Pharisee and/or Tax Collector?

October 27, 2013
23 Pentecost, Proper 25
Luke 18:9-14

Are you a Pharisee or a tax collector?  It’s hard to hear this morning’s parable without thinking you need to place yourself in one of the two roles, measuring yourself against the players in the story.

And most of us are so used to hearing Jesus’ stories that we know right from the first line how this is going to turn out.  It’s like when you hear the line “A lawyer and a priest walk into a bar.…”  You know a joke is coming.  And when there’s a tax collector and a Pharisee, you know a cautionary moral lesson is coming.  And you know you want to align yourself with the tax collector.  You can’t trick us, Jesus – we’re on to your sneaky stories! 

We know tax collectors are beloved by God.  They are a stock character in the Gospels, representing rough-around-the-edges but ultimately repentant and humble people, right?  After all, we know Jesus’ disciple Matthew who left his tax table to follow Jesus.  We know wee little Zaccheus who climbed the sycamore tree to get a glimpse of Jesus and after one dinner together promised to repay everyone he’d cheated.  We love these guys!  They are the underdogs!

            And we know how things tend to go for the Pharisees.  They are the foil against which Jesus so often plays.  They’re a stock character in the Gospels too – the self-righteous, rule-bound religious leader, lacking insight and compassion.  And so we aren’t one bit surprised when Jesus upholds the prayer of the tax collector and chides the prayer of the Pharisee.  We didn’t fall for Jesus’ trick!  We were looking askance at the Pharisee right from the start, waiting for his comeuppance. 

            Uh oh.

            Maybe we fell into the trap after all, looking sideways and disapprovingly at the Pharisee just as he was doing the same to the tax collector.

Now just for a moment, let’s go back and think about how Jesus’ original listeners might have heard this parable.  Let’s forget the stock characters that we think we know so well, forget the foregone conclusion that we’ve already assumed.  Let’s start this story over.

            Once there was a tax collector.  He collaborated with the hated Romans, paying the Empire a set amount for the privilege of squeezing money from his neighbors.  He threatened and schemed and took bribes to collect as much money as he could from people, some of whom could ill afford to pay at all.  He was wealthy but feared and despised.  The tax collector wouldn’t have been seen by Jesus’ listeners as a harmless stock character.  He would be seen more like a crooked prison guard, a pimp, or a drug boss in our time.  One day the tax collector entered the Temple.  Maybe he hadn’t been in some time and noticed the judging glances of the people around him.  Or maybe he’d just had a particularly bad day.  For whatever reason, he suddenly starts beating his breast and asking for God’s mercy.  But when you look closely at this story, you might notice that the Tax Collector doesn’t actually say he’s sorry for his bad behavior.  And he doesn’t promise to change or to repay the people whose lives have been ruined by his cheating ways.  For all we know, he’s going to go right back out there and act just the same!  Maybe he was in the Temple last year about this time beating his chest and saying this very same prayer and hadn’t made any changes in his life.

Heard this way, isn’t it a little harder to feel empathy for the Tax Collector?   It doesn’t seem fair that he should be “justified” so easily, does it?

            And once there was a Pharisee.  He was a Jewish religious leader, a spiritual guide for those who sought to follow God’s law faithfully in the presence of the oppressive Romans.  An exemplar of a sensible and caring faith.  He was individually careful in his religious observance and generous with his money, tithing even more than was required.  He was a good person, exemplary in the community.  Jesus’ listeners wouldn’t have seen him as a heartless and self-righteous figure.  He would have been seen like a John Baker or a Peggy Trumbo or a Marian Petroff, or some other beloved and respected member of this community.  He walked into the Temple and was greeted by everyone he knew.  Maybe he walked past the man painting the outside of the building that had been homeless until the Pharisee recommended him for the job.  Maybe he walked by the beautiful candelabra that he’d donated to the Temple.  He stood in the spot he’d frequented so often in his life.  And he thanked God for his life.  And he looked around at the despised and feared tax collector, the one who had harassed and ruined members of that very Temple, and thanked God that he was not like that.  

            Heard that way, most of us probably align fairly well with the Pharisee.  We are generally decent people, trying to do the right thing, wanting to be in right relationship with God.   When you hear it that way, isn’t it a little easier to understand the Pharisee’s prayer?  Like the Pharisee, we are thankful that we are not like the people in the world that use and abuse and manipulate and hurt. 

            So you see, either way we hear this story, we end up judging, whether these two are stock characters or not. 

            Maybe it’s that judgment piece that Jesus was trying to get to with this parable.  Because that is something that I’m guessing many of us spend a lot of time doing, consciously or unconsciously.

            This summer when my family was on our southwestern vacation, one morning in Sedona I headed off on a hike up to Chicken Point.  It was a longish hike, fairly steep, with rocks to scramble over.  Challenging but so worth it. Climbing up into the red rocks, surrounded by nothing but blue sky.  It was incredibly quiet that morning.  There were a few lizards and other creatures scampering, but not another soul in sight.  Just me, unburdened – with nothing but a little water bottle and a phone in my pocket to take pictures.  I was thoroughly enjoying myself.  Feeling good about the exercise, starting to understand the system of trail markings.  Enjoying my time alone, thinking how lucky I was to be doing this, to be apart from everything in this beautiful place.  My muscles were aching and I was tired, but a good tired.  I was looking forward to being alone at the top.  Maybe get some prayer in up there.

            Suddenly I started hearing voices up ahead.  I turned a bend and looked up and there was this huge round rock jutting out over the path and I could see dozens of people running around up there as if they owned it.  I hadn’t even known the path was leading up to something like that!  How cool!  But I wondered how all those people had made it up there when I hadn’t seen any of them on the trail?  I finally trudged up the steep incline and saw … the pink jeeps!  If you have been to Arizona recently you have seen these pink jeeps – they are at all of the great outdoor parks and tourist destinations.  They are tour jeeps that promise  -- for a small fortune -- adventures off the beaten track.  Which meant that all of the people crowding up the pinnacle of my hike were people paying big bucks to get lazily to the top of the mountain that I just worked so hard getting up to.  Some of them were wearing flip flops, for goodness sake.  They were all looking proud, taking pictures posed at the top as if they earned it.  They hadn’t worked for it one bit, and yet they were ruining my mountaintop experience with their laughing and picture taking and marring the perfect beauty of the mountain with those awful pink jeeps.  I made the final bit of the climb feeling very superior.  I made it up on my own; I earned it!  They're cheating!  

            I never did get to meditate quietly up there on top of the mountain, but I think God was speaking to me pretty clearly nonetheless.  Unlike the poor Pharisee though, who may not have ever realized that his way of praying by comparing himself to others might not be pleasing to God, on the mountain that day God made my mistake perfectly clear.  When I stopped grumbling long enough to look around me on top of the rock formation, I noticed all the kids up there – little kids like mine that could never have climbed up here and would have loved to have seen this.  Some older people that would have had a rough go of it.  Even a lady with crutches.  And the guy leading the pink jeep tour offered to take my picture at the top and insisted on refilling my water bottle before I headed back down, just in case.  It suddenly hit me how absurd my feelings of superiority had been.  Regardless of how they got there, why shouldn’t they enjoy the grace and wonder of this place too?

            Maybe the problem with the Pharisee came when he thanked God “that he was not like other people.”  Maybe the point of the story isn’t to pick a side, but to try to erase the separations we create between ourselves and other people so that the sides no longer exist.  I don’t think Jesus wants there to be a winner and a loser in the Pharisee versus Tax Collector contest.   Jesus wants both Pharisee and Tax Collector to become part and parcel of the Kingdom of God, in which anyone can be justified, and all people are included.

            Luckily for all of us, God doesn’t seem to work the way we do.  God takes us how he finds us.  In pink jeeps or running shoes.  Working hard at finding God or just luckily happening across him.  We are all included in the circle of God’s love.