This week’s gospel, like last Sunday’s, is about an aspect of prayer- in neither case the most obvious aspect and more about how we should pray that what we should pray for or about. From the need for persistence and perseverance emphasised in the story of the unjust judge, we move today to attitude and to how we should approach God in prayer, and thus how we should see ourselves.
I suspect most people’s first reaction to the story of the haughty Pharisee and the humble tax collector, is to be appalled by the former’s arrogance, and we rather suspect, hypocrisy. The tax collector is, perhaps paradoxically, the more sympathetic character.
Few of us nowadays, however much we may resent paying tax, blame those charged with collecting it. That is not how it was in 1st Century Palestine. The Roman system of tax farming was bound to entail tax collectors who were not only collaborators with an occupying power but to greater or less extent extortioners. That the tax collector is clearly the hero in the parable and the upright pillar of society, the villain would, I suspect, be a startling conclusion to most of Jesus’ or Luke’s contemporaries.
It’s a still a somewhat surprising conclusion but one with which we are much more familiar. We are to some extent victims of the success of Christianity’s concern for the poor and those on or outside the margins of acceptable society. From poor shepherds, through diseased outcasts and beggars, foreigners and even women, Luke’s gospel expresses an uncontemporary and radical sympathy for the despised or ignored classes. Luke is no friend of the establishment.
And generally, Christianity has acted on that message. Depictions of the crucifixion, illustrate this. The crucifixion was hard for the early Christians; how could the son of God end up as a despicable criminal dying a revolting death? In early art, Jesus on the cross is not depicted anything like a crucified man. Instead, he is clothed, crowned and nobly upright. Later, in the Middle Ages his suffering is recognised and emphasised, but he becomes pitiable not despicable. And finally the crucified Christ in the Renaissance, becomes the idealised human form with which we are most familiar, beautiful its human nudity; admirable rather than despised. I suggest there has been a similar development in our attitude to the poor, the racially different, and the disabled. They have all gradually become recognised as worthy of sympathy and respect for their own sake as fellow human beings and not merely as useful, even necessary, pawns in the securing salvation.
I started saying these parables were about prayer but in fact little of what we normally call prayer happens; the stories are about attitudes; superficially at least, the attitude of the Pharisee toward the social pariah skulking in the shade behind him. Do not judge others by appearance and beware hypocrisy seem to be the messages – and they are undoubtedly important lessons which it’s very easy to ignore. I suggest, however, that the more important attitudes in play here are those we have toward God and ourselves.
The context of the stories is, in narrative terms, Jesus’ approach to Jerusalem for his last Passover and his death and resurrection, and theologically they are about how we should prepare ourselves for the coming change in status and indeed the new world order. This is sometimes seen as the second coming and that is how Jesus’ contemporaries may have seen it. We, however, have been waiting over two thousand years for this apparently imminent event, and I suggest we have to work out for ourselves what it means for us.
Whatever else it may mean it surely involves our relationship with God; how we see God and how we think we are seen by God. These are exactly the themes of today’s Gospel; the comparison between the Pharisee and the Tax collector is really about their respective self-awareness, or lack of it. It’s about the way each of them thinks he is seen by God.
God is conspicuously absent from the Pharisee’s awareness; his piety and his undeniably impressive ritual record and more than scrupulous financial rectitude are both his own achievements- there is no hint that the grace of God might have something to do with it. For this reason, he can only see himself as compared to others and a miserable specimen is conveniently to hand to make a favourable comparison. We suspect that the Pharisee has no inkling that comparing himself to a peculating and collaborating tax collector is not really such a good idea; in terms of standard morality, probably most people could do better than the tax collector and the Pharisee’s moral and pious superiority is no great achievement.
Neither man asks much of God in his prayer; the Pharisee gives somewhat hollow thanks; the tax collector asks for mercy, but noticeably not forgiveness. He does not say he is going to mend his ways and does not offer to pay back what he has extorted, as the tax collector whom Jesus encounters later in Jericho does. It’s only fair to note that he was not necessarily as bad as is usually assumed- by me and most commentators. On the other hand, he clearly thinks himself bad and it is the recognition of failing, the awareness of sin even if not full confession, that enables him to leave the Temple better justified that the Pharisee.
These stories are both unique to Luke’s Gospel. One of the most famous uniquely Lucan stories is, of course, the Prodigal Son and it shares a message with the story of Pharisee and Tax Collector. In both a sinner recognises his condition and simply turns to God or his father, not making a full confession and certainly not doing anything to repay or put right the wrong he has done, but simply acknowledging what he has done and throwing himself on God’s mercy and grace- which, of course, he is given.
It is that self-awareness of which the Pharisee is incapable which excludes him from the Kingdom of God. And yet, unattractive as he is I fear he is the one of the two with whom, if I’m honest, I more closely identify. How easy it is to be self-satisfied and how hard to be totally honest about oneself. This is a much tougher parable than at first appears.
Amen