Friday • 6/9/2023
Friday of the First Week After Pentecost (Proper 4)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 40; Psalm 54; Deuteronomy 26:1–11; 2 Corinthians 8:16–24; Luke 18:9–14
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we bring to our lives that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you this Friday of the 1st Week After Pentecost. We are in Proper 4 of Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary.
Could there be a more hell-scented prayer than this one: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people…” (Luke 18:11b)? I remember being asked in my pre-Christian days what there was about me that might commend me to God if I were to face him. My answer was a soft version of the Pharisee’s sentiment: “Well, I’m not perfect, but I’m not as bad as the next guy.” What I couldn’t admit out loud was that I thought there was quite a lot about me that should make me look good in God’s eyes. Several conversations later, I concluded that I was quite wrong—that I was no less grasping, no less profligate, no less self-centered than anybody I could imagine.
The tax collector’s prayer became mine. “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” There are a couple of features of the tax collector’s (and my) prayer that deserve a closer look.
Image: The Pharisee and the Publican (Le pharisien et le publicain) by James Tissot, 1886-94, Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, Brooklyn Museum. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
This request for mercy employs a distinct vocabulary. The tax collector doesn’t use the normal term to ask for mercy, eleēson (e.g., Luke 18:38). Instead, he asks hilasthēti, which is, literally and etymologically “smile upon me.” He’s come to pray in the temple, the building that houses “the mercy seat,” which in Greek is hilastērion (literally and etymologically “the smiling place”). The hilastērion is the place where God’s wrath is satisfied by the annual atoning sacrifice that covers sins (see Leviticus 16). The tax collector asks for the mercy that comes from the shed blood of another. His prayer becomes a subtle hint as to why Luke’s gospel (who alone recounts this parable) is associated with the sacrificial ox. The cross of Jesus will become the tax collector’s and our hilastērion, our (irony totally intended) “smiling place.”
What’s more, the tax collector doesn’t merely refer to himself as “a sinner.” No, he says, “Be merciful to me, the sinner” (all the translations ignore the definite article that’s in the Greek). I don’t understand the translators’ thinking, but I do think I understand the tax collector’s mindset. So aware is he of his own failings—failings that have led him to assume a posture “standing far off … not even look[ing] up to heaven, but beating his breast”—that he cannot see himself in any other light than as though he were the worst sinner in all the human race.
Characteristic of Christian faith is that that awareness of the depth of one’s sin, and appreciation of the depth of the mercy of the cross, come in one fell swoop. That’s the way it happened for the tax collector. That’s the way it happened for me. I pray it happens for all of us.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+