Today, we have another parable with a couple of characters that seem to be complete opposite: The pharisee and the tax collector. This is not the first time we find a couple of opposite characters in Luke’s Gospel: you probably remember the unjust judge and the widow last week, and recently, we also talked about the rich man and Lazarus. It looks like Jesus enjoyed telling these stories playing on contrasts. Whether funny or shocking, the stories would make people react and captured their attention, it was then easier to deliver a serious teaching that would stick in everybody’s mind, including ours. For us yet, the full effect of the stories might be delayed a bit, since we aren’t always aware of the cultural background, and also because it can be harder to find some equivalents in our world today. It may require a little bit of imagination to relate to the narrative, and it is probably something we struggle a little more with this week. Let me explain:
We know the pharisees of course, they are everywhere in the Gospel. We know they were religious leaders, not priests. They lived outside the Temple but they strove to apply the Mosaic Law (= Moses’s Law, the Torah) to the letter. We know that they were especially big on purity laws, which could make them a bit snobbish. It’s like they thought they were a little better than ordinary people, and a little closer to God too, a little holier. This is, at least, the way the Gospel often presents them. Now the tax collectors, at the other end of the spectrum of the Jewish society, were bad guys. That was at least the way most people saw them and, we must admit, probably for good reasons. They worked for the Romans, collecting taxes for the Empire from their own people. They were seen as collaborators, traitors, and, as if it wasn’t enough, they were also seen as thieves who kept for themselves a large part of the money they collected. They were not the poor outcasts Luke often surrounds Jesus with. Tax collectors were wealthy, and if they were rejected by their own people, it wasn’t because of who they were, but because of who they chose themselves to be.
And so today in our passage we have a portrait of two extremes: When Jesus talks about a “Pharisee and a Tax Collector”, people would haveimmediately understood: “A Saint and a Sinner”. And as if it wasn’t enough, Jesus adds more details: The Pharisee we have in our story today is not only holier than your regular people, it looks like he is even holier than other Pharisees. Jesus tells us that the man “fats twice a week” and “give a tenth of all [his] income”. People would have known that Pharisees only fasted on specific days, several times a month but not twice a week, and they tithed only on certain items, not on all they possessed. This Pharisee looks indeed very holy. As for the tax collector, he is, well, a tax collector, a traitor, the worst kind of sinner. And yet, as often in Jesus’s parables, an unexpected twist happens: The story shows us that it is the tax collector that has God’s favor over the pharisee. The sinner is preferred to the saint, or at least, the sinner is the one “justified”, the one freed of his guilt. The Pharisee comes back from the Temple having gained nothing, because as Jesus concludes: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, all who humble themselves will be exalted“. To make sure we don’t miss the point, Luke introduces the passage saying that Jesus told this parable: “(…) to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt“. For sure, it’s hard to miss the point: The story is not just Pharisee vs Collector, Saint vs Sinner, it’s about arrogance vs humility. And the score is: Arrogance: 0 / Humility: 1. This is a message we can easily understand. The problem to me is how it can translate to our world, and how it can translate to our lives. We don’t have pharisees around, and we don’t have tax collectors (not that kind anyway), and that’s the main obstacle for us to relate to the story, so we need to unpack that a little bit.
So first with the pharisee: Yes, in our world, we still have religious leaders and religious people but most of them aren’t overly zealous as the man is. It’s still true though that some people use their beliefs as prejudices against others, or use their good deeds to show off. In our church, we have to acknowledge that we are not exempt of this self righteousness. Jesus imitates the prayer of a Pharisee and I was wondering, as Episcopalians, what our prayer could be if we were in the story. Maybe something like: “I thank you God that I am not like other Christians: intolerant, racist and uneducated like this Bible thumper evangelist. I defend women’s rights, I serve at the soup kitchen every month“. Yes, we have to acknowledge that, like the Pharisee, our religious affiliation can lead us to arrogance. More evidently though, I think in our world, and especially in our culture, what comes closer to the Pharisee’s prayer is our desire to be successful, to have the perfect life or at least to have our life together, to have, as we say “our ducks in a row”. Because that’s exactly what’s going on with this man, or what he claims about his existence: At least, thanks God, he has his ducks in a row. It’s a well lived life, rational and organized. He knows what he is doing and where he is headed. He is not like other people: lost, messy and unpredictable. Which is, if you think about it, exactly what the tax collector is all about. Jesus tells us that the pharisee stood by himself, while the tax collector is on his knees, prostrated, beating his breast, weighed down by his own guilt. Like the rich man and Lazarus, one looks magnificent, the other one looks pathetic.
And so, this is to me an important message we can find in our story today: Yes, we don’t distance ourselves from others so much by using our religious identity (although we sometimes still do), but mostly we don’t see ourselves as if we belonged with “other people”. We don’t recognize ourselves in “the lost, the last and the least” as some scholars describe the pitiful characters in Luke’s Gospel. Unlike the pharisee, we don’t mind helping, we are even sometimes eager to, but generally we don’t want to be the one who needs help or mercy, in a way or another we still cling to the religion of “the winners, the first and the best” – which is what our culture is all about. And so we reject “tax collectors” around us (the lost, the least and the last) and even when we have pity on them, we still push them away by convincing us that we don’t belong with them, our way I think to reject “the tax collector inside of us”, we push deep down in the dark places of our hearts all that is is us lost, least and last and shut up about it in the “Temple”, that is in our relationship with God. And this is to me the core of today’s parable: The pharisee and the tax collector are not just characters in a story, or even around us: mostly they are two aspects of our personalities, and we let the Pharisee do all the talking and we ignore the tax collector, when, according to Jesus, we need to do the opposite. Not to become, like the tax collector, a traitor and a thief, but to come to God not as a perfect student showing his A+ report card, but acknowledging our own disarray, messiness, and our need for God’s help. I think that the story tells us that although on the outside we can look beautiful, act beautifully, pray beautifully like a saint, there is also inside of us someone who can be very sad, or very afraid, or very lonely like this tax collector was and there is nothing this person can do to justify himself, to help himself, and all this person needs to do is to cry for mercy, but the fact is that most of the time, feeling like the sinner inside, we just go about wearing the mask of the pharisee and we come to believe this is who we truly are.
And yet, Jesus says, there is an unexpected twist: The good news is that whether pharisee and tax collector, God sees us both, God hears us both, but what God likes best is when we pray with the truth of our being, which often look messy, complicated and needy. Saints offer beautiful prayers in the temple, but God receives ugly prayers offered by people who don’t feel that beautiful but who genuinely looks for God’s comfort and restoration, and God rejoices in them. I think Jesus tells us in this story that the only thing God expects from us is authenticity, another word, maybe easier to grasp, for humility. Maybe that’s what the parable is all about, and what Jesus says to all of us: Enter the Temple as the pharisee you claim to be, but leave as the tax collector you truly are, only with God’s grace following you.