Roger was lounging in the lobby as I
checked into the Hotel Sandy, a cheap hostel just down the street from Rome’s
Termini Station. It was nearly
suppertime, and he was yawning and stretching, as if he’d just woken up. I asked him if he knew where to find a good
pizza, and in a high-pitched New Zealand accent, he said he knew just the place
if he could come with me.
We were unlikely dining companions:
me, an earnest theology student, making my rounds of the shrines and ancient
ruins; Roger, an accomplished carouser, wandering from club to club until the
break of dawn. He woke up just in time
for supper. But somehow, it worked. For five days, every evening we’d meet again
in the lobby and head out for pasta, and share what we’d been discovering in
the Eternal City.
The fourth night, Roger announced he
would be leaving soon, and wanted some advice on what he really needed to
see. His pious Catholic grandmother had
suggested Rome, it seems, hoping it might nudge him a bit in the right
direction, and he didn’t want to turn up in her parlor entirely
empty-handed.
He needed to see the Sistine Chapel,
I insisted.
The rest of the Vatican
Museums were magnificent and the Basilica, but if you were just going to see
one thing, it would have to be Michelangelo’s masterpiece. I told him where to stand in line, and how to
thread his way through the exhibition halls.
It could not disappoint, I assured him.
At supper the next evening, Roger
said he’d enjoyed the Chapel, but he was still a little puzzled by the
experience. “Say more,” I
responded. “Well,” he said, “that big
painting behind the Altar was just fine, Jesus on the clouds and all the blokes
going this way or that. But what about
God touching Adam’s hand. It’s on every
t-shirt around here. I thought that was
in the Sistine Chapel, too.”
“It is,” I responded, “but it’s on
the ceiling.” “The ceiling,” Roger
grumbled back, “who would have thought of that? You know, everybody did seem to
be looking up. The ceiling: why didn’t
you tell me?”
You can lead a man to the Sistine
Chapel, but you can’t make him look up.
You can lead a Pharisee to the temple, the seat of God’s mercy on earth,
but can’t make him ask for forgiveness.
Sometimes it’s possible to be in just the right place, but to miss the
point completely.
A Pharisee and a tax collector,
Jesus says, both went up to the temple to pray.
Jesus was describing a scene that any visitor to Jerusalem in his times
would have known well. The majestic
temple, overlaid in precious stones, stood atop Jerusalem’s highest hill, the
center of the life of the Holy City. It
was the place God had chosen for His glory to dwell, and the sacrifices offered
at its altars expressed the deepest longings and highest praises of His
people. All day long people filed into
its gates to offer grain and animals in the procession of rituals that
bracketed their lives: tithes at harvest, presentation sacrifices at the birth
of a son, thank-offerings after an illness escaped or a new business
opportunity discovered.
But the crowds came particularly
twice in the day: mid-morning and late afternoon, when choir came out to sing and
after an offering on behalf of the whole nation a priestly blessing was
chanted.[1] Those morning and evening sacrifices were
like the opening and closing bell on wall street—they bracketed all the
individual acts of sacrifice that filled the rest of the day’s business.
But
the faithful also believed that they were thin moments, times when the long way
between God and man stood open, and His mercy descended in power. The pious would time their daily prayers, far
from Jerusalem to correspond to that transcendent moment, and they’d turn in
Jerusalem’s direction on the sands of Arabia or in a Roman suburb to bow their
head to God, the Father of Israel, at that sacred time when he would be sure to
hear and grant their petition.
The
tax collector though he was a foul sinner, knew that this was his moment of
opportunity, and He bowed his head, crowded in among the faithful, and opened
His heart to God. “Have mercy on me, a
sinner.”
But
the Pharisee, seeing the natural opportunity the crowd presented, began to sing
his own praises. He claimed to thank
God, but in truth He praised himself.
Maybe he thought what people really needed was a good example. But to us, and to Jesus’ audience, his prayer
is appalling, drawing back the curtain to reveal his pettiness, vanity and
arrogance.
What
is more, he has missed the gift of the moment.
Who could dare to be so prideful to sing His own praise when the gates
of God’s mercy stand open. Who could
rejoice in just the way things are already when God was promising to act: to
heal, forgive, and renew.
Jesus
says that the tax collector went home justified, made right with God. His sin was put away. True reconciliation was made. He received new strength from God to lead a
different kind of life. Jesus Himself
had come as just such an agent of justification, changing the world by opening
men’s hearts and pouring out the gift of God’s mercy. To meet Jesus was to encounter the deepest
truth, the direct transformative power that all that the daily sacrifices
gestured towards. And his bitterest
scorn was reserved for those, like the Pharisee, who could see in religion only
a form of sanction for the way things already are, the order in which they had
landed at the top.
Life
in Christ begins with Baptism, in which God’s grace comes to cleanse and renew
us, and to fill us with His life-giving Spirit, who will not let us rest
content. And life after Baptism follows
just the same pattern enabled by God’s grace: seeking forgiveness, growing in
understanding, developing new moral habits.
Luther captured this perfectly when He wrote: “This life therefore is
not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not
being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but
we are growing toward it…All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being
purified.[2]”
A
few weeks ago, when I announced that my time with you would soon be ending, one
of you came to me rather exasperated on your way out the door. “I’ve had about as much change as I can take. It seems like every time I come here, there’s
somebody new standing at the front.”
Believe me, I understand that frustration. We live in a world full of so much change,
and much of it not very good. What we
sometimes seek inside these doors is a reach toward the transcendent, something
of enduring value, comforting because it stands firm.
But
new leaders also bring new opportunities, as this person, a serious Christian
later came back to me admitting herself.
You are a wonderful group of people in many ways, but God is not
finished with you yet. You are not yet
what you shall be, but are growing toward it.
The change that comes from God’s prompting, that moves you toward Him,
will not disappoint you when you receive it with open hearts.
We
are gathered around Jesus this day. This is the place of transformation. Don’t be at the right place at the right time
and miss the point entirely. Don’t
forget to lift up your heads and see what God is really doing.
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