Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
2 Timothy 4.6–8, 16–18; Luke 18. 9–14
“The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people…’”
King Charles and Pope Leo in the Sistine Chapel, 23 October 2025 © Vatican Media
The Pope and the Queen played an outsized role in the graffiti I saw as a boy. Their titles usually appeared in a three-letter acronym only differentiated by its last letter. The first letter was ‘F’, and did indeed stand for the F-word you’re wondering if the Rector is actually going to use in the pulpit. The second letter was ‘T’, simply for “the”. And the last letter was either ‘P’ or ‘Q’. It was, in a strange way, quite useful to have ‘FTP’ or ‘FTQ’ written on a wall, as if you were somewhere unfamiliar, it gave you an instant visual clue as to what sort of place you were in, and therefore whether you could tell the truth about who you were and where you came from, or whether you had to tell a few little white lies.
The Pope of Rome and the King or Queen of England were our respective bogeymen. You might not have had anything much against them personally, you may even have sort of liked what you saw of them on the TV, but you knew if you were rude about them, you were taking a pop at a sacred symbol of the other side, and you were also warning anybody on your own side who might go soft what was expected of them.
Of course, it’s easy from the security of rural England to roll your eyes at all that and say, ‘Well what do you expect from Northern Ireland?’ But for four hundred years, this division wasn’t just in Northern Ireland, but across Europe and later across the world. One side said there was no salvation outside their Church, while the other loved phrases like: “the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities”.
One of the mainstays of British national identity was, into the early 20th Century, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Almost forgotten now, it was full of grizzly stories of godly Protestants being burned at the sake and disembowelled, usually accompanied by lurid ink drawings that, in the days before horror movies, were probably part of its appeal. The Catholic minority in England had their equivalent stories of saints being crushed to death, or quartered while alive, and Irish Catholics not only had similar stories but outright dispossession in their own country to draw on.
The saddest part is, all the stories were true, in all their cruelty. Tyburn really happened, and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre really happened. But people tended to remember the stories of when they were victims, and often chose not remember the stories where they were making the victims. Christians proclaim that Christ, who rejected violence and revenge and conquest and power, is the victim sacrificed for the sins of the world—and then, too often, go out and make more victims in His name. When do that, we nail Christ to the Cross all over again.
So the King and the Pope did something very important when they prayed side by side, with the choirs of St George’s, Windsor and the Sistine Chapel singing as one body. Each one carrying the weight of persecution done in the name of their office, each one bearing the pain of being victimised.
This Sunday, just a few days after this historic visit, both Anglicans and Roman Catholics in England have the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican set as the Gospel of the day. The Roman Empire’s tax collectors were called publicani in Latin, which is why some versions of the Bible refer to them as ‘publicans’—if you hear this in the Bible, it doesn’t mean running a pub, but being a tax farmer.
The Pharisee goes to pray, which involves him telling God about how well he keeps the formal rules of the Faith – something God already knows, of course – and then telling God about all the people whom he’s better than. There’s no question the people who he’s talking about aren’t exactly model citizens—thieves and rogues (well none of us are like that, I’m sure), adulterers (maybe, if we’re being honest, some of us do know something about that), and most of all the tax-collector next to him.
Even today, I’m sure none of us likes paying our taxes all that much, but tax collection in the Roman Empire wasn’t like filling in some online forms from HMRC. The tax collectors paid a rent to the state for the right to operate, and they kept for themselves any money they were able to raise above that rent. Raising the money involved quite a bit of intimidation. They were hated across the Roman Empire, but Jews in Palestine in Jesus’ time despised them more than most, because those who operated in the areas they lived in tended to be Jews themselves, Jews who were collaborating with an Empire that only recently annexed them completely. The tax collectors were held in absolute contempt, the lowest form of human life, people who collaborated with the enemy and treated their own people abominably so they could get rich. In the eyes of most of their neighbours—scum! So, most of the people hearing this parable would think, ‘You know, maybe that Pharisee is a bit full of himself, but, come on, at least he’s still better than a tax collector!’
Yet, the tax collector – this absolute scumbag! – is used by Jesus as an example of how we should behave. When he prays, he stands far from the altar, beating his breast, and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’ The Pharisee might be good at ticking the boxes, but the tax collector knows that he is completely dependent on God’s mercy.
Heaven is not reward for good behaviour. We can’t earn Heaven. It is something that we can only enter into by accepting it as a gift from God. Christ taught that God can only save us if we accept that we need His Grace and His mercy. Now, if we accept all that—that through Christ’s sacrifice and God’s Grace, and that alone, heaven is opened to us, then it should profoundly change the way we live our lives on this Earth. But it’s important to get the sequence right. We do good in response to God’s Grace; we don’t do good to win God’s favour, for we already have that.
Christians are always at risk of behaving like the Pharisee, thinking we can tell God how much better we are than other human beings made in His image and likeness. That’s at the root of those persecutions of the Reformation era—people thinking, like the Pharisee, that they were checking off God’s holy tick boxes, and so much better than thoseother scumbags. But all of us fall short in many ways for which we need to be profoundly sorry, most of them about how we live our daily lives rather than questions of beliefs or religious practice. All of us need to constantly work at being the people God made us to be. All of us therefore need God’s Grace and His mercy – kings and popes and tax collectors and us.
In our Epistle, St Paul wrote, towards the end of his life, about the sufferings he endured so “the message might be fully proclaimed”. This was the message—salvation is through God’s Grace, and God’s Grace alone. Both Catholics and Protestants teach that. If only they had lived with more grace towards one another, much misery and suffering could have been avoided—much violence by Christians to one another, and thus much scandal to the Saviour they share.
But there is always room for a fresh start with God. This week, two poor sinners in need of God’s Grace, one a king and one a pope, opened themselves and those they lead to the possibility of something new, and fresh, when they prayed together in the Sistine Chapel.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
