20 - Chapter 20

CHAPTER XX THE PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN

Luk 18:9-14. ON God’s plan, then, the Kingdom is all-comprehensive; it is God’s will that all should come in: but some refuse to enter, and many will not have their neighbours enter, if they can shut them out: they want the Kingdom to be a close preserve, confined to their own little caste. This exclusiveness in itself marks them out as no true citizens of the Kingdom. Our Lord is not recorded as having given a Beatitude, ’ Blessed are the inclusive “; but the thought runs through all his teaching, and follows directly from his conception of God. Those who want to shut others out cannot themselves be in. If one is to enter the Kingdom, he must first realize his need of a complete transformation, his need in the first place of that cancelling of the past that we call forgiveness. At first we are inclined to call this story a solitary example of the parable as caricature, to say that no man ever really prayed as this Pharisee is represented as praying, but that Jesus is frankly and bluntly making explicit the spirit that underlay this whole type of religion. Yet the Pharisee’s prayer is not so very unlike the prayer which every Jewish boy was taught: “ My God, I thank thee that I was born, not a Gentile, but a Jew; not a slave but a free man; not a woman, but a man.” As Professor J. A. Findlay points out, it is this prayer Paul has in mind when he claims that, for those who have put on Christ the old distinctions of Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female are forgotten (Gal 3:28).

(On a strict definition of * parable ’ this story would not be included; it is simply a story of two men, one held up for imitation, one for our warning.) Sometimes the Gospel writers preach a sermon by the position in which they place a passage.

Luke cunningly puts the story of Jesus blessing the children between this Pharisee and the rich ruler; it shines all the more brightly against the dark background on either side. This is one of the parables that give a final answer to the question why Jesus taught in parables.

Paul had much to say about the Law and the relation of Christians to the Law; yet many Church members have vague ideas of Paul’s teaching on the subject, partly because Paul was not always very clear about it himself. Faced with the same question Jesus in a few words draws a lightning sketch of a Pharisee at prayer. There we have, unforgettably portrayed for all time, our Lord’s criticism of Religion as Law. The Pharisee climbed the Temple Mount to pray; but, having reached the Temple he forgot to pray, and spent all his time telling God what a splendid fellow he was. The Pharisee’s prayer consists entirely of thanksgiving. Christian prayer (Paul shines in this respect) includes the giving of thanks; thanks to God for His goodness, not for our own. Christian prayer includes petition: this man is already so perfect that he needs nothing more. Christian prayer includes the confession of sin: the sins the Pharisee confesses are other people’s sins.

Christian prayer includes intercession for others.

Five times the Pharisee uses the word ’ I; ’ he mentions various classes of people and calls God’s attention to the tax-collector outside, but he has no blessing to ask for them. They are introduced only that their blackness may bring out in more dazzling relief his own spotless purity. The Pharisee tells God what he thinks of himself. We should like to know what his wife thought of him, his children, his servants, his neighbours, the people with whom he dealt in business. Were they all as pleased with him as he was with himself? Jesus tells us what God thought of him. The Pharisee had a list; your Pharisee always has a list. It was a list of his own virtues, and other people’s vices. The virtues he claims for himself are partly of a negative nature; they are of that primitive kind the absence of which is apt to lead to the felon’s dock or to social ostracism. His positive virtues concern only the ceremonial side of religion, and in this department his record is excellent. Not content with the fast on the Day of Atonement required by the Law, he was one of the specialists in piety who added the weekly Monday and Thursday Fast. In the matter of tithing, again going beyond the requirement of the Law, he added the tithing of garden vegetables. We know what Jesus thought of those ostentatious fasts that had no meaning behind them, of that mechanical tithing that sprang from no pity and no love. The Pharisee compared himself with others, especially with the tax-collector. Your Pharisee is always strong in comparisons, to his own advantage. If he was hopelessly at sea in his judgment of himself, he was still more incapable of judging others. He could not even see them as they were; much less could he take into account their heredity, their training, their environment, their temptations, their achievements. He did not even know that such things must be taken into account if our judgment is to be worth anything.

Many people find in contempt a seductive luxury; but it is not one of the Christian graces.

It is particularly out of place when the qualities on which one prides oneself happen to be moral virtues. If the Pharisee really is as much superior to the tax-collector as he thinks he is, is it not his business to raise him up to his own level? He may find the attempt illuminating. The Pharisee “ took his stand,” planted himself down; the tax-collector beat his breast. Evidently the Pharisee looked up to heaven. When our Lord looked up, he saw the heavens opened, when the Pharisee looked up, he saw nothing but the reflection of his own face. The taxcollector looked down: he knew that if he looked up, whether or not he would see God, God would see him; and he could not bear it. The Pharisee felt that the Temple of God was the fitting place for his prayer: the tax-collector stood afar off, afraid to defile by his presence the holy ground on which the pious Pharisee was praying. Our verdict is that the Pharisee is a thoroughly contemptible man with a thoroughly contemptible type of religion. However bad we are, at least we have not fallen as far as that; and we enjoy the story all the more because we have known people just like this Pharisee, people that one cannot help despising. When we have got thus far in our thoughts, perhaps in some moment of inspiration we begin to wonder whether we may not have prided ourselves too much on our Church-going and subscription-paying; whether we have not also our pet lists of virtues and vices, carefully selected in view of our own strong points; whether we really know as much about either ourselves or our neighbours as we think we do, and whether after all contempt is any more respectable when we feel it than when the Pharisee felt it. Pharisaism is a spirit; and there are few of us who do not fall victims to it in some shape or other. The tax-collector makes no reference to the Pharisee, apparently is hardly conscious of his presence. He has no thought of any other human being, save perhaps the men he has wronged. For the time being, his universe consists of God and his own sin. He makes no plea, offers no excuse: if God treats him as he is, if God in his mercy does not cancel his sin, he is undone.

There is no reason to doubt the truth of the account the two men give of themselves. The Pharisee was a respectable, faithful member of the Church, who paid all and more than all that was expected of him: the tax-collector was a rascal. But there was this difference between them. The Pharisee, being a legalist, had a petty moral standard; he had reached it and had no more worlds to conquer. He was facing in the wrong direction; and, unless God opened his eyes, his life would be a steady deterioration. The tax-collector, having some dim vision of the righteousness of God, knew that his life was wrong from the foundation. With even the elementary virtues still to acquire, he might yet become a good man. The whole environment in which he lived, the look he saw in all men’s eyes, helped the tax-collector to see himself as he was: the Pharisee was born blind.