“9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody 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 up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evil-doers, 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 everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.””
Some twists can only be pulled once. The 1999 film, The Sixth Sense contained one. The story centered on a boy who could see ghosts, and the twist at the end causes you to immediately rethink and then understand everything in the story. It’s genius, but you can only experience the twist once. You can’t rewatch it in anywhere near the same way.
Today’s parable is like that. It would have been as startling for Jesus’ first hearers as The Sixth Sense was in 1999. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The problem then is that once we study this parable, we think we’ve got it, but the deeper reality with Jesus’ story is that while we don’t intellectually forget the twist of who is righteous, we do morally forget it. We humans re-self-righteous ourselves with shocking regularity but thankfully, this parable’s twist can be pulled again. It’s the sort of twist that straightens us out. It surprises into grasping that receiving undeserved mercy is the only righteousness. That’s the claim of this sermon: receiving undeserved mercy is the only righteousness.
We will study this in two points. First: the Pharisee and the tax collector. Second: lessons to take home. First, we will look at the entirety of the parable learning as we go. Second, we will take a step back and see which additional lessons we can learn.
We begin to consider this righteousness in our first point: the Pharisee and the tax collector. This is our fourth parable. The first three were at first blush irreligious—stories of seeds and crops and weeds. This parable is rare in that it is blatantly religious. It is so because it was designed to deal with a religious problem that is as modern as it was ancient—we religious people are prone, despite our many fine points, to become confident in our own rightness and look down on everyone else as verse 9 puts it.
Jesus told this parable to deal with this problem. You can think of this parable as a tool for deflating self-righteousness—drywall knives apply a thin coat of mud, tiny medical balloons expand arteries, this parable deflates self-righteousness. “No disease is more dangerous than arrogance,” as Calvin put it, “and yet all have it so deeply fixed in the marrow of their bones, that it can scarcely be removed or extirpated by any remedy.” It’s no different today than in Calvin’s day and was no different when Jesus told this parable, “to some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else.” You aren’t going to escape these people in this life and we will, at times, be these people the lives of others.
The story begins, not coincidentally, in Israel’s holiest place—the temple. The two characters, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector, “went up” in the words of verse 10 to pray. They physically went up the mount to the temple to pray. Spiritually, though, they were to go up. They were to lift their eyes to the heavens as you naturally do in medieval cathedrals. They were to realize they were small and God was big. They were to worship. This is a parable about one element of worship which we enact every Sunday—confession of sin assurance of pardon. It’s worth us considering what characters we were when we did this act this morning.
The first character coming to worship, a Pharisee, is the expected hero. We need to recapture that if we are to understand the twist at the end. You can imagine Jesus saying, “George Washington and Benedict Arnold went to church,” with Washington as the Pharisee and Arnold as the tax collector. First century mothers longed for their babies to grow up to be Pharisees. You see the desire in Tevye in The Fiddler on the Roof, “If I were rich, I’d have the time that I lack to sit in the synagogue and pray. And maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall. And I’d discuss the holy books with the learned men, several hours every day. And that would be the sweetest thing of all.”
That’s the way the Pharisees were admired and now this apparent spiritual giant prays; “The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself,” as verse 11 puts it. Another way to translate that is that the Pharisee took up a prominent position and prayed. The idea is that he is standing alone. Others are in the temple too but he stands alone and that’s what he believed about himself—that he stood alone. “He is a spiritual rock. He is an island.”
He believed himself to be so for the sake of these others. The Pharisees believed they were set apart for the good of the people. They were the 200% holiness people who pulled the average up for everyone else. A bit like the monks in the Middle Ages, the Pharisees separated themselves from the common to become sacred in hopes of somehow saving the common.
The Pharisee stands alone. This attitude led Rabbi Simeon to say, “If there are only two righteous men in the world, I and my son are these two; if there is only one, I am he.” You can see how such a mindset and mission as the Pharisees took on would make you unhealthily obsessed with matters of righteousness. It would make you a bit like the Evil Queen in Snow White asking the magic mirror regularly who is the fairest of them all. Most everyone in Jesus’ day would have said, “morally, the Pharisees are the fairest of them all,” and obviously so when compared with the tax collector.
The Pharisee saw the tax collector as he prepared to pray. He ‘may,’ as Bailey imagined, ‘be wondering why this [tax collector] was not ushered out. In any case, during this pause in the liturgy, the Pharisee probably takes advantage of the opportunity to instruct the “unrighteous” around him.’ The Pharisee understood this opportunity for prayer as a chance to build up those around him to become more than they already were; in short to become like him, which is the wonderful, tyrannical plan each of us have in our clean flesh has for everyone around us.
The Pharisee was clearly thinking of others as he prayed, but there is a wrong way to think of others; “God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evil-doers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.” Robber and evil-doer would have described how the Jews saw tax collectors; there is no proof the man was an adulterer, but, “if you will steal other people’s money what’s to stop you from stealing their wives?” he likely reasoned. We think that sort of way when we judge people, but Bailey is right to say that this Pharisee’s speech, “tells us nothing about the tax collector but does inform us regarding the mindset of the speaker.” So it goes. Our judgments of others almost never reveal as much about others as they do about ourselves. That’s part of why we are told not to judge; God is warning us that we will wind up judged.
This Pharisee may talk a good deal about others’ faults, but his words reveal him this to be part of his self-obsession. He uses the first-person five times in two sentences. “I thank you that I am not like other men… I fast twice a week and I give a tenth of all I get.” He is the active party in his verbs while God is a passive bystander. When you contrast this with the tax collector’s prayer, the arrogance of the Pharisee becomes as obvious as the nose on your face but the irony is that your nose is always invisible to you like your self-righteousness and like mine.
The Pharisee was clear in his prayer what he thought of this tax collector—an assessment which would have been shared by Jesus’ first hearers. He then proceeded to explain how it was that he himself was different. “I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.” Observant Jews fasted once a year, for the Day of Atonement. This man fasted at least 104 times a year likely believing that his extra 103 times were making up for the Jews who couldn’t be bothered to fast even once. He also tithed on everything, including purchases he made which their original owners would already have tithed on. This was a man who was doing above and beyond and seemingly effortlessly. As Calvin explained, “This is equivalent to saying that he performed more than the law required; just as the Popish monks talk loftily of their works of supererogation, as if they found no great difficulty in fulfilling the law of God.” This Pharisee wanted to make his super-obedience look simple in order to spur those listening into simple obedience. It’s like a weight lifter benching 500 pounds without breaking a sweat and then slapping those watching on the back saying, “someone like you could certainly do 50.” It might be meant to be encouraging, but it’s just pride. “He has gone beyond the call of duty so God should be impressed,” as Bock puts it. “Jesus considers such an approach offensive.”
What’s not offensive then? Enter the tax collector. It’s quite remarkable that he was even at temple given the hatred his profession produced among the Jews. Tax collectors bid on the right to collect the taxes for a region and whatever they charged beyond requirement was theirs to keep. It shouldn’t surprise us then that they invented all sorts of ways to tax. It’s a bit the old poem, “Tax his cow, tax his goat, tax his pants, tax his coat. Tax his ties, tax his shirt, tax his work, tax his dirt… When he screams and hollers, then tax him some more. Tax him till he's good and sore. Then tax his coffin, tax his grave, tax the sod in which he’s laid.” That’s what Jesus’ first listeners would have thought with verse 13, “But the tax collector stood…”
The tax collector, though, unlike the Pharisee knew what he had become. He ‘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.”’ The man knew that he had morally undone himself. He knew that the deed was already done and that his life was now a wreckage. Jeremias explains this well saying, “He and his family are in a hopeless position since for him repentance involves not only the abandonment of his sinful way of life but also the restitution of his fraudulent gains plus an added fifth. How can he know everyone whom he has cheated? Not only his situation but even his cry for mercy, is hopeless.” He calls himself “the sinner.” Our translation says, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” but it is, “God, have mercy on me, the sinner.”
This man knew that without unexpected grace, he was already in the annex of hell and would one day enter its fullness. You see his desperation in the fact that, as verse 13 tells us, “beat his breast.” Kenneth Bailey spent decades living in the Middle East learning local culture and explaining it for us Westerners. He said that this beating the breast is “for men… a gesture of extreme sorrow and anguish and is almost never used.” It’s used when you realize how terrible you are and when you want to destroy the source of that evil—your heart. That which the Pharisee saw as the source of his own goodness the tax collector knew to be the source of his own badness. It’s worth each of us considering what we consider to be the case about ourselves.
Notice that, unlike the Pharisee, the tax collector didn’t compare himself with anyone else. He is self-focused but in a much different way than the Pharisee. He knows he needs mercy—a need which the Pharisee cannot see in himself, and so as Jesus in verse 14 puts it, “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
The Pharisee went home thinking that he may have done some real good for those lost souls at temple. The tax collector went home righteous because unlike the Pharisee he had met himself and met God. Contriteness and humility are that important and the tax collector who was full of mess was also full of those qualities and the Pharisee who was full of himself had no room left for contriteness nor humility.
One was righteous, the other not. This is a parable addressing the question, “what is righteousness before God?” It isn’t the supererogation of the Pharisee. It is the willingness to see yourself in need of mercy which you don’t deserve and a willingness to ask God for it.
Parables are mirrors and windows—mirrors up to ourselves and windows through which we see God. This parable is one the best at being both. It shows us ourselves—wrong in our self-rightness. It shows us God with mercy to put us right. Marilynne Robinson gets this right saying, “I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at our preposterous disguises.” That’s the tax collector’s only hope. It was also the Pharisee’s but only one will receive it. Will you receive it?
With that let’s end with a few lessons; that’s our second point: lessons to take home, the language of “taking home” coming from verse 14, “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God.” The first lesson is the danger in trusting in yourself and in your righteousness. The Pharisee typifies the noble flesh we studied in Galatians which will obey you all the down to hell as you get pats on the back. “It is surprising how much egotism and rigorous devotion will be tolerated if a person is just and clean-living and gives of her or his substance,” as Snodgrass said about the Pharisee and so it can be among us.
This is a call for each of us grow in the sort of humility we see in the tax collector because each of us has ample opportunity to say with him, “God, have mercy on me, the sinner.” We tend to jockey ourselves into a goodness ranking shuffling ourselves upward but what you see throughout Scripture is that the those other than Jesus we are taught to emulate were the most aware that they, like the tax collector, truly deserved hell. We would do well to learn from GK Chesterton. Once a newspaper sent out an inquiry to him and other authors asking for their answer to the question, “what’s wrong with the world today?” Chesterton’s answer was the shortest to the questions, “what’s wrong with the world?” “Dear sir,” he wrote. “I am.” Imagine that in your family. “What’s wrong with the way this family is getting along,” and every single person in your family says, “I am.” Think what could be done. That’s the opposite of the deadly danger in trusting in yourself and your righteousness.
Second lesson, self-righteousness corrupts understanding. “It’s so hard to see when my eyes are on me,” as an old song put it. It’s amazing how quickly we become self-righteous. How quickly we move from, “God, I thank you that I am not like this tax collector,” to, “God, I thank you that I am not like that Pharisee.” How quickly our flesh grows over our recently opened eyes. That’s why the genius of this and all the parables is never the intellectual understanding. It’s the continual surprise. Jesus’ first listeners would have been surprised regarding self-righteousness and real righteousness and we need to be surprised again and again.
When self-righteousness takes hold, which is does as quickly as us getting back into our comfort zones, we can’t see straight. “Self-righteousness distorts the vision,” as Bailey put it. “A profoundly moving demonstration of remorse was enacted by a sincerely repentant man before the eyes of the self-righteous Pharisee. He saw only a sinner to be avoided.” We are that naturally ignorant. That’s a call for humility to ask to truly see.
Third and finally, undeserved favor is our only hope. The tax collector saw that he was justly under wrath and bound for wrath without it. Do you see that about yourself? Do you see that you’ve made yourself and make yourself a wreckage? The Pharisee didn’t think so and so he didn’t think he needed help. If you look at his prayer, there are no requests in it. He seems to think that not troubling God means he’s doing it right, but God loves to be troubled because we are in trouble. He loves to be asked because we need help on a continual basis.
That’s the reality of this parable. This isn’t a one-time ask for the tax collector. He stands in need of grace constantly as did the Pharisee and as do I. We in the flesh in this world are underwater constantly and unless we breathe what God gives us moment by moment we will drown—in this case in self-righteousness. To think anything else is to have wicked skin grow over your eyes so you no longer see clearly and then it is a short step to, “God, I thank you that I am not like others.” That’s the parable. That’s the need. That’s the twist. That’s grace. Breathe it in. Receive it. Amen.