Pentecost 23 C: Luke 18: 9-14
One of my favourite films of all time is Chocolat. Set in a French village, just after the Second World War, the film centres around the character of Vianne, a woman who, with her daughter wanders the world following the north wind.
In sharp contrast to Vianne, is the mayor of the town - the Compte de Raynauld, a very proper religious man, who controls the village – ensuring that everyone maintains the proper decorum and religious observances.
Vianne and her daughter arrive in the Compte’s village at the start of Lent and set up a chocolaterie – offering warmth, love and hospitality to all who enter her shop.
Vianne’s customers include several characters who represent the broken and the suffering people of the town:
Josephine who is abused by her husband,
Armande, the grandmother, played by Judi Dench who has lost her relationship with her daughter and grandson and feels that her life now has no meaning.
The righteous townsfolk are caught in a bind: should they follow the proper religious observance, living by the rules of a godly life as upheld by the Compte de Reynauld, or ought they embrace the warmth, love and acceptance being offered to all by Vianne. We are invited, along with the townsfolk, to consider what it is that leads to a rich and fulfilling life. Ought we live like the Compte de Reynauld, or like Vianne?
I share this, because I think there are some interesting comparisons we could make between the film Chocolat and the parable that we’ve heard this morning.
In the parable, two men walk into a Synagogue to pray. A Pharisee, an upright leader of the Jewish religious elite and a tax collector, signifying the lowest, the most undesirable type in society. Both men begin to pray. The Pharisee walks to the front of the temple – you can imagine him addressing God in a loud, self-important voice saying: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’
In contrast, the tax collector stands up the back of the temple, trying to fit in with the brickwork. He would not even look up to heaven, but instead was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’
The Pharisee and the sinner in this parable are both extreme examples of human nature – they’re polar opposites. While I’m sure we can both identify people we’ve known who are like either one of them, or indeed we recognise them within ourselves from time to time, these characters are meant to illustrate the extremes of the human responses that are made to God.
The Pharisee has got it all together. He’s what we would call self-righteous. Notice that his own sense of self is predicated on how much better he is than ‘other people.’
Instead of grappling with our own identity or looking at ourselves, we too can focus on what makes us better than others. Such a stance means that to respect ourselves, we need to run others down. And, like the Pharisee, we sometimes like to tell God how much better we are than the sinners, trying to impress God with our religious CV’s: “I attend church meetings twice a week, volunteer at the local nursing home, give money to charity.” Or whatever. In short, like the Pharisee sees himself, sometimes we act as though we are so sure of ourselves that we have no need of God whatsoever.
The tax collector, in contrast is well aware of his shortcomings. He approaches God in all humility: “Have mercy on me, a sinner.” In doing so, the tax collector makes his reliance on God is clear. Because he knows he cannot enter into a relationship with God on his own account, the tax collector instead places himself at God’s mercy.
It’s important to pause for a minute to say something about sin. Sin is not about the ‘ bad things we do’ – likewise confession is not about listing these things so that we can have them struck off our list. Sin, in its most universal sense is simply the things, which separate us from God. We human beings are by our very nature are broken, sinful people. Sin, simply put, is the things we must put down, or let go of in order to return to right relationship with God.
We none of us – the Pharisee, the Compte de Reynauld from Chocolat, nor you nor me can ever ‘do enough’ to make ourselves right with God. It is in fact pointless to even try. Confessing our sin as the tax collector does then, is to accept the fact that the only way to enter into a relationship with God is on God’s terms: by accepting God’s gift of grace as it is offered to each of us – knowing that none of us is worthy of the gift in our own right.
This gift of grace, of hospitality to the outsider – to the broken and forsaken sinner, is most clearly visible in Luke’s account of Christ’s death on the cross. In Luke’s version of the crucifixion, Jesus is caught up in a conversation with the two criminals who are being crucified with him, one on either side. There is no question of the guilt of these men: they both deserve the punishment they receiving unlike Jesus. One of them joined in mocking Jesus saying: “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, reminding him that while they both deserved their punishment, this man, Jesus had “done nothing wrong.” He then asks Jesus to: “remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
Jesus’ response to the criminal is the most powerful example of the inclusivity of Christ’s offer of hospitality for all. Despite the fact that the man apparently had earned his execution as a criminal, Christ turns to him and offers him salvation saying: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” The invitation to enter the Kingdom of God is available to all who turn to Jesus, admitting that they cannot make it in their own strength, but only by his grace.
Today’s parable is not just about how we ought to respond to God, but also about the way we should treat one another. We are called to love God, and to love our neighbour as ourselves.
Not only do we need to love God and respond to him in the way the tax collector does, but we also need to treat those around us with love and respect. These two concepts are so tightly intertwined that they cannot be torn apart.
For Jesus, bolstering one’s sense of identity by disparaging others (even when they are terrible sinners) easily leads to illusions of grandeur and a failure to see ourselves as we really are. It is a kind of “goodies verses baddies” game. The answer is not to pretend the tax collector has done no wrong, but to accept our common humanity and to know that our real value is in loving and accepting ourselves as God loves us and not increasing our own value by putting others down.
The tax collector is also a person of worth. We can forget trying to earn credit points with God and establishing our worth on a relative scale. When we do so, we will have so much more time and energy for compassion, both receiving and giving it. ‘Pharisees’ need grace and forgiveness – just as much as tax collectors.
Let’s return again to the example of Chocolat. In a desperate attempt to ensure that the rules are kept, the Compte de Reynauld prompts the people to treat each other terribly. He has separated out his religious observance from the love of his fellow villagers.
The contrast between the Compte’s behaviour and the way in which Vianne invites people into her shop, and seeks to meet their deepest personal needs could not be stronger. In the end, the love which Vianne offers the villagers through chocolate even causes a change of heart for the Compte.
Towards the end of the film, the village priest finally makes sense of the relationship between the need to love God and love others. Preaching on Easter Sunday he says: “Listen, here's what I think. I think that we can't go around... measuring our goodness by what we don't do. By what we deny ourselves, what we resist, and who we exclude. I think... we've got to measure goodness by what we ‘embrace’, what we create... and who we include.”
Surely this is what Jesus is saying to the Pharisee. Rather than being self-righteous and caught up in comparing ourselves to others, we need to hold the love of God and the love of others in tight relation to one another.
So where does this leave us? This is not to say that prayer, giving to the church, spending time caring for others, or any of the good things that we do are pointless and worthless. What the parable is getting to is our intentionality as we do these things. If we pray or give or whatever, merely to earn brownie points, to be the best, most self-righteous religious person about, then these actions are meaningless. As Paul says in that section of 1 Corinthians that we most often hear at weddings: to paraphrase – if I have not love, then I am nothing but a clanging gong, or a noisy cymbal.
It’s all about Intentionality.
If our prayer, our love of God and love of one another comes out of a genuine longing for a relationship with God, and if our love for one another reflects the Kingdom of God to those we meet – then like the tax collector in the parable, our prayers are truly worthy of the living God.
