the pride, of the Pharisee is to stand before God and proclaim his excellence, as though his behavior has obligated God in some way. “Look what I have done! My “jacket” is full! My resume is outstanding!”  He doesn’t appear to love God or his neighbor. Instead, he presumes to judge those thieves, rogues, adulterers and tax collectors. But who is their judge?

That’s perhaps the harder lesson here. We can all probably receive the caution about pride before God with sincere thanks. None of us want to be “that guy” or woman. But it is very easy, even natural, to look down on those we judge guilty of sins and crimes without giving any pause to what is going on in their hearts. This doesn’t have to do with consequences for sin or crime. It is about our hearts.

The tax collector has been living a sinful and notorious life, but his heart is full of contrition and repentance, begging for God’s mercy, which is where we ought to be. Jesus says that humility enables the man to be justified before God, which means that God’s judgment on him is good, favorable.

The truth is that we all have these capacities inside us. We will do good, we will be faithful and obedient - and we are susceptible to taking pride in our faithfulness, forgetting the ways in which we fall short of God. 

The heart Jesus describes and commands is evident in our passage from Paul’s second letter to Timothy.

From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing. (2 Timothy 4:8)

Paul is not presuming anything. He is well aware of his own flaws and challenges which he freely admits in his letters to explain the grace he has received. He is receiving the promise upon which he has built his whole life since meeting Jesus on the Road to Damascus, and which he knows if there for “…all who have longed for his appearing,” in other words, those who love Jesus.

But note the nature of the promise. It isn’t a promotion or a medal he has earned. It is life, life with him, life with Jesus that he knows will go on forever. Love is its own reward. Taking that long view of life with Jesus opens our hearts to love as freely as he does, suppressing our instinct to judge.

Jesus wants us to do the right things, yes. But he wants us do them with the right heart towards him, having met him or longing to meet him. He wants us to do them with the right heart towards his other children.

AMEN

[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster Touchstone edition, 1996), 109, 111