10/23/2022
The Rev. Richard Hogue Jr.
This Lukan gospel passage is often taken for granted; I think. It seems so easy on the surface, “don’t be a self-righteous jerk” is the basic message we often walk away with, and that’s not a bad message to receive and live. But like any story where we may know the end, how we get there shapes our perception of the ending, and the lessons we receive. I want to introduce an entirely different perspective on this parable, and how that shapes a different takeaway from this passage. We must start with the painfully obvious: Jesus is Jewish, and Jesus is very Jewish in his time and place. We often retroject Protestant Reformation ideas of Judaism back into the gospels, creating anachronistic tendencies in how we view the Judaisms of that time. These anachronisms often propagate a negative image of Judaism as legalistic or sanctimonious. Counter to all this, Luke’s gospel spends its second chapter recounting Jesus’ birth and then his annual pilgrimage with his family to the Temple for Passover.
Luke’s gospel goes out of its way to paint the relationship between Jesus and the Temple, the center of Jewish life apart from personal prayer and piety, as deeply positive. Jesus’ ministry arguably begins at the Temple in this gospel, when he and his parents encounter Simeon and the prophet Anna, who both proclaim Jesus’ future redemptive ministry in praises to God (Luke 2.25-38). Later, Jesus even evades his parents during an annual Passover pilgrimage to the Temple to speak to the rabbis there.
“After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, ‘Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.’ He said to them, ‘Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’” (Luke 2.46-49)
For Jesus, the Temple is not just a place of ritual, as important as that was, too. It was a place of genuine spiritual encounters, insightful and noisy conversation, deep devotion, and lively experiences with the divine in community. All of this is to say, when Jesus uses the Temple in a parable, it is entirely positive in connotation. Just a chapter later from this passage, Jesus runs out those selling items in the Temple to return it to a house of prayer, of divine interaction, rather than one merely of ritual without repentance or good deeds.1 Jesus loves the Temple and sees it as a primary avenue for interaction between God and the beloved community.
And in that community, like in all human societies before and since, there are the smoother and rougher edges of humanity, with all the downfalls, desires, dilemmas, joys, and experiences that come with life. All these were brought to God in the holiness of the Temple, ritually purified to be fully present to God. The Law was not a burden to the Jewish people, it was loved much as Jesus loved the Law, and he understood the heart of it as compassionate and loving gift from the Almighty put into a digestible framework with which God’s chosen people could structure their lives. Just as we often retroject our modern notions into scripture, we also do the same with the Pharisees, setting them up as strawmen for Jesus to knock down. The reality is that Jesus was closer to a pharisee than not. He dressed like them, spoke, and debated with them, went to dinner with them, shared the title of “rabbi” with them, and was a lively member of that community, even if a reformer among them. In fact, when the woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years touched and was healed by Jesus, it was his tzitzit, or prayer shawl, that was the hem of the garments that she reached out to and was healed through
(Matthew 9:20–22, Mark 5:25–34, Luke 8:43–48). Here’s one for show-and-tell [display tzitzit].
With all this in mind let’s rethink this parable: A pharisee, devoted to understanding and following God’s loving gift of the Law, walks up the holy mount to the Temple alongside a tax collector. Tax collectors were considered traitors to the Jewish people as collaborators with the Roman occupiers who supported their malicious regime by ensuring the people’s money went to pay Caesar’s war machine. Tax collectors were also seen as deeply corrupt, skimming for themselves on top of their treachery. Standing by himself in the Temple, the pharisee prays, thanking God, that he is “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.” There is nothing more noted about how the prayer is made, or that anyone can hear him. He simply prays this way. The tax collector, standing a bit further away in the Temple, prays too, beating his chest and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Again, we’re given no other information other than the tax collector’s prayer itself. Jesus ends the parable by saying: “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.”
But is that what the actual text in Greek says? Amy-Jill Levine, a master of koine Greek and New Testament history, points to an obvious possible translation that we as Christians mostly ignore: that instead of “rather than the other” the text can just as easily, if not more likely be translated as “this man went down to his home justified alongside the other.”2 The contraction of the word παρά, the Greek cognate for our words parallel, paradox, parasite, etc. much more often connotes being together, or beside something, rather than beyond. What might it mean for us to consider this translation, where both go home righteous before God? More shocking to consider, what if this is the actual message of Jesus, that the righteous and repentant are both close to God? That lines up better with the parable of the Prodigal Son and His Brother (Luke 15.11-32).
When we dismiss the Pharisee as a hypocrite, or legalistic, and then identify with the tax collector over and against the pharisee, we end up with the same attitude as the Pharisee to begin with, “Thank God I am not like that Pharisee.”3 It runs counter to itself. Let’s not forget that the Pharisee is indeed righteous, his good works benefit not just him but his community. Similarly, if we add things the text doesn’t say at all, like the tax collector stands further off because he was ritually impure, that’s also impossible. He wouldn’t have been able to enter the Temple without being ritually cleansed to begin with. He may well have been ostracized, given his treacherous occupation, but he was not impure. We are remiss in thinking of the Temple as a center of elitism, xenophobia, misogyny, or corruption, because again, it runs counter to reality and to Jesus’ lived experience in Luke. You don’t build places in your holiest location in the universe for women and gentiles if you don’t believe they also belong there. Even if the rooms were separate, that still signals hospitality, “there is a room in God’s house for you, too.” This is highly significant in its context, leaving our 21st century notions aside.
Perhaps we can even see the Pharisee as helping the tax collector! Much as the sin of one person affects the entire community, and just as Jesus tells us to pray that God “forgive us our sins” rather than just “my sins,” the merits of the righteous can benefit the wider community.4 After all, we believe Jesus’ death repairs the wounds between God and people, so obviously as Christians we believe the acts of even one person can redeem all of us, why can’t we apply that here too? Perhaps the first people who heard this parable, all of them Jewish, saw the merits of the Pharisee in a positive light, and that those deeds impact the tax collector in a positively too. And that leaves us with a very different takeaway than simply “don’t be self-righteous.” The lesson could be that those we perceive as evil or against us can nonetheless be justified through the faithfulness of others.5 Let me take it one step further: perhaps Jesus asks us to pray for our enemies so that through our own faithfulness to God’s love we can show others his way to live.
And that’s far more challenging for us, isn’t it? To trust that God so loved the world that not only did he give his son to redeem and pour out love for everyone, but that we can keep pouring that love out, so that still more may partake in God’s redemptive work alongside us. We must not be self-righteous, but we still must live righteously, humbly submitting ourselves to God’s grace through acts of contrition, mercy, and love, not just for our own sake, but for everyone’s.
How might God be calling us to live and love as both a repentant and righteous people? What good deeds do we engage in that show God’s redemptive power is indeed alive and at work in the world? Do we trust that God, working through us, can make a difference in one person’s life?
Amen.
