Today’s Scripture
Reading (November 4, 2017): Luke 18
“There is nothing noble in being
superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former
self.” The words, spoken by Ernest Hemmingway, speak of a reality that I am
afraid that we often miss. We want to prove ourselves worthy of worth. We want
to be important. And so we dress ourselves up and proclaim the good things that
we have done. And we all do it. From the average people that I am in contact with
to the President of the United States bragging about his Ivy League education
and how smart he is (after all, he has a very high IQ, at least, in his mind, and
an IQ that is much higher than anyone else around him). Our words scream that
we are noble, that our position in life is well-earned and we are worthy of
having people pay attention to our words.
The problem is that even if that
were true, and it usually is not, the attitude that we are better than others
drives other people away. No one wants to listen to someone who always brags
about how good they are. And there is a feeling that maybe those who proclaim
their superiority protest too much. That they are trying to sell themselves on
the idea that they are worthy. And in the process, they begin to believe that
they have no growth yet to be done. Their humility, when it is acted on, is
false.
So Jesus tells the story of two
men. One, a Pharisee, believes that he is worthy and noble and begins his
conversation with God by outlining all of the good that he has accomplished and
all of the reasons why he is better than everyone else. The second man has no
illusions of nobility. He wants to honor God, but there is nothing inside of him
that is worthy of that kind of honor. He doesn’t approach God, and his prayer,
rather than focusing on all the good that he has accomplished in life, focuses
on all of the way that he does not measure up.
And God’s response? It is the
tax-collector who measures up in the eyes of God. The story would have caused a
ripple among Jesus’s listeners. After all, the Pharisees were the ones who they
were taught to look up to and to try to emulate. The tax-collectors were the
ones who were universally despised. How could this reversal that Jesus was
speaking of be true? But the reality is that it was only the tax-collector who
had a chance to be truly noble. In bragging about our lifestyle and wisdom, we
come to the realization that there is very little that we need to change. And
so there is no way that we will become a better person tomorrow – there is no
way that we will be able to live up to Hemmingway’s definition of nobility. It is
only when we recognize our weaknesses, mistakes and sin, that we give ourselves
the chance to become a better person tomorrow.
I want to emulate the
tax-collector. There are many ways that I want to change and become a better
person. None of us have arrived at the point of perfection, and so we all have
the potential of becoming a noble person by being a better person tomorrow than
we were today – and becoming superior to our former selves. But to accomplish
that we have to forgo the foolish act of comparing ourselves to others and
begin to just compare our self with the me
that was written into history yesterday.
Tomorrow’s Scripture
Reading: Matthew 21
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