Trinity 11

August 31, 2025

St. Luke 18:9-14

The man who perpetrated heinous evil at Annunciation school in Minneapolis depicted himself in his journal as a demon. Indeed, the transgender ideology is demonic. It seeks to undo God’s creation of the human person as distinctly and irrevocably male and female. In his journal he reflects on his experience of possession: “I feel like there is some kind of god … controlling me…. I suddenly start writing things that I don’t even think of myself.” He describes losing time, another experience of people who are possessed by malevolent spirits.

Demons are real. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the forces of darkness. The devil wants to destroy humanity.

The most important thing you can do is to pray over your babies every night, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” and in the Evening Prayer, “Let Your holy angel be with me, that the evil foe may have no power over me.” And repeat it in the morning.

What is the evil foe’s chief aim? To lead us away from Christ.

Thus, even more than breaking the Fifth Commandment, “You shall not murder,” he seeks to lead us away from the First, “You shall have no other gods.” In the Small Catechism, the petition, “Lead us not into temptation” is explained as asking God to “guard and keep us so that the devil, the world, and our sinful nature may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great shame and vice.” The order is significant. The chief evil is false belief – to misunderstand the nature of God, man, and the world. Spinning out of this is despair, where we lose hope. That’s what happens when we no longer have confidence that God will rescue us. Built on the foundation of false belief and despair comes the “great shame and vice,” the wicked actions we see in disobedience to parents, murder, adultery, theft, and lies.

So the demons motivate some to strike down the innocent. But the primary diabolical aim is to teach falsely about God’s Word.

That’s at the heart of today’s parable, on the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

What is the evil Jesus identifies here? “He spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others.” They believed they were in the right. This produced arrogance and a seething animosity. Doesn’t that describe our nation’s politics? It can infect our homes and our church, too. “I’m right, everyone who disagrees with me is a fool.” The word Jesus uses, translated here as “despised others,” is the same word used for how the soldiers treated Jesus: contemptuously. Contempt might be the dominant trait of our society today. St. Paul says in Rom. 14, “Why do you judge your brother? Or why do you show contempt for your brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ” [v10].

The Pharisee reveals his contempt even in his prayer! He thanks God he is “not like other men.” That’s what he brings to the temple: his own alleged superiority.

He moves to a litany of his good works: “I fast twice a week.” Which is to say, he practices self-control. The Jews did this by having two days a week where they restrained themselves from food.

There was nothing wrong with this. The early Christians did the same, but on different days; they fasted on Wednesday, the day Judas made his agreement to betray Jesus; and on Friday, the day of Jesus’ crucifixion. Fasting is good.

“I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.” The requirement to tithe means to give ten percent of your income. He went beyond that: he didn’t just tithe on his income, but on everything he had.

Is there anything wrong with that? No, just the opposite! It is a practice we all should adopt voluntarily: when you get paid, or when you come into some wealth great or small, set aside the first ten percent for an offering. This is what the Bible calls “first fruits.” The first ten percent belongs to God; in fact, the whole thing belongs to God. Entrust Him with your first fruits and you will not go hungry.

These good works are indeed good. The Pharisee is not judged because he fasted, or tithed. He is judged because he placed his trust in these things, and looked down on others. As Jesus says elsewhere, he should have done these, along with the greater works, showing justice and mercy to others.

His core problem is the heart.

And that is where the Tax Collector is different. Tax collectors at that time were hated because they were notoriously corrupt. But this tax collector has come to the temple to confess his sins. He demonstrates contrition. God works contrition in us when we hear His Law and it terrifies our conscience. We are contrite when we hate our own sins, feel sorrow over them, and know that we deserve God’s punishment now and into eternity.

When David repented after breaking the sixth commandment with Bathsheba, and then the fifth commandment by murdering her husband, he prayed the 51st Psalm, saying, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart—these, O God, You will not despise.” That’s the spirit in which the tax collector comes to the Temple - the spirit of contrition.

This is also why God sometimes allows terrible things to happen to us. Luther put it this way: “It is impossible for a person not to be puffed up by his good works unless he has first been deflated and destroyed by suffering and evil until he knows that he is worthless and that his works are not his but God’s.”

That’s at the heart of the Tax Collector’s prayer, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” You probably know the typical Greek phrase for “Lord, have mercy,” Kyrie, eleison. So you’d expect some form of eleison here. But instead we get a passive verb related to the noun hilastērion, which is an offering of expiation or propitiation.

Expiation means the obliteration of sin through the death of a sacrificial victim. Propitiation has to do with the appeasement of God’s wrath.

The noun can refer to the “mercy seat,” the gold plate atop the ark of the covenant. The Mercy Seat is between the wings of the cherubim, the guardian angels, where YHWH sits in judgment. On the annual Day of Atonement, the high priest sprinkled the blood of the sacrifice there, making atonement for the people.

Thus the Tax Collector’s prayer is something like, “God, take away my sin because of the blood on the mercy seat.” He’s placing his trust outside of himself, and on God’s own work of the atonement. He knows he cannot fast or tithe his way out of his sins. No one can.

“If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, who, O Lord, could stand?” So he looks to the mercy seat, he looks to the expiation, he looks to the propitiating sacrifice for his forgiveness.

St. Paul uses the same word in Romans 3, saying that the death of Jesus is the blood that brings mercy: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood” [Ro 3:23–25].

By faith in the sacrifice, this man goes home justified, declared righteous before God.

So this parable teaches us how to pray. The Apology teaches:

Mercy delivers us; our own merits, our own efforts, do not. So Daniel also prays:

For we do not present our pleas before You because of our righteousness, but because of Your great mercy. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for Your own sake, O my God, because Your city and Your people are called by Your name. (Daniel 9:18–19)

So Daniel teaches us in praying to seize mercy, that is, to trust in God’s mercy and not to trust in our own merits before God.

We don’t trust in our own merits, our own works, our own good deeds. Does that mean the Christian avoids good works? Of course not!

In the next chapter of Luke is the account of the conversion of a tax collector, Zacchaeus. Jesus forgives his sins, and in response, Zacchaeus does not tithe. He gives 50%! This is in addition to restoring four times however much he had defrauded others.

This is what our confessions call the New Obedience. We Christians are called to do good works not so we can place our trust in them, but because, being baptized and made new, we desire to lead a new and different kind of life.

So what do we learn today? Demons are real. They want to harm our bodies. And they especially want to harm our souls. Our souls are harmed by false doctrine. We can’t be proud, and look down on others. We must be contrite. We look to the blood of Jesus, we look to God’s mercy seat, for forgiveness. That forgiveness justifies us, makes us right before God. And then we’re ready to go about controlling our bodies, giving tithes and offerings, and caring for our neighbors. +INJ+