Contrition
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
August 29, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Isaiah 57:14-19
Luke 18:9-14
“But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying,
‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’”
At the end of this sprawling, summertime series on prayer, we come to the beginning of godly conversation: contrition, confession, penitence. “Be merciful
to me, a sinner!” cries the breast-beating tax collector. “Have mercy on me, O God,” the king half sings, half says when confronted with his adultery,
“according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.” At the hour of their death, and with every breath they
would take until then, these ancient characters confessed themselves to be sinners who were destined to stand before God empty-handed, offering at most, a
broken and contrite heart.
But at the beginning of this day it must be said that a broken and contrite heart, which God once desired more than a burnt offering, is now hard for the
almighty and merciful Creator of the heavens and the earth to come by. So eager are we to affirm and be affirmed, to be happy and confer happiness on
hapless consumers of a Sunday morning that whole congregations have quit the prayer of confession because it makes them feel bad about themselves…or because
they believe they have not done anything wrong and so cannot, in good conscience, confess--as the old general prayer of confession goes (a prayer I
inadvertently had memorized by the time I was in sixth grade): “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep; we have followed too much the
devices and desires of our own hearts; we have offended against Thy holy laws; we have left undone those things which we ought to have done and done those
things which we ought not to have done.” Seriously? Is there someone in this sanctuary who cannot say these words with a straight face? Where, in the common
life, did so many of us miss the turn toward home which is repentance? When will we wake from our unconscious and unconscionable residence in a far country,
come to our miserable selves, and admit that we are not worthy to be called God’s child? How has it come to pass that we live and move and have our being
unmindful of the fall from grace that ultimately will thrust us into the open arms of God’s grace?
On one hand, you could say our impenitence has come to pass because we were taught to be like the Pharisee, thinking ourselves a cut above the madding crowd
of thieves, rogues, adulterers or even the pitiful tax collector who stands afar off. New Testament scholar Joel Green characterizes the “type” represented
by the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable: “First, having become convinced of their own righteousness, they have come to depend on themselves. They are
self-possessed, able, at least in their own minds, to live honorably before God quite apart from divine mercy.” Here, says Green, Jesus is not concerned
with a particular group of people—with the Pharisees--but with a habitus, “a set of dispositions and commitments that generate practices, perceptions
and attitudes that are set in opposition to the…impending reign of God.” Jesus probably had his own disciples in mind—and he still does!
Nevertheless, if you are going by the Book, you have to admit that the Pharisee does everything right: not only fasting on the appointed day but two days a
week; not only tithing designated items of produce, but giving a tenth of everything he has to the temple. Moreover, he properly distances himself from the
“others” who do not take God’s word seriously, thanking God that he has distinguished himself from these by a remarkable degree of self-discipline and
obedience.
Yet listen closely to the theological presuppositions his prayer reveals. It is the prayer of one who cannot give to God the one needful thing: a contrite
heart. What is striking, says Green, is that “the Pharisee’s prayer begins like a thanksgiving psalm, but never enumerates the divine actions for which one
is thankful.” Think back to Sir Leslie Stephen or Katherine Mansfield who were thankful but knew not the One to thank. Or remember the gratitude of which we
spoke last week, a gratitude we return to ourselves for our own good deeds. “For God’s acts,” says Green, “the Pharisee has substituted his own”: I fast
twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income. In other words, I cannot join the rest of the congregation in the prayer of confession not only because I
have not left undone those things I ought to have done, but also because I have no need or knowledge of the God with whom the congregation speaks when they
say, Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundance mercy, blot out my transgressions.
This little detail about the Pharisee sent me running to the 1541 French Edition of John Calvin’s Institutes looking for a word about human
wretchedness, because apart from Calvin’s stern assessment of the human condition and his soaring belief in the goodness of God, our lack of contrition
simply could be said to issue from egos made healthy and strong in a culture of self-reliance and self-congratulations. Almost as if he has in mind the
Pharisee and tax collector, Calvin writes:
The whole sum of our wisdom which is worth calling true and certain is practically comprised of two parts: that is, the knowledge of God and of ourselves.
Of these, the first ought to show us not only that there is only one God whom all must worship and honor, but also that the same One is the fountain of all
truth, wisdom, goodness, righteousness, judgment, mercy, power and holiness, so that we may learn to expect and ask everything from Him, and also to
acknowledge with praise and thanksgiving that all these things come from Him. The second part, by showing us our weakness, wretchedness, futility, and
greed, leads us to feel cast down about and to distrust and hate ourselves; and then kindles in us a desire to seek for God, since in Him lies all the good
of which we are empty and naked.
In other words, knowing God as the One who alone is good [Why do you call me good? Jesus once asked the crowd. God alone is good!], we then
know ourselves as “not God”…dare I say, as “not good”: as pensioners on God’s mercy. I cannot prove this but only confess that even as I have met something
of my true humanity in a first century Jew named Jesus, I also have met something of the God who is the fountain of all truth, wisdom, goodness,
righteousness, judgment, mercy, power and holiness. In his presence, I see how far I have fallen from the human being I was created to be and see the depth
of God’s love toward me made manifest in him such that my first instinct is to cry out, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love.”
The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector effects this very meeting, if we have ears to hear. In its brief six verses, Jesus turns us from our
Pharisaic habitus to consider the miserable tax collector, the sinner beating his breast and crying, “God be merciful to me, a sinner,” that we may
behold in him a man whose weakness, wretchedness, futility, and greed not only have led him “to feel cast down about, but also have kindled in him a desire
to seek for God, since he knows in God lies all the good of which he is empty and naked.” Moreover, we both see in the Pharisee what we are missing of our
own humanity when we refuse to acknowledge with contrition the broken and scattered pieces of our days and nights and we know in the tax collector that we
have missed the One whose mercy we have forgotten in the blindness, the coldness, the hubris of our hearts.
“We cannot ardently desire God before we have begun to be completely dissatisfied with ourselves,” Calvin continues. “For what person does not choose to
depend on himself? Who does not rely on himself so long as (since he does not know himself) he is happy with his own abilities and does not see his
calamity? That is why each of us,” according to Calvin, “is not only prompted to seek God by the knowledge of himself, but also guided and practically led
by the hand to find Him.” Calvin’s point is that somewhere in the interplay of our knowledge of God and our knowledge of ourselves, if it is the God we know
in Christ and not an idol we have fashioned in our minds, we find ourselves standing afar off, unable to look up to heaven, praying, “God be merciful to me
a sinner.”
Finally note that though the tax collector also separates himself from the others, his motive for separation is the inverse of the Pharisee’s: he presumes
he is unworthy to enter the temple where only those with clean hands and a pure heart are welcome. Because his separation is a literal acknowledgement of
his sin, of the distance he lives from God’s goodness, we may glimpse, in the words and actions of the one telling the parable, the God who has come to him,
who has justified him, who has received the broken and contrite heart into the heart of God. I tell you, says Jesus, this man went down to his
home justified: went home trusting God alone in life and in death.
I imagine the tax collector rising each remaining morning of his life with the 51st psalm on his lips. We could do worse! Acknowledging his transgressions,
his iniquity, his sins in the light of God’s promise to blot out his transgressions, to wash away his iniquity and cleanse him of his sins, he begins his
day as a new man. So deeply aware is he of the goodness of God toward him that he speaks his faults and failures to God who alone bears them such that they
are no longer his. Behold, you desire truth in the inward parts, he prays with a confidence born not of arrogance but fearful reverence. When you
consider the enormous time, energy, emotion and self-deception required to present ourselves to the world (and even to our inmost being) as though we were
without spot or blemish, you can almost taste the freedom conferred upon those who, humbled before the God who is God, offer only empty hands and a contrite
heart.
“One late afternoon, on my way to the Piazza del Duomo, I stopped in a small, undistinguished church, San Giuseppe, for refuge from the rain,” write Barbara
Grizzuti Harrison. “The purple, red, and white candles of the Lenten season were burning, and six men and two women—one of the women in blue fox, the other
in a blue smock and floppy, backless felt slippers with a dust cloth in her hand—were praying, chanting, contrapuntally; I let the lovely sounds, half song,
half speech, wash over me. I thought idly: How much I love to see men in church, how touched I always am to see men bow the knee in an attitude of
submission. There is not cheap victory in this, I do not rejoice in seeing a man brought low; for men to be humble in the house of God, for them to declare
that their need is equal to my need to be healed, releases some wellspring of tenderness in me….God’s peace protects the frailest; that is perhaps why I
like to see men pray: They assume a frailty and a vulnerability they are elsewhere at pains to deny. In church, in the attitude of prayer, we are all God’s
vassals, and only the lord is the Lord.
“An old man asks me to join my voice to theirs in prayer. Painfully aware of the deficiencies of my Italian, I decline, and he, as courtly as he is
threadbare, says, ‘God understands English.’ The elegant woman in the blue fox coat edges over to ma and says, ‘I work all day, but this is peace.’
Pace….The wonderful words break over me: Misericordia, a word that sounds like misery and means “mercy.”
May each of us, before the hour of our death, be given the grace to acknowledge our misery, that we also may be found, on our knees, beseeching God’s mercy.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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