Sermon - "The Publican or the Pharisee?"

Sermon preached by Dr. B.J. Hutto at Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church on Sunday, October 26, 2025.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Fred Craddock used to tell the story of when he was invited to guest preach at another church one Sunday and was assigned to preach Jesus' parable of the prodigal son. Craddock says that he decided to just preach the story straight, to focus on the end where the loving father is pleading with the dutiful older brother who is standing out in the darkness, refusing to come into the house, because he refuses to celebrate the return of his younger prodigal sibling. Craddock says that he closed his sermon talking about how God the Father always stands ready to show grace to all his children. And then after the sermon, Craddock said, a man in the church approached him looking grumpy. I don't know whether I should say that I didn't like your sermon or I didn't like the text, the man said. Craddock asked him to say a little bit more. The end, he said, about the boy, the younger one. He should have been disowned by his father, shunned by his family, shamed, thrown into jail, if at all possible. That is what he deserved. Not a party. The following Sunday, Craddock says he got pressed into teaching a Sunday school class at his own church because a teacher called in sick. Oh, it'll be easy, he was told. It's just Jesus' parable of the prodigal son. So Craddock, not wanting to be scolded two weeks in a row. Preachers never like to get scolded two weeks in a row. Craddock decided that he was going to get it right this time. There was a man who had two sons. He began the class with a wry smile. The older son stayed home, did his father's bidding, worked hard on the farm. The younger son took his money, wasted it in a far country, came into hard times. He decided that he should go home, confess his wrongdoing. Well, when the younger son drew near the house, he heard music and dancing, and he called one of his father's servants and said, What is this party that's going on? To which the servant replied, Well, you know your older brother who stayed home, worked hard, listened to his parents. Your father appreciates him. And so he's throwing him a party. As soon as he finished telling the story, Craddock says that a woman in the front row of the class leaned over to her husband and said, That's how it was supposed to go. Today, Jesus tells another parable that focuses on two men. One, a Pharisee, and a genuinely good man. He's scrupulous. He fasts twice a week, well above what would have been required. He's generous. He donates 10% of all of his income, no matter what. He is a genuinely good man, and if you don't believe it, then just ask him. God, I thank you that I am not like other people, he says. Thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this, tax collector. The second man in the store is the tax collector. Which doesn't mean that he is an agent of the IRS. It means that he is a turncoat, a sellout, a toady for the Romans, whom all of his countrymen hated. And he is genuinely a bad man. And if you don't believe it, then just ask him. This man, Jesus says, stood at a distance with his head low, beating his breast and praying, God be merciful upon me, a sinner. And it is this tax collector, Jesus tells his disciples, who walks away justified, not the Pharisee. I suspect that if, like Craddock did with the story of the prodigal son, I rewrote the end of the parable to say that the good guy Pharisee walked away justified instead of the bad guy, tax collector, more than one of us would turn to our neighbor and say, That's the way it's supposed to be. The Pharisee is upright. He is upstanding. He is scrupulous. Just like the older brother of the prodigal who stayed home, worked hard, kept his nose clean. And yet neither is the focus of their two stories. The older brother ends his story outside in the darkness, listening to the party going on inside his father's house, seething at the grace that is being shown his degenerate younger sibling. The Pharisee ends his story by walking out of the temple, head held high, undoubtedly respected by his neighbors and aware of it. But as we are told, failing to have justified himself in the eyes of God, and undoubtedly unaware of that fact as well. Both are good men. But they are both focused on how righteous they are and on how unrighteous they're convinced their neighbors are, and that, my friends, is precisely where they have lost the plot. Now I am sure that you will be surprised to hear it. But even today, there are some Pharisaic older brothers walking around us. You would think that over two thousand years the church would have already been able to overcome this kind of temptation. You would think that by now we would have taken to heart what all Jesus said about this kind of thing. These two parables in Luke, for example. Or his words to Nicodemus in John 3 about how God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world. Or his line in Matthew's gospel about not focusing on the speck of sawdust that is in your neighbor's eye, but instead working on dislodging the two by four that is sticking out of yours. But no. There is something in us. There is something in our neighbors that would much rather point a finger and judge those around us than point a thumb and take a hard look at ourselves. But that's not how God calls us to act. That's not how God acts. That's certainly not how Jesus acts. Jesus always a friend of sinners. Jesus always seeking out the least and the lost. Jesus, known to the good, upstanding, religious people of his day as a drunkard and a glutton because of the company that he kept. That's Jesus. In our Old Testament lesson today from Isaiah 42, a passage that the church has held forever points forward through time and foretells the coming of our Lord. We are told about how gentle He is. A bruised reed, Isaiah says, He will not break. A dimly burning wick he will not extinguish. That's Jesus. If Jesus ever points a finger at someone and calls them out, it is almost universally the Pharisees of his world that he's talking about. The righteous who border on self-righteous. The religious people, the upstanding, the older brothers and sisters of the world who know just how admirable they are. Not the ones who are bent low. Not the tax collectors. It's not the humbled that he points out. The people who get kicked around, he's much too gentle for that. Like Isaiah says. And yet, just last week, right here in Jacksonville, there was a perfect encapsulation of the same kind of attitude that Jesus is preaching against. A sister congregation of ours, Riverside Baptist Church, now known as Riverside Church at Park and King, woke up last Monday morning to find their pride flag ripped down, covered in blood-red paint, and staked to the ground with a cross. Now, I feel very confident when I say that whoever did that left that church feeling justified in their own eyes. Confident of their own righteousness. Thank God I am not like these people. And I feel sure that they left convinced that they had just done something to further God's kingdom here on earth. And yet I'll tell you this. I have people right in my own family, from fifteen to fifty, who love Jesus. But who, because of things like this, will not darken the doors of church. Because from what they hear about on the news, they are convinced that church is more about that kind of hatred and that kind of self-righteousness than it is about the overwhelming grace of God. And I suspect that some of you here might have people in your lives who assume that same thing. So yeah. It has been two thousand years since Jesus taught this parable about the tax collector and the Pharisee, and that other one about the prodigal son and his judgy older brother, and he said that thing about the sawdust and the two by four in your eye, and he told Nicodemus about how God so loved the world, and he said it again and again and again and again. Twenty centuries. Amen. So there's a story that I like to tell whenever I preach this text that just did not fit today. A children's Sunday school teacher was teaching the story of the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, where the Pharisee says, Thank God I am not like this tax collector. And when she finishes, the teacher says, Now, children, let us bow our heads and pray and thank God that we are not like this Pharisee. And then the preacher stands in the pulpit and says, Congregation, let us all thank God that we are not as dense as this Sunday school teacher. That's not how it works. But it's easy to point a finger. It is so much harder to point a thumb. And yet that, my friends, is the way of discipleship. Not pointing a finger, but having the courage and the hope to point the thumb. And it's hard. But if you're here today and you have that courage, and you have that hope, and that faith in God's overwhelming grace, not just to forgive your neighbor whom you might judge, but to even forgive the self that you know in your heart of hearts. Or if you have already accepted that challenge of discipleship, been baptized into Christ's body, but you need a family of people to help you with that hard work. To walk with you, to love you, and to help you see yourself as beloved in the eyes of God no matter what. And you think that this church might be that family. Well, then now is the time in our service when such decisions might be made known publicly, as we stand together as we are able and sing.