Most of us think we aren’t very good at praying, or at least, that we could do a lot better in both the frequency and the content departments. But no matter how little we know about prayer one thing we do all know, that in this gospel the Pharisee shows us exactly how not to do it. “I thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity.” In a way, it’s an encouragement for the rest of us to get back to prayer, since really, almost anything incoherent we might decide to blurt out has to be better than this.
It’s easy to laugh at this caricature of a haughty, selfish hypocrite. And yet before we go too far feeling superior to him, let’s remember that this gospel reading is a big trap, since it’s a reading about feeling superior, and where we end up doing that.
Let’s think for a few minutes about exactly who these two people in the temple are, and let’s also think about where exactly they stand with God.
The fact is, Pharisees were good people. As people say today, he was entitled to feel good about himself. Pharisees were a small minority of the Jewish world, and what they were noted for was not their hypocrisy but their devotion. Everything that their religion demanded of them, they did more, not out of a spirit of showing off, but out of a spirit of commitment, of doing things the right way. In many ways, they were as respected among most Jews as someone would be who was here, taking part in every church service and parish organization and good work you could name. So when Jesus singled them out, again and again, as examples of how people can go wrong while being good, he was criticizing serious, generous, visible practicers of the faith. So let’s not get them wrong — there is some of ourselves in these fine upstanding people.
But in the same way we can get Pharisees wrong, we can get tax-collectors wrong, and pretend that they were just ordinary people in a looked-down-upon job. These were not your regular hard-working civil servants who didn’t get enough respect. Tax collectors were essentially independent operators in the service of the Roman state. They could demand whatever they wanted in the way of taxes due, and as long as they passed along Rome’s cut, they could keep the difference. So Jewish tax agents were not only turncoats working for Rome, but possibly chiselers taking a big commission simply because they had the power to. Try to imagine a job where just to be a member of it would mark you out as a betrayer of your faith, of your people, of your ancestors. This tax collector perhaps really is a little creep, and maybe worse. He might be ashamed of the awful work he does, but he’s still in the job.
So the point is not that the Pharisee is actually bad, and the tax-collector someone with an unseen heart of gold. The point is that they both assume that they understand where they stand, and both are wrong. The Pharisee assumes that God has looked with favor on his many projects for salvation, but also assumes that God looks with disfavor on the failure next to him. That, it turns out, is not true. The tax collector assumes that God shuns and condemns him and won’t look him in the eye, and that, it seems, isn’t true either.
Again and again in the gospel, the goodness of good people does not extend to the way they regard people other than people like them. They assume that doing the right thing means that God has given them higher grades. They are morally stronger, and they assume they did it themselves. They are luckier in life, but they assume they somehow earned it. They think that their own goodness earns them a stripe on their sleeve that the sinful simply don’t get unless they change completely.
That, of course, is where Jesus comes in. Over and over again, the Pharisees, and people in general, are appalled at who Jesus associates with, even eats with. It suggests a deep equality, not between good and bad, but between good people and bad people. He loves them both the same. That must mean in his eyes they have something in common. All the meals in the Gospel of Luke, and there are several dozen, in a way present a vision of how God sees us all here, all of us eating together, one family, some of us on a good streak of succeeding, some on a long, long roll of mistakes and sinfulness. All together at one table, without too many explanations about why.
If you need a reminder that this is far from the way most good people really feel about the people who aren’t as good as they are, all you have to do is listen to the way law-abiding people talk about criminals, to the way good observant Catholics sometimes talk about the lax ones, at how the moral talk about those who are clearly less so.
And the real message of this is that God is just not subject to our judgments. The gospel and the commandments are not our weapons to use against others, they are mirrors in which the first thing we should be looking at is ourselves. It isn’t that morality doesn’t matter, it’s that standing in judgment of others and questioning their salvation more than we question our own is a very dangerous business. Salvation is God’s business, not ours, and God goes about it in a way that’s much more generous than the way any of us ever would. We all need a savior, not just a few of us, and it’s the same savior for all us, and he doesn’t play favorites.
So: Should we feel happy about our accomplishments as fine upstanding people? Yes. Do we give up worrying about sin and sinners? No. But we’ll go about both those tasks a little differently when we remember that while we have quite a few people who are sure they know sin when they see it, people who actually love sinners are in very short supply.