The Great Inversion: The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector

(Luke 18: UC Davis - 1/20/09)

9To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: 10"Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11The Pharisee stood up and prayed about[a] himself: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.'
13"But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

14"I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."


As I was reading this story it occurred to me that we tend to read Jesus’ stories as if they had the same narrative structure as the movie Titanic. I remember when Titanic first came out my dad said ‘Why would anyone go see that? You already know how it ends. I suspect we read familiar scripture for the same reason we would watch a movie like Titanic…we know how it ends, but we try to experience the drama any way. Or even more dramatically, like Memento, where we interpret each event in light of the events that come after it. It works for the occasional movie, but it is no way to approach most narratives. Consider this anecdote from xkcd.com.

Someone[1] said “Here’s one test of whether we’re reading one of Jesus’ parables correctly: if it doesn’t surprise, shock, and challenge us, then we should probably go back to the drawing board.” This is as true for today’s passage as any other.

So I ran track in high school. I was bad at it. It was really just a really good way to keep in shape for soccer season. Track is an interesting sport because even though I ran the three longest events on the schedule (4X800, the one mile and the 2 mile) the vast majority of the time was still spent sitting around, hanging out, drinking Gatorade and talking. My senior year some of the other distance runners developed varying levels of curiosity in Jesus. A couple of them checked church out and one of them, Shaun, started reading the gospels. A couple weeks in I asked him how it was going. He said, ‘Great. I have started playing a game. When someone asks Jesus a question I, or sets a trap for him, I try to guess how he is going to answer it.” I found myself feeling envious. Because even though I had only been a Christian for a little over a year, the gospel stories were already so familiar to me that I read them anticipating the ending.. For Shaun they were full of drama, suspense, paradigm crushing twists and surprise endings.

We tend to read Jesus’ stories like they are the Titanic or Momento. We know how it ends, but we try to experience the drama any ways. But they actually read much more like a M Night Shyamalan movie. In Night’s movies (especially his really good ones like The Sixth Sense and, my favorite, The Village), you spend 90 minutes thinking you know what is going on, but in the closing minutes of the film you suddenly realize that all of your expectations and assumptions were totally wrong. At the moment Bruce Willis understands the truth in the Sixth Sense, or at the moment Ivy jumps the fence in the Village, you suddenly realize that you’ve been tricked. Nothing is as it seemed. That is how today’s passage works more than almost any other. So in order to have a surprise or ‘twist’ ending you need to narrative devices: First is the misdirect. You allow the audience to run with their mistaken assumptions. You feed them details that are likely to be misinterpreted to support their expectations. Then you bring the reveal. You abruptly unveil the true nature of the story and the audience suddenly realizes that nothing was as it seemed. This is the narrative structure Jesus uses in today’s parable, and I’d like to investigate it using this structure:

I. The Misdirect: Jesus Introduces the Characters
II. The Shocking Reveal: A Distinction Between Gospel and Religion
A. Three Marks of Religion from Luke 18
1. Moralism
2. Self Interest
3. Comparison
B. A Couple Brief Applications

So lets start by looking at Jesus’ misdirect

I. Jesus Introduces the Characters

10"Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

This verse seems like a pretty short, mundane bit of narrative exposition. Jesus is simply setting up the characters of his story in what seems like the simplest possible way. But this is the heart of his misdirect. He is laying intentional clues that encourage the audience that the story is headed in a different direction than it actually does.. Jesus is setting the expectations that he will summarily undermine in his surprise ending. I guarantee you that when they heard this sentence, almost everyone who heard this story were sure they knew where it was going. The Pharisees were the most morally admirable individuals of the day. They were the religious role models of the culture and were widely respected. The tax collectors were the most widely despised members of society. No one like them and the audience was looking forward to a good ‘tax collector’ bashing story.

There is a visceral reaction that Jesus would generate by introducing his characters. Introduction of the first character generated respect and affection, generating the second cause passionate repulsion and revilement.

You have to get the picture here, that Jesus is setting up an expectation by making the characters of his story someone universally respected, even loved, and someone who was universally reviled. The universal expectation would be that the Pharisee would be the hero of the story and the tax collector would be the villain.

So I want to briefly illustrate each of these characters: To illustrate the Pharisee character I’m going to play you a clip. This is AJ Jacob at the TED conference.[2] Jacob is an experiential author. He often tries to do outlandish things and then write a book about them. For example, he once read the Encyclopedia Britannica cover to cover in a year and wrote a book about it. Well his most recent book made him famous. He calls it ‘The Year of Living Biblically’.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/a_j_jacobs_year_of_living_biblically.html
(Note: In the talk I only played the clip from 2:32 to 5:44)[3]

Now, let me just say as an aside, no Christian theologian I respect claims to take the Bible literally. One of the first things you learn in seminary is to interpret passage with respect to the author’s intent taking the historical-grammatical context, the genre and on which side of the cross the passage was written into account. For example, you can do as much violence to the text by interpreting a metaphorical passage literally as you can allegorizing a literal passage.
The reason I love this clip is that is illustrates how hard it was to be a Pharisee. These were some seriously righteous dudes. They also had counted the laws and come up with 613. But they were so concerned with not breaking the laws that the made additional laws to keep them from getting close to breaking the biblical laws. You could not know one of these guys without being impressed with their religious fervor and careful behavior. For example, the Torah only specifies one annual fast, the day of atonement. This guy fasts TWICE A WEEK[4]. Are you kidding me? The Pharisees were not interested in being good enough. They were much better than good enough. It is important that we don’t think of this man as a hypocrite, but a mann universally respected for being a moral person. This is a really good person. People came to Jesus expecting to hear a good moral teacher…so there would be no doubt that this righteous Pharisee, the ‘good man’ would be the hero of this story.

But the antagonist was as despicable as the protagonist was respectable. There is a great exchange in the recent movie Stranger than Fiction. Dustin Hoffman’s character is asking will Will Ferrell’s protagonist, Harold Crick a series of questions. The exchange goes like this:

Professor: Is there any one who doesn’t like you…that would want to cause you harm
Crik: I work for the IRS, no one likes me

We have pretty negative connotations associated with our culture’s tax collector…but at the end of the day, IRS agents are just bureaucrats doing an unpopular job. In first century Palestine it was much more that that, by selecting a Pharisee and a tax collector Jesus is setting up an expectation. The best and the worst. The ominous background of all of the gospels is the Roman occupation of Palestine. You should always read the gospels with the recognition that Jesus is talking to an oppressed people with a dark, brutal foreign overlord that was extorting money from them by military force. Rome was taking their money by force. And to do that they recruited Hebrews, people of the local culture, to collect it. Bronwyn will talk about one of these eccentric gentlemen in particular in a couple weeks, but they essentially had tax franchises. They had to give a set amount to Rome but they had freedom to collect extra to cover their expenses…but there was very little regulation on just how much ‘extra’ meant…and they tended to interpret it as ‘a lot more’. So they were not only the reviled instruments of the great oppressor, they engaged in direct extortion of their fellow Hebrews. This was someone who had sold out his family and friends for cash. He was not only immoral but unlikable. He could be thought of as a Nazi collaborator in occupied countries during world war 2. The closest modern equivalent I could think of was the American that they found at the Al Qaeda training camp. One of our own countryman set on our destruction.[5]

So I hope I have painted this picture for you. The characters of Jesus story are ultimate types of goodness and badness. Jesus intentionally sets up an expectation. It is certain to his listeners that the Pharisee will be the hero and the tax collector the villain in Jesus little morality tale. They are wrong. This distinction between a good person and a bad person is Jesus’ misdirect and it sets up his shocking reveal.

II. The Shocking Reveal: Jesus Makes a Distinction Between Religion and Gospel

This is actually turns out to be a parallel story of the two lost sons Bronwyn preached on last week. Consider the similarities[6]:
What’s the point? Jesus tells us there are two ways to run from God, not one. We tend to think that religion is good and irreligion is bad…but hedonism and moralism are both ways to define yourself apart from the mercy of God. And in both stories Jesus suggests that moralism is a more insidious spiritual peril. Moralism…’being a good person’…can convince us that we don’t actually need the only thing we actually need…mercy. The hedonist is in the better place spiritually because he or she is more likely to come to a place of recognizing a spiritual need.

The hedonist is in the better place spiritually because he or she is more likely to come to a place of recognizing a spiritual need.

Here is what Tim Keller says about this tendency: (Prodigal Goe p31-33)

“Our Western society is so deeply divided between these two approaches that hardly anyone can conceive on any other way to live…both of these approaches tends to divide the whole world into two basic groups. The moral conformists say “The immoral people-‘the people who do their own thing’-are the problem with the world and moral people are the solution.” The advocates of self discovery say “The bigoted people-the people who say, ‘We have the Truth’-are the problem with the world, and progressive people are the solution…The message of Jesus’ parable is that both of these are wrong. His parable illustrates the radical alternative.”

Keller suggests that in the scriptures, the word ‘religion’ is often used as a pejorative. He suggests that this parable and the one we studied last week illustrate the differences between religion and gospel. Consider the following distinctions[7]:


This idea is echoed elsewhere in scripture:

Philippians 3:4-8

2Watch out for those dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh. 3For it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh— 4though I myself have reasons for such confidence.
If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.

7But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them skubalon (skubalon)…

Paul is essentially saying, ‘I was trying as hard as I could to be a good person. I was super religious. And you know what…it was all skubalon. Some of you know what that Greek word means. Paul says all of my religion, all of my moral performance, all of my achievement in goodness…it is just a steaming pile of excrement[8]. The apostle calls religion a big ol’ turd.

But why? Because religion is repugnant. Religion, as Jesus and Paul describe it, is a dark tendency of the human heart to create an ‘other’ and feel superior to them. It often, even usually, takes the form of trying to earn the favor of a divine being…but it can be entirely secular.

Let me take the next few minutes to just point out three marks of religion in this passage that makes it the kind of thing Jesus would tell a story about.

A. 3 Marks of Religion in this Passage

1. Moralism: Personal or Corperate

‘Righteousness’ doesn’t have much meaning in our culture…except as a pejorative. But we are pretty interested in ‘being a good person.’ So let’s take a look at how this first guy conceptualizes ‘being a good person.’

Notice how external and personal this man’s understanding of sin and virtue is, it is completely focused on behavior and breaking of rules. He sees ‘sin’ seen as discrete individual external actions.[9] He doesn’t thank God for patience, joy, and love but for his ability to keep self defined rules.

Let me try to put together a contemporary version of this external/personal idea of sin and virtue…”I thank you God that I am not like other people, I am not like the Greeks, liberals or atheists. I don’t sleep around or accept evolution. I always go to church, never smoke, swear or drink, I only listen to Christian music, and I ALWAYS vote republican.”

We have culturally rejected this idea of virtue. We now think of ethical norms in terms of how they impact the rest of the community. We have a more ‘corporate’ morality.

Our culture would probably produce a prayer something like this…”I thank you God that I am not like other people, I am not like the Uncaring or the Rich. I am not hateful or prudish. I don’t eat cute animals and don’t drive an SUV. I happily pay my taxes, recycle regularly, keep a small carbon footprint and NEVER vote republican.”

These two different visions of morality, individual and corperate are at the heart of our current ‘culture war.’ Conservative religion tends to focus on individual moralism, Liberal religion and many secular ethical systems tend to focus on the corporate moralism, how your behavior affects others…but they are two versions of the same phenomena. But these are just two different versions of moralism. Don’t get me wrong. I think it is really important to enjoy sex within God’s designed boundaries and to reduce your carbon footprint…and I won’t tell you how I vote. I think individual and corporate morality both matter. But Jesus rejects moral performance (in either its public or individual incarnations) as the criteria for being right with him.

2. Self Interest

Let’s do a word count of ‘God’ and I/me: God=1 (the very first word, he starts out well), I/me=4 (5 in the Greek manuscript). Religion that Jesus condemns is fundamentally self interested.

The question the parable poses is ‘Why do we do good?’ Religion says we do good because we want to ‘get to heaven’ or we want to be respected by others or we just want to be good for its own sake[10]…but it is fundamentally self interested. The gospel puts all of our trust for salvation, self worth and identity in the mercy of God and the work of Christ on the cross. We do good out of thankful gratitude for the mercy we have been offered, but there is NOTHING in it for us. Jesus said that the tax collector was ‘justified’ which is a legal term which means ‘declared without fault.’ If the tax collector is ‘justified’ for nothing, offered free and sufficient mercy just for asking, what is his motivation to ‘do good.’ Overwhelming, joyful, overflowing, grateful, love. This is the gospel. Jesus offers us unilateral rescue. Un-deserved mercy. None of our moral or spiritual achievements ‘play’ in his evaluation of us. So we do stuff for him and our community and our world out of the reservoir of joy and gratitude. And we are entirely free to fail, because we know that our cosmic standing does not depend on our performance.

3. Comparison

Competitive comparison is the way of the moralist. You see, at the heart of this man’s feelings of religious worth is comparison. The desire to be better than…to be accepted as good and valuable in contradistinction to those who are not. The moralist, internal or corporate, religious or secular, only knows their value or worth in relation to others. In order to respect themselves, the moralist MUST look down at others. And it doesn’t actually matter how ‘good’ you are, if you ascribe to a moral performance narrative you’ll employ comparison to validate it. Moralism is necessarily judgmental. If you find yourself thinking or talking a lot about how the democrats suck or how the republicans are evil or how environmentalists are wackos or how business majors are materialistic or how the French like to retreat (oops, I do that one a lot) or if ‘this group’ has ‘that deplorable trait that I do not have’ you are probably behaving as the Pharisee in this passage.[11]

The Pharisee compared himself against weaker people, the tax collector compared himself against a holy God. You know the tax collector could have easily fallen into this mistake. He could have said, ‘Sure I’ve made mistakes, but at least I am here at temple…at least I go to church.’

We each want to think of ourselves as a ‘good person.’ But what is a good person. How do we define ‘a good person.’ It must be in distinction to ‘bad people.’ I Goggled the phrase ‘but I am a good person.’ 98,000 entries. Why is this phrase so interesting. Because it usually follows a moral failure (since it starts with a ‘but’). One of the first ones I clicked on was by Don Imus following his comments about the Rutgers’s women’s basketball team: 'I did a bad thing, but I'm a good person.'

But how does someone who does a bad thing know they are a good person, especially if the recent evidence is against them. They compare themselves to someone deplorable and say I am not as bad as them. I remember before I was a Christian, Christians tried to convince me that I needed God’s mercy. I found this idea extremely offensive. Why? ‘Because I’m a good person’ I used to tell them. ‘I’ve never murdered anyone or stolen anything big. There are lots of people worse than me.’ I would have been better off spiritually if I had done something obviously horrible. An accurate self assessment is closer to God’s kingdom than being good.


How much of your value comes from not being like X, where X is someone else? ‘the other’
I’ll be honest. A lot. I often feel justified before God because I am more gospel oriented than the liberals and more justice oriented than he fundamentalists, people seem to like my teachcing from time to time, I work AND preach, that I don’t have a TV (even thought I, obviously, consume a ton of visual media through DVD’s and streaming online content). The moment I derive my value from any of those things, I AM the Pharisee in this story. God only replies to desperate pleas for rescue. The only thing that should give me value is God’s infinite mercy. Everything else should emerge from awed gratitude.

But one warning emerges from all this. Jesus is not just saying ‘be humble’ like, by doing this thing better than others you will please God. He is not just a new legalism of humility and speaking poorly about yourself.[12] Rather It is an exhortation to derive your value simply from the mercy of God and to reject the temptation to comparison.

Let me wrap up with three brief applications.

B. Three Brief Applications

Dan is continually saying that CL is a place for two kinds of people. It is a place for those of us who have made a commitment to follow Jesus and are trying to figure out what that looks like. But it is also a place for the spiritually curious, those who may be intrigued by Jesus, but aren’t totally sure he’s for them. Let me try to make a couple applications from this passage for each of you.

1. First, for those of you who already follow Jesus, you need to know that the gospel is for you too. Be very careful not to make Christianity into a religion. You need to continually recognize that the only thing you have of value is mercy. We do not just accept God’s mercy when we become Christians and then earn his favor from then on. We remain object of mercy. You need to get a hold of the gospel every day or you are going to end up getting religious and start thinking you are better than other people.

The gospel, as a separate path from religion or irreligion, is an antidote to self righteousness and bitterness. Let me in on a little secret. The church is full of self righteousness and bitterness. The cure is gospel people…people fully aware of their position as unilateral recipients of mercy and who serve out of awed gratitude.

2. For those of you who are investigating Jesus, he wants you to know he is not asking you to be a self-righteous prude. We are not asking you to get religion or to accept a new moral code. Mark Driscoll sometimes says ‘Why would I ask you to be religious… people are horrible’, we are not asking you to become one. . And call us on it. If we are being religious, by talking about how much better we are than some group or world view or by being condescending towards you or your friends rather than gospel people, call us on us…you’ll be doing us a huge favor.

Jesus is simply asking you to recognize your need, accept the free, transforming, unilateral mercy he offers, and live in light of that.

The Pharisee’s resume is too long. The tax collector’s resume is short. The only thing on it is need. The shocking thing about this parable is that it is the only thing he needs.

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[1] http://www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2004/10/proper_25_year_.html
[2] An annual conference on Technology. E . and Design. loosely associated with New York NPR.
[3] I love the line ‘I’m Jewish like the Olive Garden is Italian…not much.’ I actually am half Italian. My mom grew up in Rome. This got me thinking ‘I am Italian like Chili’s is Italian…not really at all.’
[4] Keller has a great insight on this. He points out that robbery and adultery are actually wrong, but his fasting practices are entirely extra-biblical. It is a worship style preference…but he has imbued it with moral significance. He uses it to feel superior rather than different.
[5] Although this does not really work b/c the American Al Queda guy was operating out of principal not just crass financial gain.
[6] I owe this insight to Tim Keller’s similar teaching on both passages.
[7] This is also from Tim Keller at the Resurgence conference.
[8] Skubalon has a range of meaning (any refuse, as the excrement of animals, offscourings, rubbish). But in this context, given its other uses in first century Greek literature, Daniel Walace, professor of NT at Dallas Seminary puts it somewhere between ‘crap’ and the s-word semantically.( http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=5318) It is a term for excrement, but not just a clinical term…it is a term with calculated shock value. This makes sense, because Paul has already called religious people ‘dogs’ (a reviled animal in the middle east, not like davis where they receive comparable attention to children) it seems contextually consistent that he would turn around and call religion a turd…a big steaming pile. The vast majority of translations lacked the cohunes to render it such. Only the ‘uptight’ KJV calls it ‘dung.’ Nearly all use the term ‘rubbish.’ Shoot, ‘table scraps’ would have been more visceral. ‘Rubbish’ is a far more clinical rendering and does not remotely fit with Paul’s rhetorical mood.
[9] This insight is from Keller’s sermon on this passage.
[10] This was how I was raised. One must be good but only for the sake of being good, not for an eternal or temporal reward. But this is still fundamentally self-interested because we are doing it to ‘be good’ and win the psychological (and self righteous) rewards that come from being thought of as good (and feeling superior b/c I am).
[11] I am reading Augustine’s City of God with Dan and a couple other guys. In book one, Augustine speculates that once Rome lost it’s main rivals it began to decay from within as the citizens turned on each other. We require ‘the other’ to give ourselves value. We define ourselves by what we are not.
[12] Honestly, self deprecating talk is annoying and generally is meant to show how humble you are or a bait to get affirmation.