Eleventh Sunday after Trinity—Justified by God’s Mercy, Not by Our Works
In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I want to read a few things to you from the Augsburg Confession, the first Protestant confession of the Reformation, official to an emperor at least.
Our churches teach that the Word, that is, the Son of God, assumed the human nature in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So there are two natures, the divine and the human, inseparably joined in one person. There is one Christ, true God and true Man, who was born of the Virgin Mary, truly suffered, was crucified, died, and was buried. He did this to reconcile the Father to us, and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of mankind. He also descended into hell and truly rose again on the third day. Afterward, He ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. There He forever reigns and has dominion over all creatures. He sanctifies those who believe in Him by sending the Holy Spirit into their hearts to rule, comfort, and make them alive. He defends them against the devil and the power of sin. The same Christ will openly come again to judge the living and the dead, and so forth, according to the Apostles’ Creed.
That’s on the Son of God. Right after that, we have On Justification, where we talk about, apart from works of the Law, being justified for the sake that Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, was sent by His Father to make satisfaction for what we fail to do according to the Law of God. That Christ came and lived a perfect life according to the Law, in our place, and that He suffered the wrath of His Father in our place, which we deserve for not fulfilling the Law.
That is the basis by which we are justified, trusting in the fact that He did this for us.
That follows right after the Son of God. Right after that, we have On the Ministry, so that we may obtain this faith—faith in these facts of Jesus’ redemption for our sake, coming in what 1 Corinthians 15 tells us: “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and… rose again the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4)—for the forgiveness of sins, dying according to the Scriptures for us, rising from the dead, and ascending.
So that we may obtain this faith, the ministry of teaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments was instituted. Through the Word and Sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Spirit is given. He works faith when and where it pleases God, in those who hear the Good News, that God justifies those who believe that they are received into grace for Christ’s sake. This happens not through our own merits, but for Christ’s sake.
And then right after this, we have an article On New Obedience.
Our churches teach that this faith is bound to bring forth good fruit. It is necessary to do good works commanded by God because of God’s will. We should not rely on those works to merit justification before God. The forgiveness of sins and justification is received through faith. The voice of Christ testifies: “So likewise you, when you have done all those things which you are commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants. We have done what was our duty to do’” (Luke 17:10). The fathers teach the same thing. Ambrose says: “It is ordained of God that he who believes in Christ is saved, freely receiving forgiveness of sins without works, through faith alone.”
You’ll understand why I read all that to you in just a second. In this parable that Jesus teaches, it’s interesting in the Gospel of Luke—you should pay attention to this as you’re reading, especially the Gospel of Luke—when He tells a parable, usually Luke includes why He’s telling the parable.
Like this morning: “He spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others” (Luke 18:9). The word there, “despised,” is the same word used when Herod and his soldiers treated the Lord Jesus with contempt in the Passion account (Luke 23:11). Or when Peter’s preaching to the same Jews who crucified the Lord and said: “This is the ‘stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become the chief cornerstone’” (Acts 4:11).
Same word as “treated with contempt.” So that’s who He’s speaking this parable to: those who trust in themselves that they are righteous and despise their brother.
We have two men in this parable:
The Pharisee, who is outwardly pious but inwardly deceived, trusting in himself and despising others.
And then we have the tax collector—if you know anything, especially today, maybe you could say the same thing about tax collectors, but especially back then when the Roman Empire was occupying Palestine and they employed their own kindred, like Matthew, a Jew, as a tax collector. He gathered revenue for this foreign country from his own people, and often took more than he needed so that he could have some for himself.
You’re talking about an outwardly sinful person, a despised person. The Pharisee, outwardly to people, is the cream of the crop. The tax collector is lowest on the totem pole, the wicked, just persona non grata.
Yet those are the two people we have: the outwardly pious yet inwardly deceived, and the outwardly sinful but inwardly contrite, trusting in the mercy of God. And then Jesus’ warning at the end: “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 18:14).
There are all sorts of deceptions that we can all fall prey to as Christians.
I want to just talk about two of them from our parable today. But before I say that, I had a member of a previous congregation. He was taking new member instruction, and we were talking with his son just about the Christian faith and the Gospel in general.
I was explaining this article on justification—that you’re saved by grace through faith apart from works of the Law, that it has nothing to do with anything you have done, but only depends on you trusting in Christ, that you’re saved, that He did everything for you on your behalf.
And his son said: “Well, that means this is pretty easy, doesn’t it?” And I kind of chuckled at that, and his dad chuckled at that, because then we said: “Well, that part of it, for you, yes. But now you have to live a life in this world where you’re constantly bombarded with temptations to doubt that, for all sorts of reasons. Temptations to cast it aside, and all sorts of deceptions.”
Today, especially, a deception of trusting in works, and a deception of abusing grace. These are the ones I want to think about especially today.
First, we have this deception of trusting in works. You don’t need to think of the Pharisee in this parable as an outright unbeliever. He may very well be, but that’s not the point for us. We’re not supposed to look into the heart of a person. Jesus is going to tell us about people’s hearts. He’s going to say some of these Pharisees are like whitewashed tombs—looking nice on the outside, but inside full of rotting corpses (Matthew 23:27).
But you need to understand that he is a representative of visible Christendom—of the holiest and most pious Christians. I’m saying that so you don’t think that the Pharisee is not someone you need to look at as someone who could be you. You could be that Pharisee, deceived into trusting in your works even as a Christian, and then fall away.
The Pharisee boasts in things like fasting twice a week, giving tithes of all that he possesses (Luke 18:12)—outward works of piety that are not wrong, and not only not wrong, but oftentimes commanded. We don’t have a specific number for what we’re supposed to tithe to the church, but we do have the command that we are to ensure that the ministry of the Gospel is able to continue through our offering of what God has given us monetarily. “Even so the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should live from the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:14).
And what’s also there is the phrase: “God is not mocked” (Galatians 6:7). While we don’t post it on a bulletin board nowadays—though it used to be this way—we don’t post what each household gives so everyone can see. That should not make you feel at ease, because God knows, and He will not be mocked.
But understand that the Pharisee is talking about outward works that we actually ought to perform as Christians. Jesus, when He’s speaking in other places about the Pharisees, says: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone” (Matthew 23:23).
So the danger of relying on works for justification is thinking that they make us righteous before God while we despise others.
We can be easily deceived in this—even as Christians. Read the book of Galatians, and that is what it is about: Christians who have been baptized, same as us, who come to Divine Service, same as us, who receive the Sacraments, same as us—yet they were starting to be deceived by people coming in and saying, “Yes, you were brought into faith by the Spirit through the preaching of the Word. But now, to stay in this, you must keep these outward laws of Moses, like circumcision.”
That was what they were being deceived into believing. And that’s why Paul says: “Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:3). That is, being made perfect by obedience to the Law.
That’s the deception of trusting in works. And if you continue down that path and fall under the illusion that it’s your works that either make you right before God, or that your works after being converted to faith keep you in a right relationship with God, you will be deceived and you will fall away.
A second one—and I’ve already said this—is the deception of abusing grace, almost an opposite error. If we are justified only by Christ’s works, then our works don’t matter at all. That’s the conclusion. That’s how it could be stated in a certain way: “Hey, if it’s all Christ’s work, then it doesn’t matter what we do at all.”
It could be like the boy I was talking to, who said, “Well, this is pretty easy. If it’s all about Jesus and not about me, that sounds pretty easy.”
But that is not what the Scriptures teach us. We’re justified before God apart from our works, and we remain in the faith only by the work of the Spirit. But we also have the Scriptures that tell us: “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not!” (Romans 6:1–2). And also: “Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:17).
And this is why I read to you before, even in the Augsburg Confession, this ordering of things: the article on the Son of God and what He has done for us, and what He will do in returning on the last day. Faith in that is what justifies—what He does and what He has done. That is what makes us right before God. We receive that not through anything we do, or by making a decision or cooperating, but “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17).
So—the ministry. And then right after that, new obedience, because true and living faith will bear fruit. It is necessary that Christians do good works, because it is God’s will, and also because they necessarily follow true and living faith.
If there are no good works, then the faith is not actually faith. And that is the trap you will fall into if you are deceived into abusing grace.
Jesus affirms both inward and outward obedience. I want to quote in full this tithing of mint and cumin:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone” (Matthew 23:23).
The Gospel doesn’t undo our being faithful stewards and beginning to fulfill the Law of God by the Spirit. It doesn’t undo that. Outward works like tithing, fasting, and discipline are not meaningless, but they must flow from contrition and faith, not self-righteousness like the Pharisee.
A common way this abuse of grace can get voiced amongst Lutherans is to take quotes from guys like Luther out of context—like “sin boldly.” Have you heard this before? Have you heard “sin boldly”? You can take quotes like this, or that Jesus dwells with sinners, but then use it like a badge of honor and think the point is to be almost braggadocious about the fact that we sin.
I would say in context, I doubt Luther meant that, judging from how he writes in other places and especially in the sermons he writes on these very texts. That is not what he thinks we should be doing. But that is an example of an abuse of grace among us, where we take the hymn Chief of Sinners Though I Be and forget all the text of the hymn and just take “chief of sinners,” or Paul saying “of whom I am chief” (1 Timothy 1:15), and think it’s this badge of honor. Almost in a weird turn of events, it becomes the thing we will boast about—like the Pharisee boasting about tithing, not being an extortioner, not being an adulterer.
That is not how we present our sins to God.
Do you think for a moment that St. Paul, when he is talking about being chief among sinners because he persecuted the Church of God, when he remembers how he murdered Christians, how he stood there as St. Stephen was stoned to death (Acts 7:58–60), do you think that he’s bragging? Do you think that if he could, he wouldn’t give anything besides Christ to go back and not have done that? He is not bragging—not for a moment.
The tax collector is not bragging that he is a tax collector. He is not reveling in that fact. When Paul in Romans 7 talks about the war between the sinful flesh dwelling in his members and the new man, he’s not bragging. At the end, in contrition and desperation about that fight, about that sinful desire warring in him as a Christian and how he wishes it would go away—that he would not have to struggle with these sins, that he would not fall into these sins as a Christian—he says: “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24–25).
That is what our sinfulness and our standing as sinners ought to mean for us: not a badge of honor, but in true contrition, worked only by the Spirit through the Word of God, driving us to beg the Lord for help.
And that’s exactly what the tax collector does in the Gospel this morning. When he says, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” (Luke 18:13), he’s not just saying, “Lord, have mercy upon us,” like we hear in the Kyrie eleison. The Greek word here is not eleison—which is used when the blind men are crying out to Jesus for sight (Matthew 20:30–31).
Instead, he is using the word for propitiation. It’s hard to put it into English besides just saying, “God, be merciful to me.” But you might also find translations that say, “God, be propitious to me,” to get across that it’s a different word. It’s the word used about the mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant (Hebrews 9:5).
So the tax collector is in the temple, in close proximity to that altar where all the animal sacrifices that point ahead to Christ dying on the cross would take place. And he’s there, beating his breast—not bragging about his sin, not boasting in his sin—but placing before the eyes of the Father the propitiation of the Father’s beloved Son, Jesus Christ, for his sins.
That is what he’s doing. He wants the sin taken away, and so he puts before the Father the only thing that can take it away: the only thing that can give forgiveness, and the only thing in this life that can even cause us to begin to fulfill the Law of God as we are required to do. And that is Jesus Christ, “the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world” (1 John 2:2).
“God, be propitious to me, the sinner.” That is our posture—not being boastful about our external works while inwardly full of rotting corpses, but also not being boastful in our sins.
That’s not what Luther meant, if he ever said “sin boldly.” And if he did mean that, then he was wrong in that point. He didn’t write the Bible, so he could be wrong—but I doubt that’s what he meant anyway.
We’re not braggadocious or boastful about our sins or our external righteousness. We come before the Lord confessing that we are sinners, placing before Him the propitiation for our sins, and begging Him to continually send us His Spirit, who worked faith in us in this propitiation and who is the only One who can make us obedient in that new obedience that flows from living faith.
That is what we are begging for, like St. Paul begging: “Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24–25). May we all have this posture, and not fall prey to these deceptions.
Let us pray. Mighty God, Lord and Creator of heaven and earth, with grieved and hard-pressed hearts we come into these last times with the poor tax collector and stand afar off, recognizing that we stand far away from Your grace because of our sins. We also do not consider ourselves worthy to lift up our eyes toward heaven. But we beat our breast, that is, we lament the poison and inborn injury of our corrupt heart, and we say, “God, be gracious to us sinful men and women, for the sake of Jesus Christ, Your dearest and only Son, who lives and reigns with You, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one true God, now and forever. Amen.
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