The parable of the self-righteous Pharisee and the repentant tax collector.

At face value this is how we would tend to title and interpret the parable from our Gospel reading for this morning.

Luke has told this parable in a way that encourages us to identify with the tax collector who demonstrates the positive Christian virtue of humility, as opposed to the Pharisee who displays a negative sense of moral superiority.

Be humble like the tax collector, and don’t be haughty like that Pharisee, and you’ll be justified before God.

Simple right?

It is difficult to avoid interpreting this parable in straightforward, even simplistic terms.

There are many problems with this traditional interpretation.

Knowing that Pharisees are regularly cast in the gospels as Jesus’ opposition, we all too easily judge the Pharisee to be a self-righteous hypocrite and assume that the moral of the story is to be humble.

The problem when we preach this is that we become self-righteous.

Not only can it lead us to commit the same offense that Luke says the parable is teaching against (and seems to commit himself in his introduction to the parable), as we thank God that we’re not like that Pharisee, more importantly, it can lead us inadvertently into perpetuating harmful ideas about the Jewish community.

It can play into old tropes about Jewish people and Judaism as legalistic, elitist, and out of touch with the “true” God.

The truth is that the Pharisees, as a group, were good people.

They were among the most sincerely religious people in Israel.

They were well-respected within the Jewish community.

They were a voluntary group. Members had different levels of involvement, they belonged to other groups, and they earned a living in a variety of ways.

They were not part of the governing class; they competed for influence and power. Pharisees were not “legalists” who were trying to earn God’s favor.

They were a Jewish movement that emphasized the importance of obedience to the law of Moses.

Living in obedience with torah was a way of making God’s benefits visible and accessible in all aspects of life for all who were Jewish.

The Pharisees believed that God wanted all Jewish people to follow the covenantal rules, not just the priests, kind of like our Protestant reformers of a few hundred years ago.

They wanted everyone to live a life in relationship with God and didn’t see the priests as having some kind of special access to God.

They are the reason that Judaism still exists today as they enabled Judaism to survive the destruction of their Temple and their city, Jerusalem, by the Romans in 70 AD.

They were able to re-imagine their faith in an ever-changing world and a radically changed historical context.

I think we can identify with this struggle, and I think we modern-day Episcopalians are trying to do the same.

The reason the Pharisees are portrayed so negatively in our Gospels is because our Gospels are written by another Jewish group, Christ-followers, who were in direct competition with the Pharisees following the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 AD about what Judaism would look like.

What we see in the Gospels is an intra-Jewish argument about the future of Judaism.

The writers of our Gospels were Jewish.

What evolved from this conflict was Judaism and Christianity.

The two groups parted ways and took different paths.

The Gospels reflect the fight from the perspective of the Christ-followers just before they parted ways.

And tax collectors, as a group, were not the greatest of people.

They were Jewish people who joined with the oppressive Roman regime in order to make money.

They contracted with Rome to collect taxes.

These entrepreneurs paid a stipulated amount in advance to the empire for the right to collect taxes.

They then squeezed as much as possible from the people to cover their initial investment and turn a profit.

They in turn hired local Jewish residents to physically collect the taxes.

They were not an oppressed and marginalized group.

They were not without power, wealth, or status.

Most were rich and had no mercy for others.

Tax collectors were collaborators who violated community welfare.

They took from the poor and gave it to Rome.

They were not kicked out of the Jewish community, they made choices that took them out of their community.

They could and did still enter the Temple.

So, what are we to do with this parable then?

The parable sets a trap, as I believe Jesus intended it to do.

To criticize one of the characters or distinguish us and our values clearly from one of them causes us to become the self-righteous disdainful person we say the parable is preaching against.

Indeed, I think Luke falls into this trap in the first and last verses of the parable.

So first, I think we should read the parable again without Luke’s glosses:

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.

I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner!’

Both characters in this parable are caricatures and not typical members of their respective groups.

Neither the Pharisee nor the tax collector behaves in the manner that a first-century Jewish audience would expect.

Listeners would be surprised that a Pharisee would be dismissive of others in the community; they would be surprised that a tax-collector could be repentant.

And this parable is not really about either of the men.

Instead in its shocking portrayal of two-well known characters from Jesus’ time and place who don’t behave in expected ways, it shows us how God sees the world.

It is a parable about God. We draw lines between who is in and who is out.

We look at others with disdain and judgment.

God does not.

God sees the complicatedness of each and every one of us and seeks to draw every one of us into the Divine Love.

Through God’s eyes there is enough grace for the Pharisee and the tax collector.

Jesus gives a shocking portrayal of both in his story in order to shock the hearers into understanding just how big God’s grace really is.

Think for a moment about some individual or group that you see as the worst individual or group that exists.

Hold that individual or group in your mind.

Now imagine Jesus telling this parable to you and hear Jesus casting the character of the Pharisee as being from a group you hold in high regard, perhaps a group you identify with and belong to.

And hear Jesus casting the character of tax collectors as being from the group that you think should be condemned to the deepest depths of hell.

Maybe this will give you a sense of the infinite grace of God that Jesus is trying to explain to us here.

It shakes up our view of the world.

It shakes up our view of God.

And this is exactly what parables are meant to do.

What is outrageous in this parable is the grace of God.

And as our view of the world and God are shaken up, we find our own view shaken up.

We start to understand Matthew 7:3-5 a little better:

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

We understand this better because we begin to understand and have gratitude for the infinite grace that God shows to us to.

And we take one small step toward better loving our neighbor as ourselves.

And what does it mean to love our neighbor as ourselves or to see with the eyes of God?

Well, I think the last two of our baptismal vows says it better than anything I could come up with:

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

Every human being is a child of God and God’s grace is available to every human being.

It is not our job to be in the role of judge.

Frankly we can’t handle that role.

It is our job to love as best we can and to repent when we fall short and to give thanks for the grace of God.