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Reign of Christ
20/11/2022

Colossians 1:11-20
Psalm 46
Luke 23:33-43

In a sentence:
Patience is finding life in the midst of life

Conventional wisdom has it that “patience is a virtue”. As often as not, this is declared by the person on whom we are waiting, and so the saying generally serves as a way of trying to keep us at a distance until our time, or turn, comes.

In our reading from Colossians this morning, Paul prays for two things for the Colossian believers: that they might be made strong with the strength that comes from God’s own power, and that they might be “prepared to endure everything in patience”. These are really not two things but one, and we’ll look at them together by focussing on patience.

Patience is a certain kind of waiting, the bearing of suffering or some other deprivation or difficulty. We don’t have to be patient. Despair is a way of enduring which knows no hope – no end to whatever afflicts us. Despair anticipates no resolution and the ethic of despair is sheer endurance. But few people can live this way; we’re more likely to opt for the less debilitating resignation, which is marginally happier. Resignation tolerates suffering and deprivation as a strategy of least resistance. At best, it will be a brave acceptance of what cannot be changed, a stoic keeping-at-a-distance of loss or suffering. A third response to suffering or deprivation is impatience – a refusal to accept suffering by exercising power to bring about a change. Impatience powers-through, if it has the resources, either in a DIY way or by haranguing others.

Why, of the various responses to difficulty, does Paul propose patience?

The key here is in recognising that patience is not simply endurance, and so not really like despair or resignation at all. Patience is a reconciliation with the timeliness (the temporality) of our lives. This is more than accepting that we need to wait out whatever is wrong. The timeliness of our lives is not in counting the ticking of clocks but rather in the fact that our lives are not “immediate”.

In our common talk, when something is immediate, it happens now: I want it done, and done immediately! The modern world is increasingly immediate in the sense that things happen faster: faster calculations, faster travel, faster service delivery, and so on. There is the more trivial sense of immediacy – quickness, without intervening time.

Broken down to its roots, however, the word “immediate” means, “without mediation”. Something is immediate in this sense when neither time nor anything else stands between us and what we desire. The “middle” drops out. We no longer order a book from a local store, which store then orders it from overseas; we can go direct to the supplier ourselves. We can – if we’re lucky! – find a life companion directly online without the hard work of lurking in this or that place, joining a social group, discovering who might be nearby and interested and available. We can find a spare part or the next piece in our collection without driving across the city or the country looking for it. Impatiently desiring Faster and Easier is not only about the immediate as instantaneous. It is also about the immediate as “without a middle”, without someone or something between us and our goal, perhaps even standing in the way.

By contrast, patience has discovered something which matters in the “not-immediate” (to put it clumsily) or, more positively, in what is mediated. After Paul speaks of patience in our passage this morning, he moves straight on to an account of God’s work in Christ: “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Most importantly, this healing work does not take place “immediately” – instantly or without something between the origin and the goal. This is a mediating kingdom, a mediated relationship to God, and to everything. Christ stands in the middle between God and us. There is no immediate, direct link between us and God; time, space, and spaced-timed bodies are part of what it means to connect to this God.

Impatience is about immediacy; patience has come to terms with the mediated nature of our existence as creatures of this particular God. There is an unavoidable middle between us and what we truly need. But being unavoidable, it is necessary. And so patience experiences time and all that is in it as itself the stuff of life. “What we truly need”, then, is not just where patience might lead us but also the messy middle between here and there. Time and the persons and things which seem to be in the way between us and our desires are just what God uses to make us, to redefine and fulfil those desires. What God finally makes is the Body of Christ – a community of people learning to be patient with each other.

Patience is a virtue not because it is convenient for the person we are waiting on but because we too easily experience time as quite other than filled with divine possibilities between us and where we think we are going. In fact, having to wait seems increasingly to be creating a hatred of time and those who fill it, whether it be sitting in traffic, waiting 10 extra seconds for a slow internet download, standing in a supermarket queue or “having” to pause to eat in the midst of a busy day. We struggle with the passage of time and what fills it because it seems to be empty time: wasted time simply to be endured, time for resenting others because they are holding us up and, of course, time for being resented by them in return. Patience is not waiting; it is allowing that God takes time. God takes time, and makes of it life for the time‑d.

Patience is not a dry agonising endurance of time or of each other. True patience reflects God’s patience with the world – God’s making use of our time. Patience does not simply endure but takes what fills our time to be a rich field sown with the stuff of life.

Patience is then not an emergency plan for a situation in which something has gone awry. It is about the simple, God-blessed fact that we are situated – “sited” – in time, in relation to others.

Patience is being reconciled to being the kind of embodied, time-set creatures we actually are. We are not to be patient because the circumstances might require it; patience is all there is. To be reconciled to God and to each other is to be patient.

Paul prays for patience so that we might discover that even time which looks empty is God’s own time. God has been patient, has “endured” time, has become broken flesh in Christ, and so made time God’s own, the place God is content to be. If God is content to be here, to be patient is to claim this time as be truly our own, the place where we are content to be.

To be patient is, then, to be conformed to God’s own way of being and doing. To be patient is to be our true selves: the “image” of God.

By the grace of God, then, may the virtue of patience, with the strength it gives to redeem our time, be ever more fully ours, to our fuller humanity and (what is the same thing) to God’s greater glory. Amen.

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Pentecost 23
13/11/2022

Isaiah 65:17-25
Psalm 126
Luke 21:5-9

In a sentence:
The heaven we need and live towards is our here and now

When the question is heard in our house, “Can you tell me a story?”, the following little tale is sometimes told:

Once upon a time, there was a spider who wanted to spin a web.
But she couldn’t. So she died frustrated.

(End of story).

These days that story is re-told either to be annoying or in mockery of my story-composing skills. But it wasn’t until I read closely our text this morning from Isaiah that I realised the theological significance of that frustrated spider.

Isaiah 65 tells of the coming creation of new heavens and a new earth. It’s difficult to hear this without hearing its much later echo in the book of Revelation 21, but we must try to filter that out for at least a moment. Revelation is a thoroughgoing apocalyptic text, but even late Isaiah is too early for apocalyptic ideas. In particular, unlike in Revelation, Isaiah’s vision has no promise of resurrection.

Isaiah’s vision of heaven, then, has no “eternal life”:

No more shall there be … an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. (65.20)

What is promised is not eternal life but enough life. This is because, for the Hebrew mind, the problem is not death but dying frustrated. In the restored creation,

[t]hey shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD – and their descendants as well. (65.21-23)

The new heavens and earth signify, “They shall not labour in vain”. The problem to which Isaiah’s vision is an answer is vanity of purpose, thwarted intentions, not enjoying the fruits of our labour. Heaven is the opposite of this, Isaiah says: no more “dying frustrated”. The death which remains in this vision of restoration is now a “good” death after a life that proved to be worthwhile. Un‑fulfilment is the problem; fulfilment is the correction. Isaiah’s heaven needs no eternal life because one fulfilled life is life enough.

A heaven without eternity is a confronting thought for those of us accustomed to speaking of never-ending life. In truth, we don’t think much about eternity. But what do we imagine we would do in a “forever” heaven? “Forever” is what we usually associate with boredom; to say that the sermon went on “forever” is to say that it was not, in even the remotest sense, an experience of heaven! Heaven-as-forever might be somewhat less than we hope for.

But it gets worse. In Isaiah’s vision, not everyone gets to heaven, even the worthy! “I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy”, declares God, meaning that it’s not here yet. It will be the case that some listening will not see it, perhaps even all of them, because Isaiah has no resurrection to carry them there.

And so a surprising thing emerges: Isaiah’s first hearers both rejoice that this restoration of the heavens and the earth is coming, and know that they will not see it. They look forward to the coming of what they will not see. For Isaiah and those who first hear him, it is heaven enough to know that Jerusalem will be restored, without having to be part of that restoration. Faith here is not that I will experience the good thing but that someone will. For Isaiah, not I but the Jerusalem-to-come will know the new heavens and new earth – a new Jerusalem in which I may not get to live.

This is about as un-individualistic an idea of faith and salvation as we could imagine – that the promise of heaven could be for me a life-giving promise even when I don’t expect to experience it. I rejoice and take heart that God’s salvation will be experienced by someone else.

If we are surprised by this, we will also be surprised to hear that precisely this understanding of the promise of heaven is at the heart of Christian confession and life. Christian faith begins not with the idea that I might get to heaven – something often mocked by non-believers. Christian faith begins with the idea that Jesus “gets to” heaven. Christian confession simply displaces Isaiah’s Jerusalem with the crucified Jesus. It is Jesus’ life which is frustrated by being cut short. He doesn’t see the fruit of his work but dies too early, and all he built is thrown to the wind. Good Friday is what Isaiah describes: houses built, vineyards planted, children born – but all in vain. In the death of Jesus is caught up all frustration of human work and intention. The cross is exactly non-heaven, exactly the frustrated, disordered world. But to speak of the resurrection of Jesus is to say of him what Isaiah said of Jerusalem. It doesn’t overturn pointlessness and thwarted goodness in happy consolation for Jesus but rather says that his thwarted life was enough, that the frustrated life he lived from his vision of heaven was enough.

This is more than a clever theological trick, tying Isaiah’s earthy salvation to what we’ve learned to be the “more” heavenly Christian salvation with its overtones of resurrection and eternity. But the point is that faith doesn’t leave the earthiness behind with a dose of resurrection and comforting notions of eternal life for everyone. If Jesus is Lord now – is now the sign of God’s kingdom – he was also the presence of God’s kingdom before the crucifixion, in his seemingly frustrated life and work.

Consider what it is like for us to believe here and now. We live not in the glorious heights of heaven but on the plain of frustration. Perhaps we “believe” in heaven, but all this can really mean is that we believe that Jesus is restored, that he is in heaven. This is the only angle on heaven we have, apart from sentimental and wishful thinking which proposes a heaven as some kind of retirement payout. We might hope that we join Jesus in heaven but this is precisely the point: we hope. And what do we hope? We hope first and foremost not that we might get to heaven, but that Jesus is there. Because if he is not there – if someone is not saved – then no one is, and we have no idea what we hope for. Our hope is that Jesus’ thwarted life was enough, because then our thwarted lives might be enough, too.

This is to say that an overgrown hope in heaven to come threatens to deny the real possibility of life here and now. There are some who expect heaven to come as a consolation for a frustrated life. And there are some who find solace in that, though they might not see heaven, it is nonetheless real and they will live here and now in view of that reality. There is a world of difference – even a heaven of difference! – between these two mindsets. Heaven as reward or consolation makes what I do and experience here and now less important than the coming life of heaven itself. I live now for the coming heaven in which I’ll really live, rather than living to live here and now. This is because the heaven I look forward to makes me think that this present world is not the real thing. I’ll be good for heaven’s sake rather than for goodness’ own sake. I’ll “wait” for heaven, and get on with things when it comes. This is not just a frustrated life but a procrastinated one.

But, against this, the real heaven I might not see requires me to start living here and now, because there is no other life to which I can put things off. I must live as if there were no heaven to come, as if the promise of heaven were as close as I’ll ever get to experiencing it, apart from getting on with a heaven-shaped life here and now.

This is to say that we might need to set aside our infatuation with a heaven to come – for our own sake, for our neighbour’s sake and for God’s sake. We pray, of course, for the coming of God’s kingdom, “on earth, as in heaven”. But we do this knowing that the coming of God’s kingdom is the gift in the Incarnation, and the gift in the Eucharist, and the gift in the promised presence to us of Christ in our neighbour. It is into our Now that the kingdom comes, and heaven is possible.

Lift up your hearts, Isaiah says to his people. God will come.

Lift up your hearts, we hear each week: God has come, and made dwelling among us, and comes and comes and comes again in glimpses of heaven in the lives of the saints and those who don’t yet know they are saints.

We gather as those learning what the kingdom looks like, learning that we might be saints, and so learning how to become God’s kingdom here and now.

So, Sleepers, awake.

Lift up your hearts.

Live.

Become the coming of God.

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All Saints
6/11/2022

Ephesians 1:11-19
Psalm 149
Luke 6:20-31

In a sentence:
The one crisis (judgement) in faith is the cross of Christ, by which God judges all human judgement to make straight our way to him

To speak of “All Saints” is to speak of an identity – of knowing who we are or, at least, who the saints are! But this is more than a label. Who we are has to do with where we are, who we are with, and what we do. Identity has to do with a situation, a condition. What, then, is the human situation and the condition of the saints?

In the last week, the little owner of the sweetest singing voice in our house was heard to chime the following chorus,

“you’ve got to get yourself together,
you’ve got stuck in a moment,
and now you can’t get out it” (U2, “Stuck in a moment”).

(Mine is not the sweetest singing voice in the house!).

“Stuck in a moment”. This week the lexicologists at the Collins Dictionary announced their word of the year: permacrisis. I hadn’t heard that word until I read the announcement. Yet I knew straightaway what it meant – “an extended period of instability and insecurity – and I felt how appropriate a choice it was. The crises to which permacrisis points are, of course, very close to us all. Any one of the pandemic, Ukraine, #MeToo, inflation, floods, and heat waves would be crisis enough on top of the usual crises of family, work, and health. But laid one over the other, things are feeling fever-pitched. We might hope it’s a passing phase, except that I was struck by a comment in something else I read during the week, which remarked upon “the complex of modernity in which life knows itself to be at the mercy of a continuum of crisis” (Peter Sloterdijk). While that also seems to characterise today’s experience well, it was written 40 years ago. If the commentator is correct, the problem is not the world in the early 2020s but a deeply rooted cultural experience: being stuck in a milieu that we “can’t get out of”.

In all of this, the crisis of permacrisis is an instability to which we must constantly respond – “perma” wars and rumours of wars. The world is continually upset as things refuse to stay where we put them, and we want desperately to put them back again if we can.

What does faith say here? The Bible knows crisis, yet it differs from the crises we know. Our word “crisis” comes, letter-for-letter, from a Greek word which, in the New Testament, is typically translated as “judgement”:

And this is the judgment [crisis], that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil (John 3.19)

The Father judges [crisis-es] no one but has given all judgment [crisis] to the Son (John 5.22)

The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment [crisis]with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here! (Luke 11.32)

This is evidence of the righteous judgment [crisis] of God, and is intended to make you worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering (2 Thessalonians 1.5)

That is, a biblical “crisis” is not accidental but something intended, something God brings. The crises taking place around us are occasional – natural disasters or things we have done to each other that cause the world to go to smash. Biblical crises are deliberate interpretations of natural and historical conditions and crises; it is God who is smashing stuff. By themselves, natural and historical crises are things to be “coped with” and managed – occasions for getting ourselves together. Biblical crises reveal: “this is the crisis, this is the judgement, this is the setting right”. We don’t “cope with” crises like this; we live with them as a given condition.

Such a crisis is folded into our Gospel reading today – Luke 6.20-31. Blessed are the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those reviled for Jesus’ sake. Woe to the rich, the full, the comfortable, and the well-reputed. This crisis-inducing judgement upsets the world, for now, we might wonder anxiously, Am we among the blessed or the cursed? The crisis is not, “How can we hold it all together?” but “When it all finally falls apart, where will we be found?” Luke, of course, is too simplistic here, in the way of the old prophets. God doesn’t do nuance, and so we can’t let ourselves off the hook too easily. To come to church and hear such a text is to have yet another extra crisis to “cope with” if we are to make ourselves safe, now from God.

This reveals the depth of the human situation, what we are really stuck in – not just our engrossing crises but the requirement for constant decision and assertion of ourselves in the face of the world, of other people and of God. This is our permacrisis: we are required to be the sufferers, the judges and the setters-right of ourselves in the world.

In our reading from Ephesians this morning, we heard of another crisis, much less explicit but real nonetheless. Here the crisis (the judgement) is, “I, God, know who you are…You are mine.” You – the saints of God – are “destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will” (1.11). This, in a wholly (and holy) new way, is the permacrisis of the gospel, the permanent judgement of the gospel. There is only one judgement, one moment of decision – that moment in which all judgements are collapsed into Jesus, and we are collapsed into him with them. This judgement is given that we might “hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory” (1.12). The “praise of this glory” is not an orientation out of this crisis-plagued world, for the glory of Jesus is the cross, which God makes the crisis of crises, the judgement of judgement. In the cross, the rich one is made poor so that the poor might be made rich through judged judgement. Luke, with his inversion of the status of the rich and the poor, says to us that we don’t know ourselves: we judge each other wrongly, anxiously, exclusively and violently: crisis leading to crisis, judgement to judgement.

Against this, the gospel is that there is one judgement which matters – the judgement of all judgement which makes human life once more a gift and no longer an anxious work of self-justification. While we are so accustomed to self-knowledge and self-determination through self-judgement, we have in God a new witness to who we are. If, distracted by the crises, we forget God, God does not forget us. In the crisis of crises is found the life of the people of God. This is the moment we want to get stuck in: the permacrisis which is the gift of life, and which sets all other crises in perspective.

This is the crisis which would make saints of us and not just of us, but of the whole world.

To be such saints as this is to live as though all deathly judgement is behind us, and before us is only life.

Let us, then, live as saints: bearers of crisis-dissolving grace from God to each other and the world. And then we might see that the moment we are stuck in is nothing less than the coming of God’s kingdom.

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Pentecost 21
30/10/2022

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

This story must be one of the most vivid, and memorable stories in the Gospels.  Children love it and remember it, Sunday School plays used to be made of it and we could all happily believe it is just a tale, a diversion from the serious stuff in the Gospel. The reality is that it is a meticulously formed story in Luke’s carefully constructed two-volume proclamation of God’s plan for humankind in Jesus.

So I thought we’d examine the text in a bible study this morning and perhaps discover more than we did when we were young. The verses are all set out in your service sheet.

The trouble with lectionaries is that they chop a biblical book into small chunks, and place them alongside three others which may well also have the gospel we need to hear for the day. We regularly lose our place in the stories. So let’s begin by stepping back and seeing where today’s chunk fits.

Today’s story has its beginning back as far as chapter 9, when, after the transfiguration, Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem. Jericho is the last stop on that line, 20 km to go. But Luke has been theologically leading his readers on this journey too. At the end of the last chapter (18), he gives us (v.31-) the third prediction of Jesus’s passion, three sounding gongs in his narrative about what will happen in Jerusalem, and how it will be the fulfilment of prophecy regarding Jesus.

Jesus is not just walking by himself; he is part of a great crowd ‘going up’ to the Holy City for the Passover festival.  As they approached Jericho, he meets a blind beggar who calls out to ‘Jesus, Son of David’ and when asked what he wants he says, ‘I want my sight back’ and he receives it, instantly. And all present praise God for it.

So, let’s now follow the text in my favourite translation, from the Revised English Bible, which replaced the NEB in 1989.

1 Entering Jericho Jesus made his way through the city.

2 There was a man there named Zacchaeus; he was superintendent of taxes and very rich.

All we need to know about Zacchaeus in one line! Older translations say he was a ‘Chief Tax Collector’, the only such one mentioned in the NT. He is in charge of other tax collectors (‘superintendent’) and will have added to his income from them. In short, he belonged to the most despised section of Jewish society.

3 He was eager to see what Jesus looked like; but, being a little man, he could not see him for the crowd.

‘See’ in the sense of wanting to observe this man, not to consult him.  But there is one more fact: Zacchaeus was ‘of small stature’ [helikia mikros] and couldn’t see for all the regular-sized folk in front.

4 So he ran on ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see him, for he was to pass that way.

Sycamore trees are good for climbing: they have a sturdy trunk and spreading branches, but they also have abundant foliage. Peter’s graphic looks right!

5 When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said, ‘Zacchaeus, be quick and come down, for I must stay at your house today.’

Leafy or not, Jesus spied him, almost as if he expected to see him. Jesus already knew his name. Notice that Jesus says he ‘must’ stay with him – not just for a meal, but for a B&B on the journey to Jerusalem too. There is a sense that the Abba God compels him to stay.

The crowd would have spotted him. He will have been conspicuously well-dressed, and the sight of him shimmying up a tree invited sniggers. He may have hoped to ‘see’ Jesus, slither down and vanish unseen. Not likely.

6 He climbed down as quickly as he could and welcomed him gladly.

Both verses 5 and 6 speak of ‘hurry’, ’quickly’, which is intended to highlight the urgency of Jesus’ summons and of Zacchaeus’s obedience. (We might remember the haste of another rich man in robes, running to greet his prodigal son. That too was undignified and unexpected.) Zacchaeus’ welcome of Jesus hardly suggests reluctance.

7 At this there was a general murmur of disapproval. ‘He has gone in to be a guest of a sinner,’ they said.

Suddenly the mood changes and the fickle crowd turns on Jesus and this is not the only time we hear this criticism. Jesus (in Luke) is often in the company of ‘tax collectors and sinners.’  It is part of Jesus’ divine mandate to sit with sinners.  Such actions belong in the kingdom which is breaking in.

8 But Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, ‘Here and now, sir, I give half my possessions to charity; and if I have defrauded anyone, I will repay him four times over.’

However successfully he descended from the tree, Zacchaeus doesn’t care. He ‘stood there’, calm and composed before his critics. And his first words are what the NT calls ‘fruits worthy of repentance’ – though there is no other sign of his penitence. He is, from that moment, giving half of all his goods to the poor and a four-fold restoration to those he has defrauded. Now, the degrees of compensation are laid down in Jewish law (it’s all there in Leviticus 6: 1-5): Zacchaeus’ offer exceeds the legal requirement. He chooses to relinquish his very profession and embraces a considerable drop in economic status. By contrast, in the previous chapter (Lk 18: 22-24), we have just heard of a rich young ruler who sadly turned away from the kingdom because of his great wealth.

9 Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house – for this man too is a son of Abraham.

It would be possible to describe Luke’s Gospel as dedicated to showing the restoration of all the children of Abraham to their rightful relationships. Abraham’s children have been scattered, exiled, lost in biblical history; in Luke they are being gathered in once again, not least women and children – and even Gentiles. Compassion marks Luke’s Gospel.

Included are include the blind beggar (19:35f), the tax collector (!) praying alongside the Pharisee (18:8f) and earlier, the crippled woman in the synagogue who is healed on the sabbath day, who is called ‘a daughter of Abraham’ (13:10f). Zacchaeus has demonstrated that he has come home.

Two notes to end on.

Jesus says ‘salvation has come to this house’ and it’s worth remembering that Zacchaeus’ ‘house’ now includes all those who have suffered by him, but also his family and his slaves. Zacchaeus continues to be their guardian and benefactor, in a very different spirit – as kin under the God of Abraham, through Jesus.

And ‘salvation’ may begin here with one man’s conversion, but it has personal, domestic, social and economic dimensions. The biblical word can be translated as ‘made well’ or ‘healed’. The whole of life is embraced by Jesus’ ministry, and all who follow him have a foretaste of the coming reign of God.

The meeting of this little man with the very Word of God incarnate is not a diverting tale in a larger story: it is the larger story.

10 The Son of Man has come to seek and to save what is lost.’

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Pentecost 20
23/10/2022

Joel 2:23-27
Psalm 65
Luke 18:9-14

In a sentence:
Humility overcomes hard righteousness to bring
reconciliation for all

The obvious lesson from our Gospel reading this morning is, Don’t be the Pharisee: “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” This presumes, of course, that we all want to be exalted, at least a little bit!

This reading works even for those not really sold on the whole God thing. We value humility and have little time for self-righteous posturing. Not taking ourselves too seriously is appreciated by others, and so is a helpful rule of engagement as we move through daily life. Here endeth the lesson, then – at least the obvious, moral lesson – and a good one to learn.

But let us look to see what might be less obvious here. While the two figures in Jesus’ little story are poles apart in terms of moral judgement, they have in common that each stands at his pole alone. I don’t know whether this is intentional in the original telling of the story, but I’m going to make quite a bit of it in what follows! The Pharisee is a self-made man. It is “standing by himself” that he declares his judgement on himself and the other. He needs no other, because this is the meaning of self-righteousness: righteousness by virtue of what I am or have done, perhaps against great odds, with reference only to the truth I perceive and not to others and their truths. The unexpected and usually unobserved effect of self-righteousness is that such a person ultimately stands alone in the world they have created, which does not require and so finally does not admit others. The heaven of the self-righteous has a population of just one. My presumption to be able to perceive the unrighteousness of all others excludes them. Judging and rejecting others has no end and, finally, I am alone.

The experience of the tax collector is the aloneness of being rejected. We don’t know why he considers himself unworthy before God but we can take him at his word that he is, for whatever reason, morally (or otherwise) unworthy. If the Pharisee is a self-made man, this tax collector is a self-unmade one. This is the moral reading of their different experiences.

But the important point is not the difference of their moral achievements but the similarity of the effect of those achievements: both men stand alone. Both have isolated themselves. This sameness makes possible a new perception of their difference. No longer is this difference in taheir moral performance; it is in their perception of their being alone. For the Pharisee, aloneness is a virtue to be celebrated, for which he even thanks God. Or, more precisely, the Pharisee doesn’t see the aloneness but only his isolating righteousness. The Pharisee doesn’t know his condition. And so he also mistakes the condition of the tax collector. The Pharisee sees the other’s sin but not the other’s aloneness. The Pharisee, then, doesn’t see how he and the tax collector are the same.

While the Pharisee celebrates his righteousness and the alone‑ing it brings, for the tax collector, aloneness is a devastating affliction he desperately wants to escape. Recognising his problem, he seeks relief by the only means available – the appeal for mercy. And so the one whom the Pharisee’s moral, alienating righteousness holds in contempt now finds true, reconciling righteousness.

Hoping that this much has made sense, now for something less sensible. All this makes possible what is, on most grounds, an untenable assertion but one we must nonetheless make. If the tax collector is alienated by hard righteousness and is restored to life by God before the one who rejected him, then the tax collector is Jesus himself. It was the righteousness of the Pharisees, priests and scribes which cast Jesus out – which “alone‑d him” – in crucifixion. Easter Saturday becomes the prayer for mercy – a strangely unvoiced prayer of the dead – and the resurrection becomes God’s healing insistence on life not only for himself but for those who rejected him in Jesus. The tax collector’s prayer is not for himself only.

Notice how far we are here from the mere morality of arrogance and humility as personal attributes we might or might not possess and which we eulogise or lament in others. Humility is now nothing like a meek mildness but the opposite of the hard righteousness which divides and alienates us from each other and even from ourselves. Humility becomes the possibility of connection, reconciliation, and so of the creation of something which wasn’t there before. The truly humble do not slip quietly into the background. The truly humble are the means by which the world is made whole again. The tax collector’s prayer is not for himself only.

This is, perhaps, an appealing exaltation of the humble. But there is some bad news here. Such justification as the tax collector received that day in the Temple didn’t change much. Things will be the same tomorrow as they are today. The Pharisee isn’t likely to have changed, nor most of the rest of us who are like him to varying degrees. Ours is a world of harsh alienating righteousness, increasingly pressing towards cynical contempt and contemptuous cynicism. This is not the rejection of righteousness but a relentless demand for it – a demand in and all around us.

In the face of this, prayer for reconciliation, and work toward it, are a struggle, something of which we see in the demeanour of the tax collector and in the crucifixion. There is nothing easy about a sinner’s prayer for mercy. Humility which is merely a mood or way of negotiating difficult circumstances cannot survive the “cost” of mercy. The humility which creates is difficult work. Without the conviction that things can be made out of nothing – the conviction that God will raise the dead – humility is something better seen in other people, a convenient pathology which makes our lives easier (if not theirs).

The humility of the tax collector, however – the humility of Jesus himself – recognises poverty and trusts that God can do something about it. Death and nothingness – the ultimate humiliations – are not barriers to life. And the humility which seeks mercy from God also seeks mercy in the world. To be humble in this way is not to be weak but to desire the smashing of the cold fetters of hard righteousness. This is not easy in a world like this one, in which the alienating righteousness of the Pharisee in Jesus’ story is part of what drives our society and its politics.

Cynicism and contempt are the fruit of an excluding righteousness, the application of some moral or political code against which the enemy measures up only very poorly. This contempt, however, is not a moral flaw in those who look about with contempt but a misreading of justice and righteousness, usually on all sides. Against this, Jesus summons us to what he calls elsewhere the righteousness which exceeds that of the Pharisee (Matthew 5.20). The righteousness of the Pharisee leads to a myriad of heavens with population one, from which we can hurl contemptuous abuse at others in their lonely heavens. But the righteousness of God is towards a single heaven bursting at the seams with Pharisees and tax collectors, Russian presidents (and American ones), rapacious colonists and displaced indigenes, billionaire entrepreneurs and gullible consumers, cynical politicians, sarcastic shock jocks, smug baby boomers, sanctimonious gossips and even Uniting Church ministers.  There they – we – all shall be, in a heaven pressed down and flowing over for the wantonness of unrighteous grace, of unrighteous mercy, of unrighteous forgiveness and of unrighteous reconciliation. With graced abandon, the unjust justice of God exceeds that weaponised righteousness with which we cut and divide so deeply.

Let us, then, not cheapen humility by mistaking it for niceness, and the call to humility as a nudge in the direction of not taking ourselves too seriously. Humility, at least that of Jesus the tax collector, testifies to God’s refusal of any final alienation and so to the power of God to reconcile.

Blessed are the humble – blessed are the peace-makers. They will be called the children of God because, like God’s first Son, their way of mercy and reconciliation grants a glimpse of what heaven looks like.

Humble yourselves, then, that God might exalt the whole world.