Lectionary Reflection for Proper 25C on Luke 18:9-14

IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT “THEM”

One of my favourite things to do is try and notice and make sense of the patterns I see around me. This is part of why I love the Bible so much. I find it immensely fascinating and satisfying to see how the biblical writers, and especially the Gospels, use symbols, word plays, metaphors, and rhythms to create patterns to drive their message beyond just the intellect and into the heart. As the Lectionary has followed Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem in Luke’s Gospel, we have seen patterns that describe God’s reign in terms of radical hospitality, some that speak directly to issues of justice and the gap between the wealthy and the poor, and parables that seem to be about prayer, but are really exploring deeper questions (like the hospitality and justice already mentioned). The reading from Luke 18:9-14 for Proper 25C falls into this last category.

On the surface, it’s a simple parable about the vastly different prayers of a pompous, self-righteous Pharisee and a humble, penitent tax collector. But, as is always the case with Jesus, beneath the simplicity lies a much more nuanced, complex, shocking, challenging, and equalising message. Let’s begin with the first sentence of Luke’s narrative: “Jesus told this parable to certain people who had convinced themselves that they were righteous and who looked on everyone else with disgust…” (Luke 18:9 CEB). As Eric Barreto notes, while the self-righteous person in the parable is a Pharisee, the Pharisees are not named in the group of people to whom Jesus told this story. So we need to ask who these self-righteous and contemptuous people are. Right away, we find ourselves being drawn out of simplicity into complexity, out of dualisms and into blurred lines.

As Barreto points out, identifying the “righteous” in Luke’s Gospel is not as easy as it may seem. Righteous people like Elizabeth and Zechariah (1:6), Simeon (2:25), and Joseph (23:50), in whose tomb Jesus was laid, are to be imitated. But others who are called righteous seem to fall short of the description, and those who are anything but righteous, like the lost son in Chapter 15, are the focus of God’s grace and welcome. So, Baretto writes, “Such are the tensions Luke navigates when describing the righteous. The righteous are both imitable and an object lesson in going awry”.^¹

Luke’s nuanced and multifaceted view of righteousness should be a word of caution for us as we approach this parable. It is tempting to turn it into a simple morality lesson in which the self-righteous Pharisee is bad, the tax collector is good, and we should all be like the tax collector. Jesus’ conclusion even seems to support this interpretation: “I tell you, this person went down to his home justified rather than the Pharisee. All who lift themselves up will be brought low, and those who make themselves low will be lifted up” (v.14). But as Debi Thomas pointedly observes:

On its face, this is a very simple parable. It feels silly to interpret it when its message is so obvious. But here’s the trap, expressed as a prayer I am sorely tempted to pray in response: “Lord, I thank you that I am nothing like the obnoxious caricature of a human being who is the Pharisee in your story. Thank you that I have arrived at a point in my faith journey where I am much more like the tax collector: self-aware, emotionally intelligent, mindful, cognizant, teachable, humble, and woke.”

Yikes.²

The point with this parable, as with all of Jesus’ parables, is that it’s not just about the people we dismissively categorise as “them”. Whether our “them” is self-righteous legalists or unrighteous sinners, Jesus’ story challenges any tendency to one-dimensionalise and disregard the “other”. Instead, Jesus challenges us to learn to make ourselves low enough to hold our assumptions lightly and to be curious enough to have our minds changed about the people we are tempted to write off.

NOT JUST A PARABLE

By now, we should be starting to see that this is not a parable about prayer or about humility and arrogance alone. It is a brilliant social commentary hidden in a deceptively simple story. It is a reflection on the stones we so carelessly throw across our mile-high fences before we even consider the possibility of substantiating our hatred or exploring the full story to see if our version is correct or even close to complete. In his masterful way (and Luke’s masterful reporting of his storytelling), Jesus comforts us with a scenario we think we understand easily, and then confronts us with our failure to understand, and our reluctance to embody, what God’s reign is really about. And as we enter into Jesus’ story with this awareness, we realise that the Pharisee is not a caricature of all Pharisees, and neither is the tax collector of all sinners. Together, they are an image of the social dynamics that rip our relationships and our world apart.

To subvert our assumptions and prejudices, Jesus first describes these two men and their prayers in a pointedly polarised way. As Joel Green notes, the structure of both prayers and both parts of the narrative is the same, but like a mirror image, the content is starkly different.³ With this in mind, it is a good idea to remember that the way the Pharisee is portrayed in Jesus’ parable is not what all Pharisees were like in Jesus’ time. While Luke and the other Gospels do describe significant opposition from the Pharisees, some warned him of Herod’s threat (13:31-35), Jesus often shared meals with Pharisees as he did with outcasts (7:36; 14:1), and in Acts we are told that some became part of the Christian community (15:5). Similarly, not all tax collectors or “sinners” (see Luke 15:1) were like the one in this parable. Of course, for Jesus, this is the point—we cannot use his parable to villainise either group, and we have to dig deeper.

The way Jesus portrayed these two men was exactly what his audience would have expected. The Pharisee is “an embodiment of arrogance and contemptuous” and tax collectors “were slimy opportunists and collaborators, willing to victimize their own neighbors while assisting the occupiers”.⁴ Yet, if anyone had taken the time to reflect, they might have remembered that Jesus associated with both groups of people, which would have confused any simplistic and moralistic interpretation of his story.

Perhaps what Jesus is inviting us to see is that these men were not as far apart as it seems. Perhaps, as usual, Jesus is calling us out of our dualistic assumptions about these two representative people, and asking us to explore what they have to say to us a little more carefully. To unpack this possibility, I hope you won’t mind if I engage in a little bit of speculative interpretive work, remembering that this is a parable, not a report on an actual event. Let’s begin with the tax collector. For Jesus’ audience, the Pharisee is not where the surprise and shock lie. To imagine a richer and more textured story for this “righteous” man (which would likely not even have entered the minds of Jesus’ audience) would be fairly easy. But the tax collector is an altogether different prospect. Human beings have always tended not to care about the stories of those we deem sinful, evil, unworthy, or outcast. And even if there is a suggestion of a story, we resist it because, in our meritocratic, moralistic society, we interpret it as an attempt to excuse unacceptable behaviour, and we don’t allow excuses. But perhaps it’s worth exploring the possibilities here.

IMAGINING A RICHER STORY

As with Zacchaeus, whom we will encounter next week, and for whom the description is not far from the truth, tax collectors could be a little like organised crime bosses. So, for many of Jesus’ hearers, this tax collector praying the way he did would have felt a little like watching Tony Soprano going to confession and then casually returning to killing, stealing, and extortion. But what if Jesus wants us to question our expectations here? Why would a tax collector who loved his work beat his breast and keep at a distance from others? Could it be that Jesus is inviting us to picture him as someone forced into work he hates and that has cost him friends, social acceptance, dignity, and his own sense of self? Could Jesus be inviting us to imagine this tax collector not as a sinner, but as a human being with a complex and conflicted life? Perhaps we need to expand the story we might tell about this man before we can accept the unconditional grace that God bestows on him.