The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

22st Sunday after Pentecost

Ruskin Heights Lutheran Church

October 24, 2010

St. Luke 18:9-14

Everyone knows this story.

Two men went to the Temple to pray.

One was a Pharisee, one a tax collector.

There is a great difference between the two men.

The Pharisee was a “separatist” — that’s what the name meant. They were a lay spiritual movement dedicated to keeping the law of God in its every detail. This is how they organized their daily living, fashioned to keeping the Law of Moses.

To do that they kept themselves separate from everyone by attending to every detail of the Talmud.

So the Pharisee prays “to himself” a prayer of thanksgiving.

Thank God I am not like the rest of humankind.

I am not greedy, I am not unjust, I do not commit adultery, I keep the grass mowed and the property neat, I am not an uninsured driver.

I am not like everyone else.

I am different from the tax collector over there.

And even though there is no requirement for in the Law of Moses, I fast twice a week.

And of my income, I give a tithe to the Temple treasury.

The Pharisee is different from the tax collector.

A tax collector was a tax farmer for the Roman imperial government, raising money for Caesar, taking his fellow Jews on behalf of an occupation army, handling coins which contained the graven images of Caesar and the Roman gods. He violated the first commandment, handling coins with images, among his other many crimes.

Nobody liked tax collectors. When a man became a tax collector, he had to find a new set of friends.

So the tax collector prays, and prays for mercy.

I am a sinner. I am greedy, I am unjust, I never pay taxes, I doge what is right.

And the story concludes.

The first one in the front of the Temple was wrong, and the second one in the back of the Temple was right.

The problem with this story is this — it is very easy to get the wrong message.

If you were to give a prayer of thanks based on this story, your prayer would go like this:

— “I thank you God that you have not made me like that Pharisee over there. No, sir, Lord, I'm glad to be humble, even more humble than all the rest."

We think too frequently of the Pharisee as a hypocrite.

But Jesus did not call him that. Jesus did not call him by that name or any other.

When Jesus elsewhere calls Pharisees hypocrites it wasn’t because they pretended to keep the law and did not. They did keep the law, every bit of it. Remember the challenge of Jesus: Your righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees?

No, Jesus identified other problems with the Pharisees, but hypocrisy in living wasn’t one of them.

So this is an important point.

We must take the Pharisee as his word.

He was a just man. He was what he said he was. He lived a prudent, up-right, sensible life, bounded in every way by the Law of Moses; a life that would be anywhere, anytime, above reproach.

He was not pretending.

What he said is in fact what he did.

His mistake lies in something else.

Listen to the Gospel of St. Luke: “The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself . . . .”

He had gone to the Temple to pray, but he did not pray to God.

He prayed to himself — he revealed to himself why God should love and respect him.

It was not gratitude that made his prayer.

It was the Pharisee himself, not God, that was the center of his prayer.

God was silent of course, and did not answer.

But that did not matter. The Pharisee was content with himself.

We come to God with nothing.

What counts with God is not our morality nor or religion.

It is not our race or our class, and even less our net worth that finds any favor with God.

We enter the waters of baptism as strangers and aliens to God, and we emerge washed, cleansed, named and adopted; children of the king.

Our new status is a gift.

That is why, among other reasons, we practice baptism of infants — helpless, vulnerable, requiring constant care, they have accomplished nothing with their life. They are the premier example of God’s undeserved love, a love that reaches to us even before we know it, a love which continues undeserved throughout our lifetimes.

We should want it no other way.

If God’s love for us depends upon what we do —

If God’s love depends on how much we accomplish —

If God’s love depends on how well we have preformed —

If God’s love depends upon skin color —

If God’s love depends on how sincere our faith is —

— then there is no one, not one, prepared to stand before God.

We are commissioned with the Gospel, commissioned to carry the Good News that a broken spirit, a contrite heart, a plea for mercy are the only requirements for living with God. (cf. Psalm 51)

The tax collector prayed the first verse of Psalm 51: “Be merciful to me, O Lord, a sinner.”

And that means he went home, in God’s mercy.