Beyond winners and losers
Luke 18:9-14
The Rev. Sara Fischer
Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: A Pharisee and a tax collector went up to the temple to pray. The pharisee prayed: (God, I thank you that I am not a thief or a rogue or an adulterer or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” The Tax collector would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast saying “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” This one went down to his home alongside the other.
Last week, Jesus offered a parable to his disciples and introduced it saying: “he told them a parable about their need to pray always and not lose heart.” That’s a handy introduction and it is easy for us to hear this and feel that Jesus is talking to us, his disciples. This week, he also offers a parable that includes a helpful introduction: Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt. This is not quite so easy for us to identify with. And yet, we are called to pay attention and figure out what God might be up to in this parable.
Because of what we already know about Jesus from the gospels, we might go into this parable thinking we know what to expect: the Pharisee will turn out to be the bad guy and the tax collector will turn out to be the good guy. But remember, parables are meant to be full of surprises. Parables almost always challenge us, and rarely teach the lesson we expect. So we could read this parable a certain way—Pharisee bad; tax collector surprisingly good—but that would be our own twenty-first century interpretation of Jesus which would not have occurred to Jesus’ original hearers. Also, it would be predictable. And, much as we might like it, predictability is never what Jesus is asking of us.
I had a conversation with somebody last week about how worship is not entertainment to be taken in; it is a practice in which we participate. I think one could say this about the life of the Pharisees as well. The Pharisees who gave Jesus a hard time were the ones who considered their position in the religious establishment to be a given, one which they could benefit from with no self-examination or religious practice. But there are plenty of good Pharisees in scripture. In Jesus’ time, pharisees safeguarded the Jewish religion, which was particularly important under the imperialist rule of the Greeks and then the Romans.
The shadow side of being a Pharisee was a tendency to be too scrupulous, to get fussy about things related to religion that are peripheral to God’s love and God’s call to us. I don’t think it’s possible to be Episcopalian without a bit of pharisee in each of us. But I think it’s always important to ask ourselves: are we intentional Christians or habitual Christians? Our habits tend to attach to the forms of worship, the trappings, rather than to God who is the object of our worship.
Jesus is always inviting our full attention and engagement. We see this in the pharisee in today’s gospel; he is a good guy. He is praying and praising God. He describes, in his prayer, faithful actions that are over the top, far more than the Torah required of Pharisees: tithing, fasting twice a week. He offers a heartfelt prayer of gratitude.
Some of us might be able to make the same prayer. Dear God, I know that it is only by your blessing, that I never had to sell drugs or steal to survive. Only by your blessing am I able to do what little I can to be of service to you.
The parable is about prayer. Prayer is not just asking something of God but revealing to God something of ourselves. Each of the two characters’ prayers in this parable reveal something about them. One could say that the Pharisees prayer is too much and the tax collector’s prayer is not enough.
We don’t know as much about this particular tax collector as we do about the pharisee. We know from other stories in the Gospels that Jesus welcomes tax collectors, and in particular we have the story of Zacchaeus, who not only repents but invites Jesus to stay at his house and promises a significant portion of his income for the poor. We don’t know if the tax collector we encounter this morning is like Zacchaeus, or if he is more like a typical tax collector. Tax collectors in Jesus’ time were not the IRS accountants you might think of. Tax collectors collaborated with the oppressive Roman regime. A tax collector was more like a senior ICE agent, but instead of taking people, they took their livelihood.
This tax collector asks for mercy with no sign of repentance. His prayer is insufficient, we might say. But the tax collector is not being habitual going to the temple; tax collectors often did not go to the temple to pray. He is being intentional, praying for mercy and showing awareness of his own sinfulness. He is making an act of faith.
One important detail: the story ends saying that the tax collector went home justified rather than the pharisee. But the word most commonly translated as “rather” can also be understood as “alongside.” The Pharisee and the tax collector returned to their respective homes alongside each other, both justified.
The structure of this parable makes us expect that there will be a winner and a loser, but what if they are both winners? What if we are all winners? This parable turns our expectations on their head by reminding us that what God does is justify people—make them righteous—through no doing of their own. This is good news for us: there are no magic words we must say to God to earn God’s love or our place in the Kingdom. That place is already ours. This is the way of God.
