In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Trust in God and don’t be a jerk.” Isn’t that what the parable that Jesus tells about the Pharisee and tax collector says? While trusting in God and being nice to other people are both good life lessons, if that’s all we take away from this parable then Jesus is little more than a Middle-Eastern version of Aesop. Jesus’ teachings were radical and led to those around him wanting to kill him; and a fable with the moral of the story being “trust in God and be nice” isn’t radical and certainly isn’t a capital offense. The parables though are subversive and surprising stories about how God’s ways our not our ways, and the reversal of the tax collector being justified is such a surprising twist that we know this is more than a simple story about humility.
We start with the Pharisee – someone we’ve been trained to be suspicious of. But that suspicion is our baggage, not Jesus’. The character of the Pharisee is the one that we’re supposed to identify with – he’s the “good guy” in the set up. Pharisees were devoted to the faith, and there’s no evidence in this parable to think otherwise. The prayer that he offered was a common one in his day; we might say it was a standard Prayer Book prayer.
It’s a prayer we all often utter, even if we don’t recognize it as such. At least once a week, I hear someone say “Well, I just remind myself that other people have it worse than me, so I thank God for that.” That’s not a bad prayer, nor does the Pharisee offer a bad prayer. And as a thanksgiving for these blessings, the Pharisee notes that he is faithful in stewardship and religious observance. In the language of the Prayer Book, we call this “oblation” – the offering of ourselves and our lives and our labors to God. When we say “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee,” we’re saying a version of what the Pharisee prays: O God, we wish to offer our lives in thanksgiving to you.
One scholar has noted that to think of the Pharisee in modern terms, we might see the Pharisee as a Deacon – an example of faithful witness and service to the community. Hardly the sort of person we should look down on. But by the end of the parable, Jesus says “I tell you, this tax collector went home justified rather than the Pharisee.” Something doesn’t add up.
Well, maybe things will make more sense if we enter the parable through the tax collector. If the Pharisee is supposed to be the good guy, then the tax collector is the bad guy. Throughout the Gospels, we hear of how Jesus was criticized for eating with “sinners and tax collectors,” as if the category of “sinner” isn’t big enough to include those vile and repugnant tax collectors. Tax collectors were despised because they were seen as collaborators with the Romans who were occupying and polluting the Promised Land. Furthermore, tax collectors were not known for their honesty, as they often extorted as much as they could from the community. Even if this particular tax collector doesn’t appear to be aggressive or ruthless, the stock character of the tax collector is easy to hate and condemn as a worthless lowlife.
But Jesus gets in the way of such a judgment, as he tells us that it is the tax collector who goes home justified. What’s going on here? Jesus, why can’t you just tell us which one to be like – the respected but unjustified Pharisee or the dastardly but justified tax collector.
But Jesus gets in the way of such a judgment, as he tells us that it is the tax collector who goes home justified. What’s going on here? Jesus, why can’t you just tell us which one to be like – the respected but unjustified Pharisee or the dastardly but justified tax collector.
Okay, maybe there’s something we’re missing about these characters that’s the key to understanding the great reversal. Perhaps it’s that the Pharisee’s prayer isn’t quite satisfactory. He does use the word “I” a lot. Maybe he’s full of himself. Or maybe he isn’t confident in his relationship with God and so he tries to self-justify instead of trusting that God has already made him righteous.
Or might it be that he scoffingly compares himself to the tax-collector? He should stand on his own merits – he doesn’t need to look down on the tax collector to make his own practice of tithing and fasting appear holier. But earlier in Luke, when the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, Jesus doesn’t say a word about whether or not we should use first-person pronouns or compare ourselves to others.
So if the Pharisee’s prayer isn’t the problem it must be that the tax collector’s prayer is so overwhelming commendable that it justifies him. After all, his prayer “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” we might say, is a prototype for a prayer that has been used by millions of Christians through the years. It’s known as the Jesus Prayer and goes like this: “Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.” This prayer has brought people closer to God for generations, and so it certainly is a high-quality prayer which the tax collector utters. The prayer is simple, unassuming, and humble. Might it be that this wonderful and sincere prayer brings justification to the despised tax collector?
The trouble there is that sounds a lot like a magical incantation more than faithfulness. If justification comes after using special words, well, I’m just not convinced that salvation comes through our words. Salvation is God’s work, not ours.
And we don’t know how the story continues. We can only assume that the Pharisee continued to be an example of faithfulness – reading Scripture, attending to the needs of others, being steadfast in prayer. And tax collector? His prayer says nothing of repentance or an intention to change his ways. Certainly his prayer doesn’t give him license to continue doing whatever he wants at work, does it?
So, which is it Jesus? What in the world are you trying to get us to see in this parable? Even if we say, “Ah, let’s be like the tax collector instead of the Pharisee,” then we’re caught saying “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: the arrogant, those without humility, those who trust in themselves, those who exalt themselves, or even like this Pharisee.” Oops. We’re right back where we started. And if we choose to be like the Pharisee, well, we know that’s not the right choice because the Pharisee gets passed over in favor of the tax collector. Nowhere to go; it’s a trap.
Instead of reading this as a parable about ourselves, what if it’s a parable about God? What if the purpose of Jesus’ words isn’t to give us two examples that both seem like the wrong choice? What if what we’re missing isn’t some key to better understand the characters of the tax collector and Pharisee, but instead what if we’re missing something is about the character of God?
Let’s go back to those starting assumptions. Just as in a good joke, the punchline was setup in the beginning. We assume that there is a limit to God’s grace, that only a certain group of people can be justified. And when we think in those terms, we do have to start putting qualifications on God’s grace. If some of us are in and others of us are out, well, there has to be some system by which we determine who’s in and who’s out. And that’s how the trap of this parable is loaded, with our assumptions.
We want God’s grace to be generously given, just in a way that makes us feel like we’re part of an exclusive and chosen group. We very much like it when God’s grace is extended to all those whom we’d extend it to. But to those thieves, rogues, adulterers, people who voted differently than us, people who don’t believe what we do about God, people who have wronged us – well, send them home with weeping and gnashing of teeth. We don’t want God to be prodigal with grace. You just can’t go around justifying everyone. You can’t justify an unrepentant tax collector just because he asks for mercy. Or can you?
It probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that when I was in middle school that I got good grades. When it came time for group assignments, everyone wanted to work with me. They knew not only would I ensure that our group got a good grade, but I was also meek enough that you could do less than your fair share and I’d pick up the slack without telling the teacher about it. And slack is exactly what I picked up for those slackers. I probably uttered that prayer – thank God I’m not like these slackers who are never going to get a decent job because they don’t work hard. We always ended up getting an A on the project. In my mind, I earned it while others stole it. But the fact that they got an A didn’t reduce my A at all.
But on the other hand, sometimes it’s nice to get more than you deserve. When it came to sports, unless it was tennis, I wasn’t the person you wanted on your team. I started playing baseball when I was eleven, which was many years after all of my peers. In my first season of playing Little League I was atrocious. I couldn’t catch a ball thrown right to me and my only hope of getting on base was a pitcher that couldn’t throw three strikes. But the first team I played on happened to be the best team in the league. In fact, we went undefeated, with no thanks to this error-prone hack. I very much appreciated the unearned grace of being on a winning team, because my contributions were far surpassed by the victory that I took part in.
This is the scandalous, surprising, and saving grace of God – that it’s for those we deem as righteous and for those who we don’t think deserve it. Grace is not for us to distribute or judge.
The thing to keep in mind about this parable is how it is introduced. Typically, when Jesus offers a parable it begins with “The Kingdom of God is like…”; and that would be troubling if this were a parable about the Kingdom because it would suggest that the Pharisee has no share in it. But that’s not how this parable begins, rather, it is told for a specific audience – “those who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” That address implicates me, it implicates all of us.
Jesus never says that those who exalt themselves and are humbled cannot then be justified as well. Given what we know about God, it’s virtually certain that the Pharisee will also be justified, but that’s not what Jesus’ audience needs to hear. We trust that we will be justified; we don’t always trust that those people will be justified as well. And so Jesus offers a parable to shock us into realizing that God’s grace doesn’t know the boundaries that we do. God’s love isn’t restricted to the people that we love. God’s favor busts apart our assumptions. Sometimes we can only see this from a place of humility, and Jesus’ parable takes us there.
How might we see other people if we trusted that God loves them as much as we trust that God loves us? How might we treat those around us if we were more certain of their righteousness or deservingness than our own? If this parable tells us more about God than it does ourselves, which is always a good assumption to have when reading Scripture, then maybe you don’t worry if you’re more like this person or that one. Sometimes the grace of God comes through you, sometimes it comes to you. Ours is not to judge which of those two is better, but rather to give God thanks that it does.
