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"The Pharisee and the Tax Collector”

Sermon by Dr. Greg Knox Jones
on Luke 18:9-14
given October 28, 2007

What a marvelous parable! I love the way Jesus exposes the arrogance of this full-of-himself Pharisee. The application of this parable to our own day is a cinch. When I picture this Pharisee, what immediately emerges is an amalgamation of Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, Oral Roberts, and his son, Richard. And I can hear their pious voices dripping with sanctimony as they pray, “God, we thank you that we are not like the homosexuals, the abortionists and the liberals who are destroying our nation.”

Self-righteous hypocrites really get under my skin, so to see one skewed by Jesus does my heart good. However, I must confess that on close inspection, my modern day equivalent of this Pharisee is not a perfect fit. A couple of details in the parable prevent us from brushing the Pharisee aside as quickly as we can dismiss some contemporary televangelists.

Did you catch how much of his income he contributes to God? Ten percent. When compared with Presbyterians, whose giving to the church averages about two and a half percent, this fellow looks pretty impressive in the stewardship department.

There is one other detail. This man fasts twice a week. How many of us have fasted in the past week? Not to work on our waistlines, but as a spiritual discipline?

Over the years, the church has trained us with Pavlovian conditioning. When we hear the word “Pharisee,” a bell in our brain registers “self-righteous hypocrites who opposed Jesus,” and that is not an altogether inaccurate assessment. However, that caricature for all Pharisees is a distortion. It makes it too easy for us to overlook the fundamental fact that the Pharisees, more than any other group in first century Judaism, lived their faith 24/7. No one would have ever accused them of being one-day-a-week believers. They sought to make God primary in their lives and they demonstrated their commitment in their daily habits.

Yet, whenever we hear a passage from the New Testament, if there is a Pharisee in the story, we know that he’s the villain. He is the person in the story with whom we do not identify.

But, when I pause to reflect on the two characters in today’s parable – the Pharisee and the tax collector – I find myself agreeing with the pastor who writes, “I know which one of these characters my church depends on. I know which one pays the bills, teaches the Sunday school classes, visits the sick and feeds the hungry. Wouldn’t we love to have a church full of people with his commitments – people who care enough to fast, people who contribute ten percent of their income and thank God for the opportunity to do it? It’s people like this Pharisee who hold the community of faith together. We make a monumental mistake if we simply write him off. He’s probably a better person than most of us.”1

But still, there is a problem, isn’t there? In many ways this Pharisee lived an exemplary life, but as the parable reveals, you can keep all of the commandments and still miss the point. You can follow the law scrupulously, but undermine your good efforts with the wrong attitude.

The Pharisee reveals his Achilles heel when he prays. He does not thank God that he has been spared from becoming a thief, an adulterer or a tax collector. He thanks God that “he is not like those people.” He regards others with contempt. In his heart of hearts, he truly believes he is better than they are, and that’s what makes him so pompous. This is what alienates him from God.
But before we are tempted to pray, “God, I thank you that I am not like that Pharisee,” we had better do a close inspection of ourselves. Haven’t there been times when we have inflated our own goodness by focusing on how we are better than someone else? Instead of defining our identity by measuring ourselves against the yardstick of Christ, haven’t there been times when we have pointed to someone who is off course and puffed up ourselves by demeaning them? We end up resembling the Pharisee if we imagine ourselves to be worthy because we are better than others.

When I was a sophomore in high school, many, many decades ago, I received a letter inviting me to participate in the test-marketing of a new men’s cologne. I doubt that they were really planning to have teenagers participate in this test, but somehow they ended up with my name.

Before they sent me a bottle of this unnamed cologne, I had to answer a brief questionnaire.

One question asked me to list any cologne that I had ever used. Thinking I was a real man of the world, I wrote down the name of the cologne I used throughout my junior high years: Aii Ya! Hai Karate. Some of you never had the opportunity to use Hai Karate, but it was the rage in the 60s and 70s. Every boy in my junior high school used this dreadful smelling potion. The aroma was so overwhelming you could smell it up and down the hallways.
They advertised Hai Karate with a bare-chested man jumping around and doing karate kicks because any man who used it would be forced to protect himself from all the women who would swarm over him. Some of you may remember their tag line: “Be careful how you use it.”

By the time I reached high school, I pushed aside the Hai Karate because I realized that was for kids. Now that I was in high school, and was the big, tough, middle linebacker on the football team, I needed something more manly, so I started using “Brut.” I proudly wrote this down on the questionnaire certain that this would convey to them that they had found a real man for test-marketing their new cologne.

I buzzed on through the other questions on the survey, mailed in it in, and then in a couple of weeks, I received my free bottle of this upcoming product. After using it for a few weeks, I received a notice that a company representative would call on me to see what I thought of their product.

The company representative was a woman in her forties or fifties - someone fairly ancient to a sixteen year-old. My parents and I met her at the door, and then we all sat in our living room as she asked me questions about the cologne. She had a clipboard with a sheet on it, and she would read out a question and I would answer it, and she would mark my response. I remember this woman because she was a little different than my family. And she was a little different than the people in our neighborhood. She tried to sound polished, but her poor grammar betrayed her. The clothes she wore were clean, but inexpensive and out of style. She probably made them herself. Her shoes were old and worn.
She was not in our home very long, perhaps half an hour. When she finished the questionnaire, she thanked me for trying out the cologne and for taking the time to answer the questions. She headed out the door with her clipboard to call on others who had tried the same product.

While she was there, she treated me like an adult. She treated me courteously and with respect. I wish I could tell you that I treated her the same way, but I didn’t. I did not do anything obvious, but the tone in my voice communicated less than full respect for her.

As soon as she left, I started to head for my room to finish my homework, but my parents said, “Hold on a second, we need to talk.” We sat back down in the living room, and Dad said, “Don’t ever talk to anyone like that again.”
The legalistic Pharisee came out in me as I said, “What do you mean? I didn’t say anything bad.”

Mom piped in: “It wasn’t what you said, it was how you said it.”
Dad said, “Some people have to make their living going door to door getting the answers from teenagers who have tried out some inexpensive cologne. It doesn’t matter what they do or where they live; what does matter is that you treat everyone with respect. Are we clear?”

That talk made a lasting impression on me and helped me see how wrong I was to think of myself as better than others.

Today’s parable reminds us of the danger of thinking that we can bolster our image by thinking less of someone else. Attempting to increase our stature by standing on another, only reveals how small we really are.

However, this parable not only shows us how easy it is to get off track; it also shows us how to get back on the right track. Another man entered the temple to pray that day; a tax collector. Remember, in that culture, tax collector was a synonym for “dishonest character.” Tax collectors were in collusion with the enemy and most of them cheated their neighbors. Jesus did not hold the tax collector up as a shining example of the kind of person we should become, but rather as an example of the kind of attitude we should possess. The man did not try to deny his bad behavior; he did not make excuses; and unlike the Pharisee, he did not attempt to make himself look a little better by comparing himself with someone more despicable. He had hurt people and he admitted it. He was so ashamed of what he had done, he kept his head bowed. He felt he was too unworthy to look up to heaven. He beat his breast, another sign of shame, and he pleaded, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

God wants us to come clean; to push aside the self deception and the rationalizations and the comparisons with others. Jesus said that when the tax collector walked away from the temple, he was back in sync with God because he had made an honest confession and opened himself up to God’s forgiveness; the forgiveness that has the power to transform us and launch us in the right direction.

When I thought about God forgiving this tax collector, I was reminded of the time Abraham Lincoln pardoned a young soldier. In the young man’s first encounter with combat, he had become so frightened that he turned and ran for his life. For his capitulation, he had been sentenced to death. But in pardoning the young soldier, Lincoln wrote, “I have observed that it does not do a boy much good to shoot him.”

And when we fall short, God does not condemn us. God is a merciful parent, eager to forgive. But Jesus knows that forgiveness is drained of its power to transform us if we refuse to face the darkness that resides within, so he urges us to make an honest and humble assessment.

Today’s parable reminds us of how easy it is and how ugly it is to pray, “God, I thank you that I am better than those people.” It reminds us that instead of trying to elevate ourselves by drawing comparisons with others, we need to remember that all people are worthy of respect. It also reminds us that it is only when we honestly face our shortcomings, ask God to forgive us and seek transformation, that we can repair our relationships with one another and deepen our bond with God.

NOTES

1. Paul Duke, “Praying With a Sideward Glance,” in the Christian Century.

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