The Just Judge and the Mafia Lawyer in the Cathedral

The judge was a good family man and the senior warden of his local Episcopal church. One evening, after a difficult week, he came into the Cathedral to pray.  He had just made a judgment in a case involving terrible child abuse. He had also dealt with the worst kind of corruption in a mafia trial. He sighed as he took off his elegant wool coat and hung it over a pew, “Thank you, God, for my beautiful wife and my sweet children. Thank you that my life is not a mess like the lives of those people who come into my courtroom every day, especially that mafia boss.” He pulled the Book of Common Prayer from the pew rack and turned to the section for Evening Prayer. “Thank you, God, for this oasis of sanity in a chaotic world,” he thought, as he knelt down, surrounded by the comforting stories portrayed in the 19^th-century stained glass windows. The judge turned right to the Opening Sentences in the Prayer Book. Except during Lent, he always skipped the confession of sin. He had learned long ago that we really shouldn’t dwell so much on sinfulness. It’s depressing. Besides, Episcopalians are all about God’s love, not about sinfulness and depravity. That kind of talk is for Baptists and Presbyterians. “Thank you, God, that I belong to a civilized church that speaks of love and beauty, a church where we can use our minds and drink sherry at vestry meetings and find God on a yacht or skiing in the Alps,” he prayed with real gratitude.

          After a few minutes, the judge finished up with the final prayers, his mind drifting:
“Most holy God, the source of all good desires, all right judgments (yes, that’s what I try to do, too!) and all just works (like the weekend I just spent building a house with Habitat), Give to us, your servants, that peace which the world cannot give (that’s for sure!), so that our minds may be fixed on the doing of your will and …we  may live in peace and quietness (ahh, peace and quietness!)….”

Just then, he noticed an odor of strong cologne and heard some shuffling in the corner of a back pew. Glancing over his shoulder, the judge noticed a big man in a fur coat, wearing lots of rings on his fingers. Oh no--it was the lawyer for the mafia boss from court, that slimy, sniveling excuse for a lawyer who defends all kinds of scum and contributes to the cesspool that our society has become. The law is an honorable profession, but this man had become rich off of his trickery. This crook would do anything to earn a buck. The judge stared, transfixed by this lawyer’s audacity. How dare he come into the House of God, into this sanctuary of all that is good and holy, into this refuge that the judge had helped to build with his generous gift to the Bishop’s Fund.

The lawyer knelt on the ground over by the door, carelessly letting his coat slip into the dust beside him and scraping his fancy shoes on the cold marble floor. He didn’t seem to see the judge up in the front pew. He didn’t even raise his head to look at the beautiful stained glass or to admire the glimmers of silver and candlelight . “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” he cried aloud, as if he didn’t care who heard him. “Oh God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” he begged, his voice raw and his lips torn open. And then, as quickly as he had entered, he struggled to his feet and stumbled out of the Cathedral.

The judge couldn’t help himself: “If you want forgiveness, you’re going to have to turn your life around,” he thought smugly. “You’re going to have to quit working for the Mob and give away some of that fur coat money to a good cause, at least.  I’ll have to see some fruit in this guy’s life before I believe that he has really changed. ”

As the judge was grumbling to himself, he noticed the Lamb from the front stained-glass window turn his crowned head toward the nave and speak, as if to a congregation: “I tell you, this mafia lawyer went down to his home justified, rather than the judge; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Can you feel the judge’s pain and incomprehension at the words of the Lamb? Does it help to hear this parable in a more contemporary setting? Perhaps a little? For Jesus listeners, Pharisees were the good guys—fine, morally upright and pious. They were religious folk, just like this judge, and just like us. Luke’s Pharisee does everything right, as far as piety goes. He fasts twice a week, although the Law only requires that he fast once a year. He gives a tenth of all of his income to the Temple, although the Law only requires that he tithe on certain kinds of income. Even this prayer that he says--this prayer that sounds rather self-centered to our ears—it is similar to real prescribed rabbinic and pharisaic prayers of gratitude that were said regularly in ancient times. It is certainly no better or worse than some of the collects in our Prayer Book. And the tax collector in Jesus’ parable is as much of a traitor to society as a corrupt mafia lawyer. Tax collectors were collaborators with the hated Roman occupation, and they often charged more tax than necessary in order to keep the profits for themselves, even resorting to violence to collect the money that they were owed.

So why does Jesus pick the tax collector over the Pharisee, the corrupt lawyer over the just judge, the sinner over the righteous one? Doesn’t God love them both? Doesn’t Jesus want us to come to church regularly and to live upright lives? Is it that Jesus wants  us to wallow in our sins? To go around beating our breasts and feeling unworthy all the time? Isn’t the Good News that God loves us? So why does Jesus praise the prayer of the groveling scumbag over our good and upright prayers?

This text from Luke is the text of the first sermon that I ever preached—here at St. Thomas in 2004, as an aspirant for Holy Orders. Nine years have gone by, and as I worked on these texts again for today’s sermon, I was disappointed to find that the pious judge wears the priest’s collar with ease. It might have been easier to speak with the freedom of the tax collector nine years ago. Language is a tricky thing. Our words can be precious tools for building relationship—with loved ones and with God--but they can also be walls to hide behind. I think the trouble is that the judge and the Pharisee are using their prayers, their words, their faith, to hide their hearts from God. They are hiding behind the form of the prayer, behind their good works, behind their gifts, even behind their gratitude. As Eugene Peterson says, we religious folk can be tempted to aim so effortlessly for “all the social benefits of being associated with God without having to deal with God.”[1] Looking devout, without actually being devout, is such a tempting path to tread. Actually dealing with God can be scary, and it always asks something of us.

 On the other hand, the tax collector and the corrupt lawyer, despite all of their sins, speak straight from their hearts to God’s heart, calling on God to be God, to deal with them directly, just as they are. They are both willing to deal with God, to be in relationship to God. They name themselves plainly as sinners, and they name God truthfully as merciful. Their prayer is simple and direct, without any words or any justifications to hide behind. Writer Anne Lamott recently wrote a book about prayer called, “Help, Thanks, Wow!” She says that these are really the only three prayers that we need to know. Think about it: All three of these prayers speak directly from our hearts to God’s. It is not the groveling of the tax collector that saves him; it is the openness and honesty with which he reveals his heart. It is not the virtue of the Pharisee that condemns him; it is his refusal to open himself up to the disorderly grace of God.

Rowan Williams writes that:

“If you think devotional practices, theological insights, even charitable actions give you some sort of a purchase on God, you are still playing games. God in Christ shows himself as the God whose compassion is without bounds, utterly identified with our pain and working to bring us out of death and bondage into life. It is only when false images of God, the world, and myself have been broken that I can be truly free. When I look on the world as something focusing on me, when I look on God as something functioning usefully in my philosophy, then I am imprisoned in myself and I cannot give or receive true compassionate love.”[2]

I’d like to think that, as the mafia lawyer stumbled back home, he was moved to change his life to reflect the mercy that he had received. But I would also like to think that the judge’s chattering heart was stilled by the voice of the Lamb that he heard. I’d like to think that, on his way home, he might have dipped his finger in the Baptismal font in the back of the Cathedral and wordlessly traced a cross over his heart. He might have remembered his death under the waters of baptism and the new life that pumped freedom through his veins. He might have felt, for just a moment, free from words, free from judgments, floating on a wave of mercy that he did not understand.

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[1] Eugene Peterson, Tell it Slant,  139.

[2] Rowan Williams, Ray of Darkness,  83-84.