A Pharisee and a Tax
Collector walk into a Temple…
It does sound a bit like the
beginning of a joke, and maybe Jesus meant it to. There’s something wonderfully
over the top about his description of these two men. Jesus is definitely
hamming it up in his description of the Pharisee’s pomposity and the Tax
Collector’s humility. This is a tiny satire, just over a hundred words long,
but with a world of meaning in it.
Who are these people? Jesus’
first audience would have known very well, but we might not.
The Pharisees, who often
feature in the Gospels, were one of the main religious groups of Jesus’ time,
one of many factions within Judaism fighting for their version of the true
faith. Their name is thought to come from
a root which means “to separate”, and that pretty much summed up their approach
to faith. They wanted to be distinctive from the culture around them. They placed a high priority on observing the
laws of Moses in every detail, at home, in business, in daily life. separating
out right from wrong behaviour, good from bad, holy from unholy. But that often
meant separating people into good and bad too – those who kept the law and
those who didn’t, those who were ritually pure and those who weren’t. They
often get a really bad press in the Gospels, but many of them were , no doubt,
good and genuine people, who took their faith seriously. They saw the law as a
joy, not a burden, a gift from God to help them live well. They delighted in
it, debated it, argued about it zealously.
But zeal can easily slide
into legalistic puritanism, excluding and vilifying those who can’t meet its
demands. In the Gospels the Pharisees are often baffled and offended by what
they saw as Jesus’ laxity in welcoming all comers and accepting people as they were.
“This can’t be right,” they thought! “It makes a mockery of God, who is, above
all, the Holy One.”
The Pharisee Jesus describes
in his little story is, on the face of it, a good man. If we take him at his
word - and I think we are meant to - he isn’t a thief, a rogue or an
adulterer – and we can hardly argue that it would be better if he was. Thieves,
rogues and adulterers cause no end of heartbreak. I can understand why he wants to point out
that he isn’t a tax collector too, because they were despised for very good
reason. They collected taxes on behalf of the Romans, to fund their occupation.
They were seen as collaborators, traitors, people who lined their pockets at
the expense of their own people, making them pay for their own oppression. No
wonder they were hated. When the Pharisee in Jesus’ story says that he is not
like one of these, most right-thinking people would have nodded in approval.
But however good he looks
superficially, there are hints in the story that he isn’t going to turn out to
be the hero. There’s that little phrase “standing
by himself” for a start. Translators have struggled to be precise about what
it means, but they all agree that it implies that he’s making sure that the crowd
in the Temple notice him. He is taking a stand, or grandstanding, we might say,
making sure that everyone can hear and see him.
But however loud his voice
and prominent his position, there’s no real conversation with God
happening. He might as well be talking
to himself. It’s the tax-collector,
Jesus says, who “went down to his home
justified”, not this apparently pious Pharisee. That word “justified”, in this context, is far more
than a legal judgement. It means to be “made right” not just declared to be
right, to be sorted out, straightened out . The tax collector, for all his sins
– and they probably were many – goes home having done the business with God
that he needed to do, but the Pharisee, goes home exactly the same as he came
in. Nothing has changed in his heart, so nothing will change in his life,
because he doesn’t think there is anything to change. God can’t do
anything with him, because he won’t admit that he needs help.
John Donne, the seventeenth
century poet and priest, once preached a beautiful sermon on the shortest verse
in the Bible - Jesus wept – in which
he talked about the value and importance of tears. He quoted the famous vision
of heaven in the book of Revelation, where it says that God will “wipe every tear from our eyes”. What a
wonderful thing that would be to have God himself wipe away your tears. What a
lovely, tender moment. Who would want to miss it? , but, says Donne “what shall God have to do with that eye
that hath never wept”. https://www.biblestudytools.com/classics/the-works-of-john-donne-vol-1/sermon-xiii.html.
If we refuse to cry, how can
we be comforted? If we don’t acknowledge our need, how can God meet it? If we
don’t accept that we need to change, how can God change us?
Prayer can seem complicated,
but basically it is just us as we are meeting God as God is. But if it is going
to be that genuine encounter it has to start with the realisation that the one
we are meeting is the Creator of Heaven and Earth, of all that is, seen and
unseen, the Almighty, the Lord of Hosts, and that we who are praying are finite,
fragile little creatures who spend most of our lives falling over, getting it
wrong and generally not having a clue what is going on. That’s the reality.
That’s the fact. But this Pharisee doesn’t seem to have cottoned on to that. It
sounds as if he thinks he’s doing God a great favour by talking to him, what with all his virtues. God can’t get a
word in edgeways. What is there for him to do in this perfect man’s perfect
life? He’s been made redundant before he starts!
But the tax collector, knows
that he needs God. He knows that he can’t do it – this whole messy business of
living – on his own, and he’s not pretending that he can. He comes to God
because he has to.
The Psalm we heard this
morning, Psalm 84, is thought to be a song that was sung by Jewish pilgrims on
their way to the Temple in Jerusalem for one of the big festivals there. Zion is another name for Jerusalem. As they
slogged along the path in the scorching heat, they sang to remind themselves of
why they were making this journey. They were going to the place which was, for
them, their true home. “How lovely is
your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My souls longs, indeed it faints, for the
courts of the Lord.” Even the birds were welcome to make their nests there!
It wasn’t the physical beauty
of the place which drew them, though. It was the fact that this was the place
where they expected to meet with God. It was his dwelling place. These
were his courts, his altars, and although there is no Temple
there now – it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and eventually replaced by
a mosque, Jewish people still go to its last remnant, the Western Wall, to pray,
and they do it for the same reason. It’s the symbol of their relationship with
God, the reminder of his presence, which is with them wherever they are.
The first Christians believed
that they met with God in the person of Jesus. He was their new Temple, raised
up in three days, not in stone, but in his body, raised from death. (John
2.19). Early Christian writers talked about the Church, us, being a living
Temple, a place where people could meet God through his Holy Spirit in us.
(Ephesians 2.21, 1 Cor 6.19) And Jesus told us that we could also meet with God
when we fed the hungry, loved the outcast. He is there in the least of our
brothers and sisters. (Matt 25.40)
The true Zion, the true
Temple is wherever we meet with God, honestly, without pretending, like that
Tax Collector, whether it is in an ancient sacred site, an ordinary parish
church, at home, at work, out shopping, on the weary commute on the train, in a
conversation with a friend, or even a confrontation with an enemy conducted
with integrity. It’s wherever we are when something real happens between us and
God, the thing that needs to happen, when we do the business that needs to be
done, when we truly hear that word of comfort or challenge, or welcome, or
guidance that we need to hear, when we take it in, when we let it change us.
Sometimes that moment will
come to us out of the blue, when we least expect it, but that doesn’t mean we
have to leave it to chance. “Happy are
those in whose hearts are the highways to Zion”, says the Psalm. “Happy
are you” in other words, “if you have,
deep within you, well-trodden paths, familiar routes that lead you into God’s
presence”. Highways aren’t made by accident. They take work, and time.
There’s likely to be mess and disruption too. Our pathways to God are no
different. Sometimes God has to dig around in us, blast away the obstacles,
move tons of spiritual earth. We have our part to play too. We need to let him
get to work in us. We need to open our ears and our hearts to his voice, put
ourselves in places where we might hear him. That might be through time spent
in prayer and silence, in worship with others, in Bible study. It might be
through serving others, fighting injustice, asking for forgiveness, admitting
our weakness, wrestling with our doubts, lamenting our sorrows. These are the ways in which those highways are
established that take us into God’s presence.
A Pharisee and a tax
collector walk into a temple… and so, if we want to, do we. But will we go
home, like the Pharisee, the same people we were when we came in, or will we go
home justified, changed, even just a little, like the tax collector? It will depend on whether we are willing to
do the business we need to do with God,
telling it like it is, hearing it like is. Only then can he wipe away
the tears we’ve been hiding from him and start to set us right.
Amen
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