Often, things are not as simple or clear cut as they seem. We, as human beings, like easy, simple narratives. They work for us. We like our whites to be white and our blacks to be black—keep all that grey nonsense right out. Likewise, we like good guys to be good and bad guys to be bad. One plus one equals two. And in times of chaos, we yearn for order.
And yet, deep down, we know that life is more grey than black blacks or white whites. We know that the characters of our stories—fictional and historical—are nuanced and complex—no one is wholly good or wholly evil. And, as the almighty YouTube algorithm-bot is too fond of reminding me, there’s a gaping paradox at the center of even basic math—I’m talking simple arithmetic, one plus one equals two kind of math—that, thus far anyways, the most brilliant philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians have not been able to reconcile.
Life is messy. Life is complex. Life is beautifully and wonderfully nuanced, and we should always resist simple, easy answers and explanations. It’s ok to be skeptical. It’s good to have doubts and questions.
Because, while easy answers divide us, complexity, nuance, and doubt unite us.
Easy answers divide us.
Complexity, nuance, and doubt unite us.
We can all stand to internalize that, because for far too long, the Church has been intolerant of complexity and doubt. We have become complacent in our devotion and study of scripture. We follow a Christ who spoke in riddles, answered questions with metaphors and stories, and resisted easy answers, and yet we continue to accept shallow, surface-level interpretations of ancient texts and traditions that need to be unpacked.
Historically, we haven’t done a great job at this when it comes to discussing Jesus’s parables. Parables like the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.
At first glance, it’s a simple enough story. Two characters: a pharisee and a tax collector. Both men go up to the temple to pray, but they end up praying two very different kinds of prayers. The pharisee humblebrags, thanks God that he is not like those kinds of people, and touts off all his good works. The tax collector, on the other hand, beats his chest, averts his face from heaven, proclaims that he’s a sinner, and pleads for mercy. Couldn’t be simpler. Luke even goes so far as to give us the answer! Pharisee bad. Tax collector good. Don’t think so highly of yourself. Don’t look down on others. Be humble.
All who lift themselves up will be brought low.
All who make themselves low will be lifted up.
And yet, despite hundreds and hundreds of years of sermons that have said just that, it’s not that simple. It can’t be that simple. Because if it is that simple, then it adds fuel to an antisemitic fire that has been burning for nearly two thousand years. It reinforces the idea that, as Jewish scholar and activist Jessica Price puts it, Judaism is a problem that Jesus came to solve.
Pharisees get a bad rap in our Gospel narratives. Nine times out of ten, their literary function is to serve as a foil to the character of Jesus. They serve as Jesus’s theological sparring partner. They are the ones who are so narrowly focused on matters of the law at the expense of the marginalized and oppressed while Jesus is eating with the sinners and those tax collectors too.
Pharisee, as a word, has even transcended the Gospel narratives and taken on a new life of its own. We have words like pharisaic, meaning self-righteous or hypocritical. And, speaking from my own experience, we progressive Christians love the rhetorical power that “pharisee” wields. Isn’t it just so gosh darn satisfying to write off homophobic Christians and church leaders as “pharisees”? As people who are more concerned with the letter of the law rather than the spirit?
But here’s the problem. Pharisees weren’t just a literary figure. They were a very real and very historical movement of second temple Judaism. Far from being self-righteous hypocritical elites, the pharisaic movement was actually a grassroots movement comprised of leaders who deeply cared for and were concerned about the material needs of their respective communities. They didn’t care about the Torah, or instruction, for its own sake. Rather, they strove to make the Torah as accessible to the people on the ground as possible. And because of this, when the Temple fell in 70 CE, it was the Pharisaic movement, rather than the Temple-centric Sadducees, that endured and gave birth to Judaism as we know it today.
All contemporary Jewish thought and practice descends directly from the Pharisees.
And so, when we say, “don’t act like such a Pharisee”, what we’re really saying is, “don’t act like such a Jew”.
For far too long, too much Jewish blood has been spilled because of the anti-Jewish passages that permeate our New Testament and the ways in which we have neglected to interpret them with anything more than a passing, surface-level glance.
And so, from now on, when you encounter the Pharisees as a character or literary device in the Gospels, an alarm should go off in your head
**WARNING. THINGS ARE NOT AS THEY APPEAR. IT’S NOT THAT EASY**
Easy answers divide us.
Complexity, nuance, and doubt unite us.
So, now that we’ve done a little bit of digging, let’s look at this parable again.
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!’
I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.
Ok, here we have this anonymous Pharisee, and so right away, that alarm should be ringing, and I’m here to tell you that the moral of this parable is not “don’t be so self-righteous” or “don’t act like this Pharisee” here.
After all, as Price notes, if that is the moral of the parable, aren’t we then behaving exactly like the Pharisee that’s depicted in this story? Aren’t we looking down on someone else for their bad behavior and striving to not be like them?
And what exactly is this Pharisee doing? Upon closer examination, is he really behaving in a manner that is self-righteous or self-aggrandizing?
His prayer is, at its core, a prayer of thanksgiving and gratitude. He is thanking God for the blessings he has received that got him to where he is and enable him to care for his community. Jessica Price, again, reminds us, “Hoda’ah, or gratitude, is a huge part—possibly the primary focus—of Jewish practice.” Jews, she reminds us, “say blessings, expressions of wonder and gratitude, over practically everything: eating, waking up alive in the morning, watching evening fall, tasting a new fruit, seeing a beautiful animal”.
And we Christians are called to practice gratitude and thanksgiving as well! We do it collectively and individually. The “Great Thanksgiving” is a key part of our Eucharistic liturgy. It is right to give our thanks and praise. We shouldn’t look upon the Pharisee in this parable with scorn and derision. At the end of the day, he’s giving thanks to God for the good things in his life—the good things in his life that grant him the ability to go above and beyond what is required or asked of him for the sake of his community.
I fast twice per week. I give a tenth of all my income.
The Torah only requires you to give one-tenth of whatever your fields produce each year, or your agricultural income—Deuteronomy 14:22. The Pharisee is taking one-tenth of all his income, more than what is required, and re-investing it in his community. Likewise, there are specific holy days out of the entire year in the Jewish calendar set aside for fasting. Price notes that fasting on a weekly basis, let alone twice per week, was seen as an extraordinary measure to ask God to intervene for the sake of the community in extraordinary times: a famine, a drought, or a brutal foreign empire’s military occupation of your ancestral homeland.
Which brings us back to the tax collector.
The tax collectors in Roman-occupied Judea were violent and oppressive goons for the Roman Empire. They were a part of the Jewish community, but were reviled because they would go door-to-door and take from their neighbors—always taking more than the required tax to keep for themselves and line their own pockets—all while keeping the wheels of their community’s oppression turning. Jesus eating in the homes of tax collectors was a scandal because they caused so much harm in their own communities.
And so, let’s take a deeper look at his prayer: Be merciful to me, a sinner. Maybe, deep down, he knows that the choices that he’s making is wrong. That he’s harming his community. It’s a good prayer for a man in his position to be praying. But is there any indication that his behavior is going to change? Is there any clue that his life is transformed through this prayer? The text, on its surface, shows no clear sign that real and true repentance—teshuvah in Hebrew, another key tenet of Jewish practice—is taking place. There are no easy answers to these questions. The text isn’t clear.
But, again, easy answers divide us.
Complexity, nuance, and doubt unite us.
At its core, this story is a comparison of two characters. A Pharisee and a tax collector. And Luke gives us this moral at the end of it:
I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other.
Except that “rather than” is a translator’s choice. The Greek word there, par, is far mor ambiguous. Par can, absolutely, mean opposed to, instead of, or rather that. But it can also mean alongside, next to, or even because of.
I tell you, this man went down to his home justified alongside the other.
I tell you, this man went down to his home justified next to the other.
I tell you, this man went down to his home because of the other.
I think that the key part of the story is that they depart from the temple together. Because, at the end of the day, righteousness, justification, and sanctification are social-relational and communal phenomena. One person cannot be righteous on their own, and one person cannot be unrighteous on their own. These are social categories. When we sin, we are harming others. When we act rightly, we are repairing that harm.
And as someone who inhabits a body that experiences oppressive forces directly in several ways—white supremacy, classism, fatphobia, ableism—I know from experience that I will never be free from those oppressive forces until everyone is free from them. I know that my communities will never be free from those forces until literally everyone is free from those forces. Because these oppressive forces hold the so-called privileged captive too. They limit our ability to imagine a better, brighter, more just, and inclusive global community. They extinguish our imaginations and compel us to maintain the status quo: there’s us and there’s them and that’s just the way things are.
Injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves won’t be eradicated until everyone is free from them.
That’s the moral of this parable. Liberation happens in community. The Pharisee knows that his community will never be free from the oppression of the Roman empire until even that tax collector is free from the oppression of the Roman empire. And so, the two men go down from the temple, side by side, and the tax collector is justified alongside the other. All who humble themselves will be exalted. All who exalt themselves will be made humble.
Jessica Price ends her commentary on this parable with a series of questions. Because, ultimately, this parable—as any good parable does—stirs up more questions than it provides answers.
- Is the tax collector going to stop being a tax collector? If he doesn’t, what does his prayer mean?
- Is it ethical to pray for mercy/absolution if you can’t or don’t intend to stop committing the behavior?
- Is it wrong to give thanks you’re not in a position where you’re tempted to behave harmfully (“there but for the grace of God…”)?
- Does our community have enough people devoted to doing the right thing to prevent the people devoted to doing the wrong thing from remaking it in their image, rather than vice versa?
- Are we leaning on the merit of others rather than contributing our own?
- What would true teshuvah for the tax collector involve?
- What’s the Pharisee’s responsibility to the tax collector?
These are not easy questions, and they won’t have easy answers. But we’re not called to seek easy answers.
Easy answers divide us.
Complexity and doubt unite us.
Amen.
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