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
Ben Franklin once wrote in his Poor Richard’s Almanac that “he who loves himself will have no rivals.”
Today’s lesson follows right on the heels of last week’s and is also about prayer. The twist to this story, though, is that it’s about prayer, the action, and then there’s prayer, the attitude. The first by itself doesn’t get you too far; it can be nothing more than going through the motions. Prayer is only worth the effort when it’s done with the right attitude. You need to feel it, not just say it.
When Jesus told this parable there were some present in that crowd who figured they had it made. After all, they followed the rules, they crossed their “t’s” and dotted their “i’s” and were sure that they were on the right track and that they were best buds with God.
These people were the Pharisees. Today, we automatically assume that the Pharisees are going to be that bad guys in any parable, and we’re always right – particularly in Luke’s Gospel, the Pharisees do not come off looking so hot. After hearing countless sermons about Pharisees and tax collectors, modern churchgoers like us have made 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! That Pharisee, though – not so much.
Except the Pharisees have gotten an undeserved reputation over the course of the past twenty centuries. The word “Pharisee” has become a kind of shorthand term to negatively describe any person or group we don’t particularly like. But to many, many people of that day, they were 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. 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.” So, yes, the Pharisees were not only popular, but they were the pillars of their society, they were widely respected and people looked up to them. In fact, many scholars believe that Jesus himself was a Pharisee. If so, that goes a long way to explaining why it was so easy for Jesus to get under their skin – he knew exactly where their spiritual fault lines were and just what buttons to push! He didn’t let them off the hook.
Then, in contrast, we have that poor tax collector. If two thousand years of sermons and Bible studies have turned the Pharisees into villains, then they have also made a hero out of this man. 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 we all automatically draw the conclusion that we should try to be like him.
But there is a problem with that. One of our favorite movies is “Out of Sight,” with Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney. This is the one where George Clooney plays a man who’s only real skill is robbing banks – and he’s already been sent up the river twice for it by the time we meet him in the movie. In the course of the film, we watch him get sent up a third time. Anyway, he and Jennifer Lopez, who’s a Federal Marshall, have an unlikely love affair. It ends tragically, of course, with Clooney getting sent up one more time.
Now, Clooney’s character is portrayed as a sort of affable anti-hero who’s really a good guy at heart. But here’s the thing: He’s still a bank robber! Bank robbers, whether they’re Clooney’s character in “Out of Sight,” or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – are criminals. Period. They are not the kind of people we want to emulate and certainly not the kind of people we want our kids to become.
This is very similar to the way the tax collector has been sort of “rehabilitated” over the centuries. This man was actually probably more of a toll collector – which meant that he was the absolute lowest form of life in his world. He had daily contact with the people he stole from – he looked them 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, on top of it all, this man wasn’t even wealthy – he wasn’t paid by the Romans, so the only way he could make any living at all was by squeezing his fellow citizens. Think of the schoolyard bully who forced you to give him your lunch money, and you’ve described the toll collector. Why anybody would follow this occupation in the first place is a very good question; but, well, this man at least did.
But he was trapped in this occupation. Even if he had wanted to quit, he would have had to pay back every last cent to every single person who’d ever given him money, plus 20%. It was simply impossible. There 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 do that.
There was nothing of the romantic George Clooney-esque anti-hero about this guy.
When Jesus originally told this parable, it had shock value. It turned the world of those who heard it upside down. But today that story doesn’t have quite the bite it once had.
Still there’s still a lesson for us here. The Pharisee’s prayer is self-serving, callous and arrogant – “I thank you, God, that I’m not like him over there!” Here’s a twist: The simple fact is that he’s right – everything the Pharisee says is true. He and those like him have set themselves apart from others by their faithful adherence to the law. He is, by the standards both Luke and Jesus seem to employ, righteous (see Luke 15:7).
Yet he has missed the true nature of his blessing.
Because we’re human, we also have such feelings sometimes – “There but for the grace of God go I,” as they say. But when we do, we need to remember that we are called to see the face of Jesus in the faces of every person we meet, whoever they are, in whatever place or circumstance. It sounds so simple, but it can be very hard.
Maybe the Pharisee’s basic problem was deliberate isolation. Note the first part of verse 11 in today’s lesson: “The Pharisee stood by himself…” Some of the Pharisees – though probably not all – had taken all the adulation of others to heart, and had begun to really think of themselves as a higher class of people; and such people don’t willingly rub shoulders with the great unwashed. That seems to have been “our” Pharisee’s attitude. Just as the pigs in George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm separated themselves from all the other animals and gave themselves the best of everything, because they believed they were “more equal” than the others, this Pharisee and his entire class had separated themselves from their fellow citizens for much the same reason. In his self-imposed isolation, this Pharisee has trusted in himself. His prayer of gratitude may be addressed to the Lord, but it is really about himself. He locates his righteousness entirely in his own actions and being. And so his prayer had the right form, but not the right feel, and therefore wasn’t really a prayer at all, but rather nothing more than self-satisfied bragging. Because he and those like him lived in their own little bubble, he wasn’t even aware of it.
By contrast, that toll collector knows that he has no means at his disposal by which to claim righteousness. He has done nothing of merit; quite the opposite, in fact – he has pretty much dedicated his life to offending the law of Israel. For this reason he stands back, hardly daring to approach the Temple, and throws himself on the mercy of the Lord.
David Lose writes, “Here is the essential contrast. One makes a claim to righteousness based on his own accomplishments, while the other relies entirely upon the Lord’s benevolence. Rather than be grateful for his blessings, the Pharisee appears smug to the point of despising others. In his mind there are two kinds of people: the righteous and the immoral, and he is grateful that he has placed himself among the righteous. The tax collector, on the other hand, isn’t so much humble as desperate. He is too overwhelmed by his plight to take time to divide humanity into sides. All he recognizes as he stands near the Temple is his own great need. He therefore stakes his hopes and claims not on anything he has done or deserved but entirely on the mercy of God.”[1]
That is the status quo until Jesus dies on the Cross. The moment that happens, we read in the Gospel accounts that the curtain of the Temple, which divides the righteous and the unrighteous, is torn in two. There is no division anymore before God. We are all justified by God’s abundant grace – as the Apostle Paul puts it in his magnificent and powerful letter to the Romans: “It is God who justifies; who is to condemn?”
This parable tells us that, anytime we draw a line between who’s “in” and who’s “out,” we will find God on the other side; it escapes even its context and reveals to us that it is not, as we think, about self-righteousness and humility any more than it is about a pious Pharisee and desperate tax collector. Rather, this parable is about God: God who alone can judge the human heart; God who determines to justify the ungodly.
So, at the end of the day, we are left with nothing to claim but our utter and total dependence on God’s mercy. When we allow that recognition to take hold of us, and we forget – if only for a moment – our human-constructed divisions and stand before God, aware of nothing but our need, then we, too, find that we are justified by the God of Jesus and invited to return to our homes in mercy, grace, and gratitude!
[1] Lose, David, “Commentary on Luke 18:9-14,” Working Preacher, October 24, 2010, https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=815