Justification

1. Two Men

Luke 18:10-14, Jesus speaking: Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood off by himself and prayed like this: "God, thank you that I am not other people--thieves, sinners, aldulterers--or like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give a tithe of everything I get." The tax collector stood a ways off and didn't even want to lift his eyes to heaven. Instead he he beat his chest and said "God, be merciful to me, the sinner." I tell you, that man went down to his house justified, rather than the other one, because the one who lifts himself up will be brought down and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

The core of this story is that two men, who are different from each other, pray, and then one comes away from praying "justified" and the other does not. Both men are Jews, and they pray within sight of each other in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, which at the time of Jesus was still standing as the geographical focus of Jewish prayers.
     One of the two men is a Pharisee, a member, that is, of a group that sought to carry out the Law of Moses in all of life, that provided musch of the religious leadership for the mass of Jews at the time, and whose beliefs and practices formed the basis for observant Judaism thereafter, up to today. They were good Jews.
     The other man is a tax collector, specifically a collector of road tolls on merchandise moving within some given area, probably not far from the temple. Tax and toll collectors were not mere minor bureaucrats but wealthy businessmen who collected money from fellow Jews for the occupying Roman government and kept some for themselves. The better they were at collecting taxes, the richer and more useful to the hated Roman government they were. They were collaborators with the hated foreign power.
     The Pharisee would be looked up to by most of Jesus' audience, and the tax collector would be despised. But, and this is the hook of Jesus' story, it is the tax collector who is justified, not the Pharisee.
     What does "justified" mean? For that, look at two other places the word is used. First, we can think about that word as we use it in judge people's actions, often taking into account the prior actions of other people:

• Am I justified in doing this?
• Do his past actions justify my avoiding any further dealings with him?
• Is it right for us to sue them for all their worth? That is, are we justified in doing that?

Here, "justified" means morally acceptable, and we apply it to both actions and people: My actions are justified; I am justified. And we can take this further and have "justification" stand for the whole human enterprise of figuring out what is right and wrong, to social mores, social control if you like, and individual conscience.
     Second, the Apostle Paul has taught us about "justification through faith," particularly in his letters to Christians in Galatia and Rome. For him, "justified" means, to simplify it, accepted by God. For some of the people who received Paul's letters, the issue was whether they had to observe the Jewish law (whether they were Jews or not) to be accepted by God. His answer was that justification in this sense comes by God's grace, by way of the death of Jesus, to those who believe in Jesus.
     Jesus' story about the Pharisee and the tax collector sets these two senses of "justified" alongside each other. The first man, as far as most Jews were concerned, was justified in the first sense and the second was not. The Pharisee was good, the tax collector was not. It would be easier to excuse any bits of bad behavior than to excuse the whole evil life of the tax collector. But Jesus' very simple comment is this: things are the other way around as far as the second use of "justified" is concerned. In terms of acceptance by God, the tax collector has it and the Pharisee does not. The two senses of that word "justified" work against each other.
     What makes the difference? The two prayers offered by the two men are mutually exclusive opposites. The first claims justification--acceptance by God, the second leads to justification. The man who claims nothing receives everything. The point is not about lifestyle choices or the words to use in prayer. It is, rather, about God's choice of the sinner's prayer, that is, the prayer that claims nothing, as that which he accepts. It is that the terms God has set for his acceptance of people take into account something altogether other than morality and religious observance. God himself has chosen those who pray the tax collector's prayer.
     Which is shocking, even to Christians, perhaps most to Christians. Perhaps the best way to understand how most Christians have thought about such things is to picture someone in Jesus' audience asking him "then what happened the next day, specifically with the tax collector?" Did he give up tax collecting? If so, then did he pray in the temple a year later and say "God, I thank you that you brought me out of that evil business, that I am no longer like my cousin Harry, who is still in the tax collecting business"? Did his prayers start to take into account of his improved life. Did they change from being the sinner's prayer to something more like the Pharisee's prayer?
     Or what if the question from the audience was "Was the tax collector able to maintain his justification once he got it? What did he have to do next?"

This is in essence what Galatians 3 says. It is also the basis for the repeated use of the "Jesus prayer" in Eastern Orthodox devotional practice. The "Jesus prayer" is the sinner's prayer in this form or something like it: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, have mercy on me, a sinner."

What did another tax collector do the next day? He went to a party with his old and his new friends. Matthew 9:9-13:

Jesus saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax table [i.e., Matthew was a tax collector]. Jesus said to him "follow me," and he got up and followed Jesus. Then Jesus was sitting in the house, and lots of tax collectors and sinners came and sat with him and his disciples. The Pharisees saw this and asked Jesus' disciples "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" He heard it and said "Those who are well don't need a doctor, but those who are sick do. Go away and learn what this [Scripture passage] means: 'I want mercy and not sacrifice' [Hosea 6:6]. I didn't come to call righteous people, but sinners."

     But the story does really end with Jesus' pronouncement that the tax collector was justified. I won't argue for some "once saved, always saved" viewpoint. But it is God who justified the tax collector, and if justification requires any maintenance, it will come the same way as the justification came in the first place, by God's acceptance of the person who prays the sinner's prayer, today, tomorrow, and every next day until the end of life. Everything the greatest, most sancified Christian saint has comes from the sinner's prayer, not because that person has prayed it once but because he or she prays it continually.
     None of that can make sense unless we understand two things about ourselves, namely, how highly we rank justification as a need in our lives, and what sin is.
     Since, then, these two kinds of justification can be like two roads going in opposite directions, imagine a traveler who knows where he wants to go but not which road gets there. Imagine, further, that this traveler has not yet figured out that his choice of which road to take was what Jesus was talking about in the story about the two men in the temple. What will inform his choice? Logic? To some degree. What others think? Certainly. The flip of a coin? But then we would not be talking about a choice. The choice that is most reinforced for us is that of the Pharisee in the story. If the moral and religious beliefs of the most moral and religious people point one direction toward justification, then the choice is made. They must be right. Religion and morality can be counted on to tell us that religion and morality are right. And to a degree they are. Jesus, on the other hand, if the proof is in the pudding, is wrong. At the end, he was publically tortured, spit on, mocked, and executed. He had both Jews and that hated foreign power against him. So much for following him.
     It is only because that is not the end that things are turned around and that following Jesus becomes the thing to do. That is, without resurrection, following Jesus makes no sense. Not just the resurrection of Jesus, but yours and mine. Our thinking is changed radically if we take into account what comes after death.

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