Hands of repentance.

 

Sermon for Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father, and Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Luke 18:9-14  ⁹Jesus told this parable to certain people who trusted in themselves (that they were righteous) and looked down on others: ¹⁰“Two men went up to the temple courts to pray.  One was a Pharisee, and the other was a tax collector.  ¹¹The Pharisee stood and prayed about himself like this: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people, robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.  ¹²I fast twice a week.  I give a tenth of all my income.’  ¹³“However the tax collector stood at a distance and would not even lift his eyes up to heaven, but was beating his chest and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’  ¹⁴“I tell you, this man went home justified rather than the other, because everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. (EHV)

Hands of repentance.

Dear fellow redeemed,

            I believe you can tell a lot about a man simply by looking at his hands.  You can tell if he spends much time outdoors.  You can tell whether he makes his living with physical labor or more genteel pursuits.  Most of the men I grew up near had hands that were darkly tanned in the summer, rough hands made strong and calloused by lifetime use of pitchforks, shovels, hammers, and wrenches.  For years, my own hands were lined with callouses and dirt and grease filled cracks, but also some scars from having them in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

This Lenten season, we will focus on the hands of those who surrounded Jesus as He walked this earth, and especially, at the hands of the One Man who would willingly give His hands into the punishment of death for sinners like you and me.  Tonight, we begin our consideration of The hands of the passion by taking a look at Hands of repentance.

The account of the Pharisee and tax collector is widely known.  Most of our children know it from their Sunday school lessons, and certainly, you have heard sermons on it in the past.  Tonight, we envision their hands—hands that will give us a glimpse into their hearts, because Jesus didn’t just see the position of their hands, He saw right into the heart of those two men, just as He will all of us when we stand before His throne.

“Two men went up to the temple courts to pray.”  Certainly a worthy thing to do on any given day.  Both men began their prayer by calling out to the same address, “God.”  However, that name is all the two prayers have in common.

If you think about it, you could almost imagine what it would be like if that Pharisee were here praying this evening; he would stand boldly right up front near the steps leading up to the altar, hands lifted up as was commonly done by the Jewish priests as they lifted up their hands to God pleading for His help for the people.  In contrast to the priests, however, this Pharisee lifted his hands boldly and proudly calling out in his heart, “Look here God.  Look at the great specimen You have here in me.”

To the world, the Pharisees looked like the ideal believers.  Everything about their religious life was designed to show their piety and commitment to obeying the law.  It took a certain amount of wealth to be a member of the Pharisaical sect; an ordinary believer wouldn’t qualify.  They dressed in fine robes, fasted two days per week without unduly stressing their bodies by physical labor.  Furthermore, they could and did tithe above and beyond what the Mosaic code called for.  A poor person couldn’t match up without putting his family in dire straits.  The Pharisees worked hard to put on this pious display, and they made sure their neighbors could see it. 

The day Jesus first told this parable, you can almost see the listening Pharisees nodding in agreement with the prayer the man prayed.  The Pharisee began, “God, I thank You.”  It is a beautiful way to begin our prayers, and every prayer we pray would well include our thanks to God, for He has given us everything we have and need.  Yet, there was a difference to this man’s prayer.

The Pharisee wasn’t actually thanking God for anything.  Years ago, Mac Davis had a big hit in country music singing, “O Lord, it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way.”  That song could have been written by this Pharisee.  He didn’t say, “God, I thank You for all You have given to me and made of me.”  Rather, he lifted himself up to God as if God should be proud to be seen with that Pharisee.  “God, look at how much I have made of myself so that I don’t really need You at all.”

As that Pharisee stood there with his hands lifted high and his voice boasting loud and clear, he was letting everyone know how much he was doing to make God happy.  More than that, they were all to hear how miserably the others compared.  In his own eyes, that Pharisee imagined he had kept the commandments, unlike his neighbors who he slandered in his heart.  In fact, he thought he was doing so well that he had outdone what God commanded.  How could any of his neighbors compare?  This tax collector sharing the room was just another example of how far short his neighbors had fallen.

Now, perhaps the people in the temple that day were impressed.  It’s hard for us to know, really, but was God impressed by this self-promoting, arrogant display?  We remember God’s word to Samuel, “The Lord does not look at things the way man does.  For man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)  God looks at a person as with a spiritual x-ray or MRI.  He sees everything inside our thoughts, words, deeds, and emotions too.

I grant you that some of what I have just said is speculation.  Perhaps the Pharisee wasn’t trying to show off in front of his neighbors.  Maybe he was just trying to convince himself that he was good.  Luke doesn’t tell us exactly what this man was thinking, but his uplifted hands and arrogant tone certainly hint that he felt no need for God’s compassion.  Furthermore, “Jesus told this parable to certain people who trusted in themselves (that they were righteous) and looked down on others.”  Jesus was giving His audience a mirror’s view into their own deceitful hearts.

On the other hand, the people in the temple that day probably didn’t pay much attention to the tax collector.  Most Jews of that time didn’t want anything to do with such people.  They were considered traitors for corroborating with the Roman government and cheaters because they were allowed to collect whatever they could as long as they met Rome’s demand.  Anything above that, the tax collector was allowed to keep for himself, and many publicans made themselves rich at their neighbors’ expense.

Now, we have no way to know what grievous sins this tax collector may have committed.  We do know, however, how he felt about all his sins.  The mirror of God’s law reflected an ugly picture to his eyes.  The tax collector knew well that he could never measure up to the holiness God requires.  So, there stood that tax collector—head down, eyes looking down to the ground in shame, hands not lifted up for pompous attention, but clenched in fists and beating his chest in agony over the depths of his sin and depravation. 

The tax collector saw in himself what God’s law told him God saw in him, which is nothing to offer but sin.  Nothing good at all to be held up for God’s praise.  Unlike the Pharisee who compared himself to the most grievous sinners and thought his neighbors all fell into that group, the tax collector compared Himself to the holy requirements of a perfect Creator, and recognized himself as a worthless, helpless sinner with only one thing to plead, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

This may be one of the shortest prayers in the Bible.  The tax collector doesn’t ask for anything else.  He doesn’t offer any positive contribution.  In humble faith, the tax collector simply turns to the One God who offers unmerited mercy and grace.  All the sacrifices that had been offered in the temple throughout the centuries had been testimony of God offering forgiveness by the shedding of blood. 

We are not told what sacrifices those two men brought to the temple that day.  Most assuredly the guilt-ridden tax collector would have offered some sin offering.  Still, he knew what he offered could not buy God’s grace.  He knew that all those temple sacrifices pointed to something greater: the sacrificial Lamb God had promised to send to take away the sins of the world, His own dear Son.

Of course, Jesus didn’t tell this parable only for the benefit of those few Pharisees.  He told it also for the benefit of people like you and me who come to an Ash Wednesday worship service knowing that we haven’t measured up to the Law’s demands.  Jesus told this so we don’t measure our confession against the people who aren’t here, or to the ones stuck in prison for whatever crime they have committed.  Jesus told it so that we don’t compare ourselves to those who have wandered away from the faith, or who don’t live in their daily lives as the law commands. 

Instead, Jesus wants each of us to look into our own hearts with His piercing vision so that we see reflected in the mirror of the law a graphic image revealing every wicked thought, word, deed, and desire, that we confess every failure to obey His Father in heaven, every time we go against His will, and every time we neglect to love truly as we should.  Then, to those of us broken by what we see, Jesus holds out His pierced hands that bled to take away all our iniquities, so that He might lift us up before His Father in peace.

You see, while we confess our great shame, we need to remember that there is one more person important to this account, the Savior who told the parable.  Of all the people in the history of the world, only Jesus had the record to hold up to God’s judgment without fear.  Jesus always obeyed His Father in heaven.  He kept every law without fail.  Jesus honored His mother and father and was the perfect child about whom no one could complain.  In addition to all that, Jesus was regularly found with His hands folded in prayer to His heavenly Father, not boasting about any of His own accomplishments, but thanking His Father in heaven for revealing His will, for the gifts we are given, for all good things, then seeking His Father’s guidance and strength to carry our God’s plan to save.

Jesus had the perfect record of accomplishments about which He could boast, but instead of boasting, He lowered Himself to live among us, and bearing the guilt of all our sins, He endured the indignity of dying as a criminal on the cross.  In Jesus, we find the purest, humblest life, and the surest love, according to which He took on Himself all the sins of the world.  The guilt of every impudent boasting, false humility, disobedience, rebellion, hatred, fear, and arrogance of every person who has ever lived was laid on Jesus.  All of this, so that the Father in heaven would count you and me as holy and truly humble in His sight.  Because “God made him, who did not know sin, to become sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him,” (2 Corinthians 5:21) Jesus assures us of complete forgiveness when He spoke about the repentant tax collector, saying, “I tell you, this man went home justified rather than the other, because everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

True Hands of repentance do not reach up to God boasting and saying look at me.  Rather, they are folded in humble confession and prayer to the One who promises to hear our prayers and answer them for our everlasting good.  True Hands of repentance also reach out in faith partaking of the body and blood of our dear Savior in the bread and wine He has blessed so that we receive in His Supper the assurance and reassurance that all our sins our forgiven because of what Jesus lived and sacrificed for us.  The truly repentant boast of nothing good in themselves but look to the God of mercy and grace for forgiveness and healing, the God who declared, “Look, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.  Your walls are never out of my sight.” (Isaiah 49:16)

Dear friends, live humbly and faithfully with Hands of repentance.  Amen.

Now to him, who is able, according to the power that is at work within us, to do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever!  Amen.