Preached by the Rev. David Henson, Sunday, Oct. 26 at St. James
When you think of the great villains of history, what fictional characters come to mind as the most iconic and most terrifying? Darth Vader? Lex Luthor? Dracula?
All those folks are justifiably scary, but this morning, I want to talk about a different villain, the only villain to make American Film Institute’s top 10 list who doesn’t physically harm or kill a single soul.
Everyone else on that list—Norman Bates, Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter—are violent psychopaths or mass murders.
Not Henry Potter.
And yet, he remains one of the most hated villains in all of history.
If you don’t recognize the name, imagine it being spoken in the iconic voice of Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey. Mr. Potter, of course, is the villain of the holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life, and his evil deeds that earn him the No. 6 spot on the all-time villain list are simply that he heartlessly extorts and bankrupts ordinary, hardworking people to make himself a little bit richer.
It’s hard not to get angry even today when Mr. Potter argues for the foreclosure on folks’ homes during difficult economic times. These people have children, they say, to which Mr. Potter replies, “They’re not my children. Are you running a business or a charity ward? Not with my money!”
Maybe Mr. Potter doesn’t shoot or stab anyone like everyone else in the top 10 villains, but his actions are no less lethal, no less gutting, no less abhorrent. There’s a reason why Stewart’s George Bailey in passionate outrage calls Mr. Potter a scurvy old spider and warped and frustrated old man preying on the poor.
It’s the kind of behavior that sparks righteous anger in us in real life as well. Remember back in 2015, when Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical representative who hiked the price of a life-saving drug, one of 50 essential medicines listed by the World Health Organization, by an astonishing 5,400%? Everyone from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders roundly condemned him.
Much like Mr. Potter, everybody hated that guy and for good reason. Just like Mr. Potter, he wasn’t just profiting from human suffering, he was exploiting it and amplifying it for financial gain.
I bring up these two universally disliked villains because I want us to understand something of what it was like when people in Jesus’ time encountered tax collectors.
Tax collectors like the one in this parable weren’t simply the ancient equivalent of an IRS tax agent, diligently tending tax tables and percentages, ferreting out fraud, all so tax dollars can fund things like roads, military, and public services. Taxes in the ancient world were about enriching those in power, not providing for the common good.
In the Roman system, the Empire sold the rights to collect taxes to a local person, who subleased those rights to various folks who collected taxes themselves. The only way they could make a living was to overcharge people—mostly poor and economically fragile people—and pocket the extra for their own paycheck. It was essentially an oppressive, ancient pyramid scheme.
But it gets worse. Not only were tax collectors profiting off the suffering of their neighbors, they were also collaborators with the oppressive occupying Roman army who ruled the region and ensured the flow of wealth went up to the top not out into the community.
They betrayed their neighbors. They betrayed their faith. They betrayed their nation.
So when Jesus introduces two characters at the beginning of the parable, a Pharisee and a tax collector, everyone and, I mean everyone, was rooting for the Pharisee. The people would have remembered their own encounters with real-life tax collectors, and how they were forced to hand over too much of what little they had. They would have remembered vividly and viscerally seeing tax collectors eating and dressing well while they and their children went around in threadbare clothes and on empty stomachs.
All those things this Pharisee says he’s doing, fasting, tithing, and the like? All that wasn’t just performative righteousness. Those were part of a sort of religious social safety net that was intended to provide for the poor.
So when the Pharisee calls the tax collector a thief, a bandit, and a swindler in the story, he’s not doing so because he’s a sanctimonious, self-righteous jerk who lacks all compassion. He isn’t insulting some poor, pitiful outcast.
Rather, here in a gathered crowd at the temple, among people who are trying to worship, during the daily afternoon sacrifice carried out by the priests, the Pharisee is standing up to this unrighteous, unethical tax collector who has the gumption to show up among the people he’s actively exploiting and betraying for his own gain.
The Pharisee is having none of it, not for himself and not for anyone else.
The Pharisee is George Bailey, dressing down Mr. Potter.
And up until this point, everyone listening would have been nodding along with the Pharisee, thinking something along the lines of, “I’m glad someone finally said out loud what we’ve all be thinking.”
But then, Jesus turns the tables on everyone.
Because the tax collector, head bowed in humility and humiliation, beats his breast and begs for mercy. The translation, God be merciful to me a sinner, while powerful fails to capture the drama of the moment and immediacy of the plea. The priests in the Temple are overseeing the animal sacrifices at that moment, and the people are gathered in the Temple area for afternoon prayers. In the context, the tax collector is essentially calling out, beyond the shaming and condemnation, much of it very much earned, “Oh God, please, let that sacrifice be for me. Make an atonement for me!”*
Now, if Mr. Potter or Martin Shrkeli ever walked into this church and prayed that same prayer, there would be at least a part of me that would want to roll my eyes and refuse believe it was anything more than a disingenuous act. “Oh please, give me a break” I might say, and I might suspect maybe some in Jesus’ time would have too when they heard this tax collector’s prayer.
Maybe their expecting some kind of comeuppance to come next.
But Jesus says the tax collector, not the Pharisee, goes home restored and made whole in the eyes of God.
Few endings would have been more shocking.
Of all of Jesus’ parables, I suspect this one might have enraged people the most.
It made a hero out of the one person everyone universally agreed was the bad guy.
Tax collectors weren’t just beyond redemption. They were beyond people’s desire for their redemption. Much like Jonah didn’t want the Ninevites to be redeemed and much like the people didn’t want Jesus to redeem another tax collector named Zaccheus but to condemn him.
And I think that might be the point of the parable today, and by point, I actually mean both the message and the part of the parable that pricks my soul, my heart, and my conscience.
There are people in our world and in our lives that if they were to walk through that door would cause us to pray like the Pharisee does—and not without reason.
Imagine a person who, like the tax collector, represents everything you stand against, everything you believe your faith stands against, everything your nation stands against.
Imagine that person walks into St. James and sits on the very back row.
Imagine the anger you feel at their presence.
Imagine your priest, feeling righteous, preaches a sermon condemning them as a thief, a bandit, and a swindler.
Imagine them confessing their sins.
Imagine them praying for mercy.
Imagine them being redeemed.
Imagine them changing their ways.
Imagine God always loving them.
Imagine God rejoicing and welcoming home a lost sheep of his own flock.
Now, to be clear, this isn’t a parable about the rightness or the wrongness of the tax collector’s actions. Just like with old Mr. Potter or even Martin Shkreli, there is no question that they have sinned and done grievous harm.
This parable is instead about confronting our own capacity for contempt for other beloved children of God, all in the name of God.
It’s about the moment when our understandable righteous anger at injustice and evil tips over into self-righteous contempt and allows us to write people off as beyond redemption. It’s about confronting that certain resigned hopelessness that makes us, instead of God, the judge and jury, believing some things and some people can never change, especially those causing harm.
This story invites us into an uncomfortable space of redemptive imagination. It challenges us to hold space, deep within our souls, for the one-day, against-all-odds redemption of the deepest, scariest, and most infuriating villains. Because even if that space is scarcely large enough for a handkerchief, it can swell to the size of a pocket universe, big enough to hold all things.
So what would it be like to place that hope against the battered walls of our hearts?
Would it be comforting? Maybe.
Would it sear our souls to recognize the humanity of those we consider inhumane, to acknowledge the belovedness of those we consider unlovable? Probably. It does me.
How badly would it hurt to dab our righteous anger and understandable outrage with the stinging balm of God’s belovedness that comes to us not in power and might but in the humble woundedness of a Crucified Lord whose death redeems all things, even those whose deal death in the world like a crooked card sharp?
Would we wind up more like Jesus, who, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, holds out hope on the cross for his enemies’ redemption, pleads for their forgiveness, and in the boundless compassion of his imagination and limitless mercy, fabricates their innocence through his own body and blood?
Would doing all this, finally and at last, save the souls of those who do harm in the world?
I don’t know. I hope so.
But I can tell you one thing. Even if it doesn’t save their souls, it might just save mine.**
Notes:
* Parables as Subversive Speech by William Herzog
**Closing line is a reference to a famous quote by Will Campbell.