Justified by Mercy

The parables, Easter, and loving the "others"

Note: This post is a reworking of a message I gave at Wood County Christian School’s middle and high school chapels on 4/16/2025.

Introduction

If you would have asked me at around age 12 or 13 what my favorite movie was, I probably would have said Inception (2010). Why would I have answered this way? Leonardo DiCaprio is always great, the visuals in this movie were groundbreaking, but those were not the reasons. I liked the movie because it was “complicated.” Unpacking all of the movie’s narrative and thematic complexities made me feel smart.

As I’ve grown older, and especially as I’ve become a literature teacher, I have learned to deeply appreciate the power of simple, straightforward stories. Stories with clear, direct narratives can easily manage to hit you in the heart with their messages.

This is what the parables of Jesus do.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past year studying Luke’s Gospel. It’s the gospel with most parables. While they are often simple stories narratively, these parables are radical, surprising, and potentially deeply transformative for those who heard or read them (I recently described one of my favorite movies of last year, The Brutalist, as an “epic parable” for exactly these reasons). The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is just one such example. It’s a story about our pride, Jesus’ mercy, and his call to love the marginalized.

Who is My Neighbor?

Before we get to that parable, allow me to talk briefly about another recognizable parable: The Good Samaritan. Jesus tells this story after being asked by a lawyer, “who is my neighbor?” Jesus’ answer is embedded in the story, and it’s an answer that, frankly, might make some of us uncomfortable.

The Other Side of the Wall: A Palestinian Christian Narrative of Lament and Hope has been a key text for me over the last year. The author, Munther Isaac, is a Palestinian Christian grappling with the complexities and tragedies of his homeland in the Middle East. He has an entire chapter dedicated to answering the question “who is my neighbor?” Here is part of that answer:

“The question ‘who is my neighbor?’ is not an innocent one. It assumes that there are those not considered neighbors. By this question, the teacher of the law was seeking to draw a circle around himself and wanted to ask Jesus, ‘Where do I draw the circle? Who is inside — so that I can be sure to love them; who is outside — so I can be free of my obligation to love them?’ Another way to frame the question would be, “Who is with us and who is against us? The man’s question reflects a typical sectarian mindset that divides one’s world into ‘us’ versus ‘them….’ We have tragically mastered this art of dividing people into ‘us’ versus ‘them.’”

Simply put, Jesus tells us our “neighbor” is everyone.

Here’s Isaac again: “There is no circle – there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’ defining the neighbor! Everyone is a neighbor – and we are called by God to love them as ourselves. It is not a matter of choice. We cannot pick and choose our neighbors.”

What I have grown to love about Luke’s gospel, and what makes it unique, is how intentionally it shows us who our neighbors are. Luke highlights women, children, the poor, and the social outcasts, all people often overlooked in Biblical times (and, let’s face it, can still be overlooked today). His gospel focuses on mercy and compassion, especially towards the marginalized.

Why this focus? Warren Wiersbe puts it this way in his commentary: “This is a book with a message for everybody…because Luke’s emphasis is on the universality of Jesus Christ and His salvation.”

This universality of the gospel should humble us, because it makes clear that Jesus didn’t just die for “people like me.” He died for everyone. He died for Americans. He died for immigrants. He died for suffering Ukrainians and displaced Palestinians. He died for people who voted differently than you or me in the last election. Everyone. Luke makes clear there is no room for exclusion in the gospel.

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

That message leads perfectly into the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, located in Luke 18:9-14. Two men go up to the temple to pray. The Pharisee was a respected, religious, and supposedly moral leader in these days. Meanwhile, the tax collectors who looked down upon and despised, often viewed as corrupt and even traitorous. Those hearing the beginning of this parable would immediately perceive the Pharisee as the “good guy” and the tax collector as the “bad guy.” But, as he often did, Jesus flipped the script.

The Pharisee boastfully prays about himself: “Thank God I’m not like other people.” He compares and measures his own perceived goodness against others’. Wiersbe says, “The Pharisees used prayer as a means of getting public recognition, and not as a spiritual exercise to glorify God.” The tax collector, though, can’t even lift his eyes up to heaven while asking for forgiveness and mercy. That’s humility. And Jesus says the humble, broken man, the outcast, goes home justified (declared righteous), while the proud man goes home only self-satisfied.

I chose this story because, if we’re honest with ourselves, we can see that too often we are the Pharisee in this story. We don’t think we are sometimes, and maybe we don’t actually pray this way, but do we think this way? How often do we feel physically, spiritually, economically, or socially superior to others? Jesus came to exalt the humble, heal the sick (Luke 5:31-33), and give grace to those who ask for it.

The Law and Grace

Thank God we are under that grace and not under the law.

The Pharisee tried to live by the law. He probably did a pretty good job of it, too. He followed the rules and checked off his list of accomplishments. The danger of solely following the law, though, is falling into pride, as the Pharisee clearly does. If we do the same, we can start to think about all of the great things we’ve done for God. But grace tells us: “It’s not about what you do. It’s about what Christ has done.” So many New Testament passages discuss this (Romans 6:14, Romans 7:6, Galatians 3:23-25, Ephesians 2:8-9). One I find particularly powerful is Galatians 2:21: “…for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.” The problem with modern-day legalism is that it puts “the law” on equal footing with, or even higher than, the grace of Christ. Grace alone is sufficient because it should humble us, helping us realize that nothing we could have said or done would earn us the mercy of Christ, yet he gave it to us anyway. We should gain humility from this, and humility in today’s world is weird.

Let’s Be Weird

But here’s the thing: Christians are meant to be a little weird. For proof, all we need to do is look back at the first-century Christians.

New Testament scholar Nijay Gupta says in his book Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling, “The first Christians were weird! I am talking about deviation from the cultural norms and society’s expectations for how things ought to be done.” His book asks us to get back to something resembling early Christianity, rather than a “modern American Christianity (that is) often viewed as a mirror of the worst of culture.” I cannot help but think that far too many churches and self-described evangelical influencers are acting more like the Pharisee than the tax collector. We’ve already seen that this is not a good thing. The “expected hero,” the Pharisee, is rejected, while “the outcast” is honored. This is the Gospel, but it can easily be viewed as strange or weird in a conservative American context where there are far too many people and groups viewed as outcasts and “others.”

Gupta, on a recent podcast episode, described how the early Christians shared in a “dangerous meal” precisely because they were not separated by race, social class, or wealth, but they held a common bond in Christ. That’s the church Jesus envisions: a table where everyone belongs. Do our churches look like that? Do your relationships look like that? Are we open to the people Jesus welcomed?

An Easter Reminder

Today is Good Friday. Do these ideas I’ve been presenting hold any ties to Holy Week and to Easter? I think so:

• The work of Christ on the cross should humble us.

• He didn’t die for the best of us, he died for all of us.

• Jesus gets us and feels what we feel, no matter how overlooked or broken we may be (Hebrews 4:15).

There has been a recent attack on the idea of empathy from certain influential evangelicals. But empathy is deeply biblical. Christ empathized with us when he took on humanity, and died the death we should have died. Just like his parables, the story of Jesus on the cross is straightforward, but it holds obvious, life-changing implications. It should humble us and change the way we view the “others,” people made in God’s image. If we fully receive the grace, the message, and the implications of Christ’s work, we too, like the tax collector, can be justified.