Luke 18:9-14 "Conundrum"

We in the 21st century are not all that different from those men and women in the 1st century who sat at Jesus’ feet, listening to him teach with parables. One similarity across the millennia is that whether we live today or whether we lived 2000 years ago, most of us prefer to see the world in black and white.

There are good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. For us, there is Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, Cinderella and the Wicked Stepmother, Barack Obama and Glenn Beck, the Tea Party and the Liberal Establishment. For Jesus’ listeners, there were the one God Jews and the Zeus loving pagans, the Jewish peasant class and the Roman Emperor himself.

And yet, we will discover that this parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying next to each other in the synagogue is not black and white at all, but rather many shades of gray.

Presbyterian pastor and seminary professor Victor Shepherd tells the story like this: “A Pharisee and a tax-collector go to church together. The Pharisee is morally circumspect. He’s squeaky clean, consistent in it all as well. He’s a genuinely good man. There’s nothing deficient or defective in his religious observance or his moral integrity. There isn’t a whiff of hypocrisy about him. As soon as he gets to church he reminds God how circumspect and how consistent he is.

(The) tax-collector, (however, was part of the) most despised group in Israel. (Tax collectors) made a living collecting taxes for the Roman occupation…This branded them publicly as exploitative, ready to “fleece” their own people, greedy, and heartless concerning the kinfolk they kept impoverished.

The Pharisee looked at this one tax-collector in church, looked away and then looked up, nose in air as he said “God, I thank you I am not like other men. They are extortionists, unjust, adulterous. I’m none of this. I am not like them. I’m not at all like this creep standing beside me.” The tax-collector, we’re told, made no religious claim at all. He simply cried, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’”

Now, at first glance, the tale may look black and white. However, when you closely observe the two characters in the story, this simplicity rapidly disappears.

The parable presents a conundrum, a puzzle, a brain teaser, a mind boggler. The Pharisee or the tax collector? Who does one identity with? Jesus’ listeners would not have enjoyed being associated with either one. There is no good guy in this parable. There is no hero.

On the one hand, Jesus was perpetually in conflict with the Pharisees. They were the religious hierarchy and way too tight with the Roman government. Pharisees dictated the nits and nats of Jewish holiness and considered themselves to be of that righteousness.

However, Pharisees also had the reputation of being religious hypocrites. Because they were generally well off, they had the financial means to observe all the complexities of the Mosaic law, down to the tiniest nit or nat, something impossible for most of the Jewish populace. Those who followed Jesus had no love for the Pharisee in our parable.

Yet, on the other hand, a tax collector was the scum of the earth. As the author of a blog entitled “Magdalene’s Musings” wrote, “If Pharisees were models of holiness and righteousness, tax collectors were models of a different kind: they were mostly thought of as models of greed, uncleanness and dishonesty,…working on behalf of the enemy,… making themselves rich off the misery of their own people.

Tax collectors were traitors.” Those who followed Jesus had no love for the tax collector in our parable either.

That is the conundrum. Who does one identify with?

The Pharisee was not a bad person. His religion was his passion. He would be the one in church every Sunday without fail. He loved the Bible, and its literal teachings dictated how he lived his life. He was a good upstanding Jew.

In fact, he lived in exemplary fashion, going above and beyond the minimum requirements for a good religious life. He fasted regularly – and he tithed on everything he acquired, even down to the herbs in his garden. He invested 10% of his treasure where his heart was – and looking at it from the perspective of this day and age, that is nothing to sneeze at. The Pharisee had religious zeal. Seen from this perspective, the Pharisee is no villain.

Of course, Jesus points out that he does have this shortcoming when it comes to his prayer life. His prayers seem less about God and more about himself – though all he was doing really was offering prayers of gratitude – thanking God that he was blessed in not being like the tax collector who prayed beside him.

Now, the tax collector – well, he is a different story. Not a paragon of good solid ethics, he would never be elected church treasurer. As United Church of Canada pastor David Ewart notes, “Not only does collecting taxes make one very unpopular, it also makes one unable to live according to the teachings of the Bible because one must constantly be in contact with ritually unclean people and goods. And taxes paid for the Roman armies and elites that were occupying the Holy Land.” Seen from this perspective, the tax collector is no hero.

However, when it comes to his prayer life, this fellow got it right. His words may not have been very articulate, but they were to the point. He asks for mercy and throws himself upon the grace of God. And in the long run, Jesus seems to say, his seeking of forgiveness in the face of tremendous odds counts for something.

Who does one identify with? It is a conundrum. The pompous prig of a Pharisee who deeply loves his God and his church? Or the irreligious, morally bankrupt tax collector who throws himself on the mercy of Yahweh? It is a puzzle, a brain teaser, a mind boggler.

As I thought about the parable this week, I wondered if perhaps there is no black or white answer to that niggling question of who we identify with – Pharisee or tax collector. Perhaps Jesus did not mean for there to be a clear right or wrong. Perhaps we are meant to learn something about prayer from both the tax collector and the Pharisee. Perhaps we are not meant to judge either one of them but simply to acknowledge that, if we look closely, we will see ourselves in the eyes of both of them.

Take the prayers of the Pharisee. They were prayers of thanksgiving – and surely there is nothing untoward in that. So often we come to God with a list of demands. We want healing for him, luck in the job search for her. We want some sort of holy intervention, so that we will sell our house or our child will travel safely back to college.

But we seldom actually thank God for that child in the first place – or even for another blessed day of life itself. Where the Pharisee went astray was not in being grateful to God, but in holding up and thereby judging the tax collector as his spiritual opposite. And when he did that, he was no longer praying but comparing.

But haven’t we all done that on occasion? We hear of mudslides in Guatemala and thank God that it was them and not us. We read in the newspaper of children killed in a car accident on prom night and thank God that our own children came home safely. We have all done it. We are all like the Pharisee.

Take the prayers of the tax collector. In spite of the fact that he was morally bankrupt, a deeply flawed human being, he understood his relationship with God clearly enough to be ever so humble in his prayers, thereby setting up a marvelous teachable moment – and that is this:

We too must be self-reflective enough to acknowledge to God our sinfulness, our shortcomings – even as count our blessings and present our list of demands to the Almighty. We too must trust enough to openly share our deepest and darkest secrets with God. Admitting out loud his deep need for God was what justified the tax collector.

And just as we are all like the Pharisee, so we are also all like the tax collector. Face it – we may not be cheaters and chiselers like he, but we all have something deeply sorry about our lives. From the tax collector’s experience, we are assured that owning up to the bad and ugly things about us will be OK – and indeed will serve to cement even more our relationship with the Almighty.

The parable is surely a conundrum, a puzzle that has no black and white solution. However, I think that the interplay between the Pharisee and the tax collector is a way for Jesus to remind us just how important prayer is in our relationship with God.

Surely it has the potential to help us discover more of who we are and who God is – even if we at times stumble in our attempts to pray properly.

Martin Luther King, Jr., [said] “to be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.” This parable teaches us that "prayer is the occasion for honesty about oneself (but also) generosity about others…(For Jesus’ listeners and so for us) prayer is not a last resort when all the plans and programs and power plays have failed; prayer is, rather, the first and primary task of Christians" (Charles Cousar) – even though, as the Pharisee and the tax collector illustrate for us, we have not yet perfected the technique.

Rev. Nancy Foran is the pastor of the Raymond Village Community Church in Raymond, Maine
www.rvccme.org