Luke 18:9-14
October 26, 2025
He also told this parable to some who
trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with
contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a
Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee,
standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘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.’ But the tax collector, standing
far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast
and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I
tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for
all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be
exalted.”
************
During the Middle Ages,
preachers sometimes told stories about sinners turning their lives around that
sound a little bit contrived when you hear them. I came across one such story recently,
though, that caught my attention because it sounds amazingly similar to the
plot of Sister Act in reverse, and without the music. It has to do with a woman now known as St.
Afra who lived in the late third century, the time when the Emperor Diocletian
was conducting the Roman Empire’s last wide-scale persecution of Christians.[1]
In case you don’t know Sister
Act (and you should), Whoopie Goldberg plays a Vegas lounge singer who has
witnessed a mob crime and has to go into hiding, so she enters a convent in Los
Angeles. She ends up finding her true
calling there as a music teacher, sparks a revival in the neighborhood, and the
pope stops by while he’s in town to see what’s going on.
Afra’s story starts out
with a bishop in Spain who has to get out of town to avoid the
persecutions. He flees to the town that
will eventually become Augsburg, all the way up in Bavaria. The only place he finds to stay is in a
brothel run by a woman named Afra, who may or may not have been a priestess of
the goddess Venus (although that sounds to me like a euphemism for her
profession). She and her employees took
an immediate liking to their secret guest and came to respect him, to the point
where they hid him under a pile of flax when Roman soldiers arrived to search
the building, and eventually came to understand God’s care for them. It was a care that led them to respect
themselves in ways no one else had ever done and changed their lives
profoundly. They had been lumped in with
“thieves, rogues, adulterers,” [Luke 18:11] but now they were set free from their past,
beloved daughters of God through Christ.
Afra was willing to stick
up for that truth when she was eventually called on by the authorities either
to affirm or deny her new faith. She
died for it, and her witness was remembered, at least in Augsburg, where her
tomb is visible to this day.
Next
Sunday we will be observing All Saints’ and remembering people who have gone
before us whose lives have shown us God’s grace. We focus on people whom we have loved and
whom we sometimes miss and sometimes still feel close to. But in doing that, though, we don’t want to
lose track of the people like Afra who make up what the letter to the Hebrews
calls “so great a cloud of witnesses” [Hebrews 12:1], people we have not
known directly but whose lives showed the grace of God at work in them and,
through them, at work in the world at large.
Like
Afra’s, many of their lives directly illustrate the parable from Luke’s gospel,
where
“Two men went up to the temple to pray,
one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The
Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘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.’ But the tax collector, standing
far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast
and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” [Luke
18:10-13]
There, referring to the tax collector, Jesus says,
“I tell you, this man went down to his
home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be
humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” [Luke
18:14]
It’s kind of instinctive,
isn’t it, to be put off by the first man’s view not only of himself as the best
and most wonderful person but also of his offhand contempt for the other man?
Jesus doesn’t say that either man left the Temple feeling in any way
differently about himself, only that God in his insight into the human heart,
holds the same attitude toward both Pharisee and the tax collector that we are
moved to have, and presumably that we would all be more merciful when we
consider where we ourselves would belong in that story.
That
brings me to another example.[2] This man was a powerhouse preacher in London
around the time of the American Revolution, just a little younger than John and
Charles Wesley. One of the things he
said could have come straight out of this parable:
“When people are right with God, they are apt to be hard on themselves
and easy on other people. But when they are not right with God, they are easy
on themselves and hard on others.”[3]
That observation came straight out of his own life.
At 17
he was forced into serving in the British Royal Navy by what they called a
“press gang”. Press gangs would find
vulnerable teenagers and either outright kidnap them or get them drunk and
entice them to enlist when they didn’t know what they were doing. They would look for runaways or street kids who
saw no future for themselves and offer a life that would likely be short but at
least include regular meals. With this
boy, though, they took in someone more troubled than they knew. Once in the navy, he began to go wild, even
more than was usual for a British sailor at the time (and that is saying a
lot). His behavior could have gotten him
hanged but he had a somewhat lenient commander who just dropped him off at the
nearest inhabited island in the middle of the Atlantic and left him there.
He was lucky that a few
months later a British ship passed by and needed another crewman as badly as he
needed a way off the island, and he soon found himself in West Africa. There he was kidnapped again, this time sold
as a slave in Sierra Leone. He escaped,
made it to the coast, became involved in the slave trade, but this time as a
seller instead of as the merchandise. He
worked his way up until he was captain of a slave ship of his own, stuffing
people into the hold as cargo to be sold off in the Caribbean, dumping the dead
overboard as they went.
There’s
a lot more to the story about how he came to his senses and about his horror
when he realized what he was doing. The
point is that his conscience caught up to him, and when it did, he knew he had
a lot to answer for, “beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to
me, a sinner!’” [Luke 18:13] Eventually
he dedicated his life both to preaching the gospel and to working for the
eradication of slavery. As by-then the Reverend
John Newton put it for the people who came to hear him:
He expressed his gratitude for God’s mercy toward
sinners, particularly to himself, in a poem you may have heard:
“Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.”
Few people’s lives go to these extremes. In fact, that’s something to be thankful for
in itself. What would the world be like
if everybody was going off the rails all the time, turning to the Lord for help
only at the last moment? But isn’t it
good to know, even if it never comes to that, how great and wide God’s love and
mercy is, and that he doesn’t give up even on somebody ready to give up on himself
or herself, someone unable to “even lift up his eyes to heaven”? I honestly don’t think he’d even give up on
the Pharisee, although he might take a little more time to come around.
[1]
The retelling of her story here is drawn from a variety of websites, including Saint Afra - Wikipedia and Portal:Catholic
Church/Patron Archive/August 5 - Wikipedia
[2] As
with St. Afra, the story here is pieced together from a variety of retellings
available on the internet.
[3] Quotations
from John Newton are found (unsourced) at John Newton
Quotes (Author of Out of the Depths)
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