On the other hand, maybe Jesus wasn't against religious people, but against "religion." Perhaps Jesus doesn't want us to be religious at all, but Christian. Someone wrote, "[Religious people] are trying to reach God, find God, please God through their own efforts. Religions reach up toward God. Christianity is God reaching down to man. Christianity claims that men have not found God, but that God has found them."17

Maybe the Pharisee's problem was his religion; he no longer needed God's grace. He was his own "god" worshiping his own "creator." Rather than genuine communication with God, his prayer was a "monologue of self praise."18 Jesus said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled (Matt. 5:6)." The Pharisee was not hungry for God's righteousness; he fed his soul on the empty husks of self-redemption. Consequently, he did not need the Lord in his system of justification. He saw himself as superior to others, his superiority a product of his own achievement.

The tax collector, on the other hand, was starving spiritually; he needed God and recognized that need. In one sense his heart was pure; he made an honest confession and acknowledged his need for God's mercy. Jesus was not praising or approving the tax collector's lifestyle any more than that of the prostitute in my parable. Nor was Jesus condemning the good deeds of the Pharisee -- or those of Elder Edwards. It was the Pharisee's attitude, his exaggerated self-confidence and comfortableness that denied him God's justification.

Likewise, it was the tax collector's confession, humility, and need that led Jesus to say, "this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted" (Luke 18:14).

When we are religious rather than Christian, God's righteousness becomes "my rightness."

When we are religious rather than Christian, God's truth becomes my understanding of God's truth.

When we are religious rather than Christian, dogma makes us dogmatic.

When we are religious rather than Christian, being a good person means being a better person than someone else.

When we are religious rather than Christian, believing becomes less important than that others believe what I believe.

I don't want to be religious; I want to be Christian for Christians need Christ. "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith -- and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God -- not by works, so that no one can boast" (Ephesians 2:8,9).

1Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing Company, 1987), p. 78.

2Ibid., p. 81.

3Fred B. Craddock, As One Without Authority (Nashville: Abingdon, third edition, 1979; first edition, 1971), p. 163.

4I like the way Ron Allen says it, "Each text has its own design, and we live in it according to the type of space it is." See Preaching Biblically: Creating Sermons in the Shape of Scripture, edited by Don M. Wardlaw (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983), p. 30.