A sermon on Luke 18:9-14 for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity. Delivered by Pastor Caleb Strutz.
One cultural quirk that I’ve noticed and that you’re probably familiar with as well is that Midwesterners can never take a compliment. If you tell someone, “Hey, I like your shirt,” the normal response is, “Thank you.” The Midwesterner will say, “Well, I got it on clearance. Well, yours is a lot nicer. Oh, this? I just threw it on.” In Midwestern nice, there’s this heightened cultural sensitivity against pride. You’re supposed to deflect compliments, divert the attention from yourself, make it seem like not a big deal, when, really, the more graceful thing is to just accept it and say thank you.
In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, Jesus talks about humility and pride. And these are things that we’re very sensitive to and self-aware of. We know pride is a bad thing and we try our hardest to be humble. But what does it actually mean to humble yourself? And is that what we do when we try to be humble? Humility really is seeing yourself rightly. That’s the challenge Jesus has for you today. Although we struggle with true humility, we can be proud of how we are seen by our merciful God.
I. In Humility
So what does it mean to be humble? Well, we are given the example of the tax collector, so we can look at how he expresses humility and humbles himself. But to start, the best definition I’ve seen is that humility is a realistic look at yourself.
Compare, for a moment, the prayers of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The Pharisee lists all the people he’s better than. The tax collector doesn’t compare himself to others. In his confession of sin, he doesn’t say, “I’m worse than persons x, y, and z.” He simply recognizes himself as a sinner. He’s looking at himself, not at others, to see who he really is.
The Pharisee also gives a list of all his good deeds. But notice the tax collector doesn’t give a list of his sins. Certainly he knows and feels them, but as he takes this realistic look at himself, he also knows that that list is too long to compile and that God knows them all. He doesn’t give excuses or justifications for his sins, but just lets it stand and bares himself before God.
So how does this inform how we define humility? Well humility isn’t simply the opposite of pride. Humility doesn’t involve the tax collector saying he’s worse than everyone else or making a similar list of all his sins. Humility means taking a realistic look at himself. It’s stripping away his pride, his excuses, any other influences, and just looking at who he is. And in humility, he is led to that confession that he is a sinner. If the Pharisee took a more honest look at himself, he would come to that same conclusion.
Now, we struggle with humility in any number of ways. But I think the one that’s the most difficult is misunderstanding or misapplying humility. I’m not talking about false humility, how we can use a display of humility to mask our pride, we’ve talked about that before. I think we’re pretty decent at detecting and trying to avoid pride, we have a healthy fear of work-righteousness. But often, our definition of humility goes beyond this realistic look at yourself. So often, we misdefine humility as self-degradation.
What do I mean, what does this look like? Well, we confess, “I, a poor, miserable sinner…” and then we stay there. We have a healthy sense of original sin and our sinful nature, that’s maybe a little too healthy to the point where we define ourselves primarily as sinners.
What does that do? It means that we confess our sins and receive absolution, receive forgiveness, and then continue on like that hasn’t actually done anything. We wallow in our sin, stay stuck in our guilt. We use our sinful nature as an excuse for sin, as though nothing’s changed. We deflect the compliments even God would give us. That’s not a realistic look at yourself, that’s not true humility.
To jump the gun on the Gospel a little bit, Christ forgives your sins and gives you the strength to do better. But we misdefine humility as self-degradation. We beat ourselves up and stay in our sin as if we haven’t received forgiveness, as an excuse to not do better.
Humility doesn’t mean giving up. Humility doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t fight against sin, because we’re just going to sin anyway. We can become proud of how sinful we are because that gives me an excuse to keep doing the things that I want to do. We’re all sinners anyways, right? That’s not humility. That’s not a realistic look at yourself. That’s a false confession. A rejection of forgiveness. Refusing to believe what God says about you. Humility means recognizing our sin and confessing it. It doesn’t mean wallowing in it or using it as an excuse. True humility is hard to come by.
II. In the Eyes of a Merciful God
Look at where the humility of the tax collector leads him. He doesn’t stay stuck in his sin. It leads him to the temple. And his plea, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” takes on a whole new dimension when we keep that in mind and see what’s going on around him.
He uses a rather odd word for mercy. This isn’t eleison like Kyrie, eleison, Lord, have mercy. This is hilastheti, a word loaded with meaning and context. Hilastheti is more than mercy. It’s atonement. Propitiation. Reconciliation. His cry could just as well be translated, “God, atone for me. Be my propitiation. Reconcile yourself to me, a sinner.”
And this takes on a whole new meaning when we see what’s going on around him. Two men are going up to the temple to pray and there’s other people there, we can safely assume this is at one of the times of corporate prayer in the temple, at the morning or evening sacrifice. This sacrifice was a hilasmos, a propitiation, an atoning sacrifice, offered for the sins of the people. The tax collector takes an honest look at himself and sees a sinner. His repentance leads him to go to the temple, to go to what God had instituted for the forgiveness of sins. He pleads for forgiveness on the basis of what God had done and promised. He prays that the atoning sacrifice which he sees before him would even atone for his sins. He holds on to the promises of God.
God’s mercy to you, a sinner, is not merely dependent on Him happening to feel a certain way. It is on the basis of Christ and His atoning sacrifice. “[T]his is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the hilasmos, the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10). Christ and His sacrifice is this objective reality, this concrete demonstration and proof that God has mercy on you, that He forgives your sins, that He has reconciled you to Himself.
Humility means taking a realistic look at yourself. When we do that, we see a sinner. But that is not how God sees you. God looks at you through the hilasmos, through the atoning sacrifice of Christ. He looks at you and does not see your sin, but the perfection of Christ. You have been washed in Christ’s blood, your sins have been covered and taken away. Sin doesn’t define you anymore. Jesus does. Humility means submitting yourself to what God says about you. Throwing yourself on His promises. Holding on to Christ and His sacrifice.
The problem with humility in the Biblical sense is that it is often seen by the world as pride. But humility is not self-degradation, as the world defines it, but seeing yourself rightly. And when we do that as Christians, when we see ourselves as God sees us, we can say some rather prideful things.
The Christian life is better than the life of an unbeliever. We have something that they don’t. And that’s not pride. That’s true humility. We humble ourselves but are exalted by God. We boast, not in what we have done, but in what God has done for us and is doing through us.
If we define ourselves in terms of sin, if we adopt the false humility of self-degradation, then what do we have to offer the world? What’s the point of being a Christian? If we’re just all sinners in here like they’re all sinners out there, why bother? Our appeal to this world is not that we are just the same as them, but that we are something different.
Yes, we come here as sinners. But we don’t leave as sinners. Because here we have our sins forgiven. And that changes everything. Here we have something that you aren’t going to get anywhere else. Here you can have a community of people who care for you, who will visit you when you’re sick, who love you enough to tell you when you’re messing up and will encourage you to do better. Here we have the recipe for strong marriages and families, the way to a life free from guilt, the answers to all of life’s big questions.
We have the best thing in the world going on right here. We have something better than anyone else can offer. And that’s not pride. We’re not exalting ourselves. We’re not saying we’re better. It’s humility. It’s looking at what God says and what He does. It’s the forgiveness that Christ gives made concrete and put into practice. “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (2 Cor 10:17, ESV).
“Two men went up to the temple to pray.” Which one are you? By God’s grace, may we always be truly humble, recognizing our sin, and holding fast to the atoning sacrifice that God has made for you. By faith, that propitiation has been made yours. The sacrificial body and blood of Christ are given to you to eat and to drink. You have been reconciled to God. He sees you differently, we see ourselves in this new reality, and that changes everything. Humble yourself to believe the wonderful things that God says to you. Amen.
