Text: Luke 18:9-14 New International Version (NIV)
The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector
9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen
When Jesus finished telling this story, everyone in the room must have stood there, dumbfounded, speechless. What? Did he actually just say that … that tax collector went home justified, and not the Pharisee? He can’t be serious!
Can he?
The Pharisees were, in the eyes of many (and certainly in their own eyes) on top of the heap. As Pastor David Dykes writes: “In Jesus’ time, the Pharisee would have been considered the good guy–he wore the white hat. He was a synagogue leader in his town. All Pharisees were super-religious men who were extremely careful about obeying the Torah, which is basically the first five books of the Old Testament. They also followed the Mishnah, which explained how to obey the Torah. There might be several chapters in the Misnah devoted to one single verse in the Torah. In addition, they followed the Talmud, which was a commentary on the Mishnah. These guys lived by the book!”[1]
And living by the book was not at all easy. Imagine the constant vigilance that was required for a typical Pharisee to live his or her daily life. They had to live by and not break all the rules found in the Torah, the Misnah, and the Talmud! Rule upon rule upon rule! And if a Pharisee could get through a day without breaking a rule, well, maybe we can understand that he or she, like the Pharisee in the lesson, might feel a little self-satisfied.
We might understand it, yes. But approve of it? Not really.
Today, when we so much as hear the word “Pharisee,” we automatically assume that that person is going to be used an example of what not to be and whose behavior is to be pointed out as something we are not to do. Particularly in Luke’s Gospel, the Pharisees routinely come off looking bad. So, after hearing countless sermons about Pharisees and tax collectors, modern churchgoers like us have made something of a hero of the tax collector and a villain of the Pharisee. We like tax collectors – well, at least the tax collectors in the parables! But we’re all pretty much agreed that we don’t like Pharisees.
But the truth of the matter is that the Pharisees have gotten a bad rap over the intervening centuries. To many, many people of that day, they were actually the good guys. The things that Jesus taught were much closer to what the Pharisees believed and taught themselves than they were to what the other major group of the day, the Sadducees, believed. And the common people of that day were much more on the side of the Pharisees. In fact, as Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the greatest preachers of the 20th Century, wrote, the Pharisees were widely known as people of “true piety and profound spiritual life, ready to respond to new insights and to discover new dimensions in faith.” Paradoxically, the very people who seemed to be so bound to rules were the ones who were open to open to the movement of the Holy Spirit, as we might put it today. And the Pharisees were not only popular, but they were widely trusted, and positively looked up to. In fact, many scholars believe that Jesus himself was a Pharisee.
If true, this would go a long way toward explaining the animosity between Jesus and the Pharisees and why Jesus was always calling them out and rubbing their noses in their own conceits. He knew exactly what they were thinking, he knew their attitudes, and he didn’t let them off the hook.
Then, in contrast, we have the tax collector, our unexpected hero of the tale. There he is, on his knees, casting his eyes to the floor and whispering so softly that nobody but God can hear him, “Lord, forgive me.” And naturally, we think that the point of the story is that we should try to be like him. Certainly that what we’ve been led to believe, isn’t it? Didn’t Jesus say so himself?
Not exactly. What Jesus says is: “I tell you that this man, and not the other, went home justified before God.” He was not extolling the virtues of being a tax collector; he was lifting up the attitude of that man – an attitude of recognition of his station in life and his crimes against his fellow Jews, and the humbleness that this recognition created in him.
And, boy, did he have a lot to be humble and sorry about! This man was actually probably more of a toll collector – which meant that he was the absolute lowest form of life in his world, even lower, if you can believe it, than a regular tax collector. He had daily contact with the people he stole from – he looked them straight in the eye, face to face, as he took their money. He was considered a traitor, a collaborator, a man who’d sold out to the enemy. And, to top it off, he wasn’t paid by the Romans, so the only way he could make any living at all was by squeezing his fellow citizens for a cut. It’s legitimate to ask just why anybody would follow this occupation in the first place, but, well, this man at least did.
And he was trapped in this occupation, trapped like a fly on flypaper. Even if he had tried to quit, he would have had to pay back everything, every last cent, to every single person who’d ever given him money, plus 20%. It was simply impossible. There was no way out.
So there really was only one thing left to him, and that was to do what we see him doing today: To go to the Temple at the hour when the sacrifice of atonement was being offered, to stand at the gate, in the place set aside for the unclean and unrighteous, and beat his breast while begging God for mercy. Because only God could forgive him and give him mercy. He had sunk as far as a man could sink.
And Jesus says that he is the person to emulate! Shocking indeed!
But I wonder if they were shocked by that toll collector, or rather by Jesus telling them with this parable that not just their practice of prayer, but their whole understanding of what it means to be “righteous” was shallow, self-serving, judgmental, and utterly worthless – if it didn’t have those all-important components of self-recognition and humbleness.
The people of that day set great store by “righteousness.” Nowadays, when we talk about “righteousness,” it’s usually in the context of “self-righteousness,” and we all have a pretty good idea of what that means, since we have all experienced it from time to time.
But “righteousness” in Jesus’ day was something quite different. To be righteous in those days meant to have spent one’s entire life in a constant effort to conform to the law. And the goal of all those exertions was to achieve and maintain a relationship with the Holy One of Israel. As we’ve seen, that was very, very hard to do; and those who were noted for achieving this righteousness, the Pharisees, got a lot a “street cred,” you might say, for it.
But there was a trap, and the Pharisee in today’s lesson had fallen right into it: The trap of the sin of pride. For this man, trying to achieve righteousness had ceased to become a reason for thanks, humbleness, and gratitude and had instead morphed into a way to blow one’s one horn, to pat oneself on the back – for this man, it wasn’t a matter of “see how great God is for granting me this righteousness,” but rather one of “see how great I am because I am so righteous.”
Pharisees like that are still around. I run into them more frequently than I’d like. They’re the ones who love to spout Scripture by the bucketful, who go on at length about their faith, and so on – but who always leave us with the distinct impression that they’re either putting us on, or have at the very least entirely missed the point. They have accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior, they tell us; but that seems to be more of their personal “get out of jail free card,” because it doesn’t translate into anything resembling what Jesus commands his followers to do. Like the Pharisee, it’s “all about me.” But the point of a life of faith is not that you can strut around and tell people how great you are because God found you, but rather that you, like the toll collector, can share with others how great God is because God has reached down and lifted you up out of whatever mire you were in, and even more than that, that God has reached down and, through the sacrifice of Jesus, lifted the entire world out of the muck.
In today’s parable, the focus is the contrast between the “prayer” (so called) of the Pharisee, and the prayer of the toll collector. You see, there’s prayer, the activity, and then there’s prayer, the attitude. The first by itself is pretty much useless – nothing more than going through the motions. Anybody can mouth words. Anybody can memorize a prayer. But the effort is only worth it when it’s done with the right attitude. The Pharisee is an example of the activity, while the toll collector is an example of the attitude.
Jesus makes that clear in his use of the word “justified.” As David Lose writes, “Justification, in contrast to righteousness, does not depend on our own efforts and, indeed, has nothing to do with them. We can take neither credit nor responsibility for our standing before God yet recognize that we are recipients of a profound gift. Looking around us, we see all others in a similar vein, people that God has created and loves and out of love has also justified.”[2]
There was no love in that Pharisee’s prayer. There wasn’t even a little bit of respect for that toll collector as a fellow human being. His sense of righteousness had rotted into the self-righteousness that cuts us off from others, and most importantly, from a true relationship with God. It is no accident that Jesus quotes two commandments, not just one, when asked “What is the greatest commandment?” – “’Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ ‘The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” That Pharisee could have made a case that he followed the first one, but not the second; he failed, and failed miserably, in loving his neighbor, in this case, that poor, lowly toll collector. Jesus tells us that we need both.
The take-away for us today is clear: We’re called to do our best to live lives that reflect our righteousness – our sincere attempts to live up to the call of Christ to us; but just as importantly, we must always be aware that what matters is not what we have done or do or may do but what God has done for us in Jesus Christ!
And that is what makes all the difference.
We end this sermon where we began: With prayer.
As William Barclay tells us: “No one who is proud can pray. The gate of heaven is so low that none can enter it save upon their knees. Christina Rosetti’s words express all that any of us can say:
“None other Lamb, none other Name,
None other Hope in heaven or earth or sea,
None other Hiding-place from guilt and shame,
None beside Thee.
“No one who despises others can pray. In prayer we do not lift ourselves above others. We remember that we are one of a great army of sinning, suffering, sorrowing humanity, all kneeling before the throne of God’s mercy.
“True prayer comes from setting our lives beside the life of God…And when we set our lives beside the life of Jesus and beside the holiness of God, all that is left to say is, ‘God be merciful to me – the sinner.’”[3]
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] Dykes, David, “The Peril of Proud Praying,” http://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/the-peril-of-proud-praying-david-dykes-sermon-on-parable-pharisee-56700.asp
[2] Lose, David, “Pentecost 23 C: The Power of Being Justified,” http://www.davidlose.net/2016/10/pentecost-23-c-the-power-of-being-justified/
[3] Barclay, William, The Gospel of Luke, The New Daily Study Bible, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 1975, 2001, pp. 266-7