(As preached to the London Eritrean Lutheran Congregation)
- Jeremiah 14. 7-10 &; 19-21
- Psalm 84.1-7 2
- Timothy 4.6-8 & 16-18
- Luke 18. 9-14
Jesus told them a story: “Two men went up to the temple to pray. One of them was a Pharisee. The other was a tax collector.” Beyond that what do we know about the two men? The original audience would have identified them both immediately and understood their background. But what do we know about Pharisees and Tax Collectors? Possibly less than we think.
Centuries of Christian interpretation have led us to think of Pharisees as the bad guys, but this isn’t entirely fair. They are often presented as Jesus’ opponents in the gospels certainly, but we need to remember that they were society’s good people. We know that the Pharisee was a religious leader; a pious man who took his religion very seriously indeed. He stood in the correct posture for prayer in the temple, arms raised and head lifted. Jesus’ disciples would not necessarily have been critical of this man.
And the tax collector? Now, again, because we know how Tax Collectors were looked down on and how Jesus dealt with them generously, we usually see them as the good guys but actaully tax collectors were crooks: this man was a Jew who earned his living by working for a foreign government, collecting taxes from his own people. For years he had collected high taxes from his Jewish neighbours to give to the Roman government. He gave the Romans their flat rate on every head, and made his money by charging over the odds and keeping the difference for himself. Basically, he is a con-man, a traitor, and a lowlife. He is hated, he is guilty and he knows it.
So, we have on the one hand the Pharisee who was one of the most respectable people in the Judaism of the time and on the other hand we have a tax collector who is a fraud and a turncoat, despised by his own people.
Surely there’s no competition here in terms of God’s favour: it’s obvious isn’t it? The man of God verses the crook.
Are we missing something here?
Jesus told them a story.
Who?
Jesus told who a story?
We need to go back to the middle of the last chapter to discover that Jesus was talking to his disciples. This isn’t one of those situations where the crowds of followers and bystanders were dogging their steps and demanding wise words and signs and wonders. No. This was quite intimate: just Jesus and his friends. Now Luke, our Gospel writer, often tends to show us the Disciples as weak and confused and, while it doesn’t do to over-speculate we can imagine the scene: the disciples are gathered around Jesus and he is telling this story. Perhaps they are at rest after a long day; perhaps sharing a meal; perhaps gathered around a fire. “And he told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.”
But are they hearing the same story that Jesus is telling? Is there a gap between their hearing and understanding?
Are they hearing the same story that Jesus is telling? Is there a gap between their hearing and understanding?
Which of the two men in the story would a group of Jewish men be most likely to think of as having God’s favour – the pious and religious Pharisee or the thieving tax collector?
The clues are in the prayers each man prays:
In the Pharisee’s prayer, he has nothing to ask of God. He’s basically giving God a progress report. As far as he can tell, he’s got it all under control, and he’s happy about it: “God I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, unrighteous folks, adulterers, or even like that tax collector over there.”
The Tax Collector, on the other hand , keeps his head lowered as he comes into the temple and stands some distance away . We don’t know why his guilt has got the better of him today, but there he is in the temple, full of remorse, beating his breast and saying, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” He doesn’t even promise to reform. All he does is ask for God’s mercy.
Remember as you are considering this, that we already know the story and its outcome. We know what they didn’t. We’re familiar with the story: so familiar that maybe we don’t consider that the message may not have been quite so obvious to the disciples.
Did you consider that Jesus was setting them up when he told them this story? Did you consider that Jesus’ summing up of the story would have shocked and perhaps even offended them?
What if Jesus had started the story differently? Two men went to the temple to pray. One was insufferably arrogant, assuming himself to be superior to ordinary people. The other stood afar off and humbly acknowledged his sinfulness before God.” That’s the contrast. One makes a claim to righteousness based on his own accomplishments, while the other relies entirely upon God’s grace. It’s clearer now which of these two models Jesus was calling them to adopt.
The surprise ending of the story is that the Pharisee, who gave a wonderful performance in the temple, went home empty. He came asking nothing of God and he went home getting nothing from God. The tax collector, dodgy character that he was, showed up empty handed asking for God’s mercy, and went home justified and in the right relationship with God.
So what? O.K. It’s an interesting story, but so what? What has this to do with us? And this is always the issue for me: I have to make the stories of Jesus real to me; I must find an application otherwise the parable remains just a story Jesus told but without the power to touch or challenge me.
Luke presents the disciples as weak and confused and likely to misunderstand his teaching.
That surely couldn’t be us too, could it?
Well actually it could. After all, we’re Disciples and we tend to think we understand the story. But are we hearing the same story that Jesus is telling? Is there a gap between our hearing and understanding? “Jesus told this parable to those who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.”
So, bearing that in mind, how do we understand the story? We may hear this parable as a lesson on humility: don’t be proud like the Pharisee; go home and be humble like the tax collector. Doesn’t that sound like good advice?
But isn’t that a trap? If that’s the moral we take from the parable we may have missed the point: we take a parable about God’s amazing, unconditional grace and acceptance, and turn it into a story about how we can earn or merit God’s love by being better people. We’ve got the answer now. If we can just be humble like the tax collector and not be puffed up with pride like the Pharisee, then God will accept us and love us. We may even find ourselves praying, “God, I thank thee that I am not like the Pharisee.” The tragedy and the irony of trying to make ourselves worthy of love through our supposed virtues, even the virtue of humility, is that we end up casting a sideward glance at others and measuring ourselves against them. If I need to earn God’s love, then I will have to be better than the others.
The contrast is not between tax collectors and Pharisees, but between those who trust in themselves and despise others and those who know that they are sinners, the proud and the humble. Other Pharisees may well have prayed for God’s mercy just as this tax collector did, and other tax collectors could have thought quite highly of themselves and despised Pharisees. Even some Christians have been known to think so highly of themselves that they despise others.
No, the Pharisee and the tax collector are the same. They both need God’s love. The difference is that the Pharisee doesn’t know it and the tax collector does. The tax collector went up to the temple with nothing to show for himself. His hands and his heart are empty and he knows it, and so he has room to experience the good news that there is nothing we need to do, nothing we can do, to earn the grace and love of God.
Ours isn’t so very different from the world Jesus was born in to. It was to both worlds, theirs and ours – the worlds of those who trust in ourselves that we are righteous and regard others with contempt – that he told the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. This parable serves now as then as a word of judgment on all those times when we would compare ourselves with others and declare ourselves righteous or those others somehow unworthy. Anytime we try to draw a line between who’s “in” and who’s “out,” this parable tells us that we’ll will find God on the other side, for as soon as we fall prey to the temptation to divide humanity into any kind of groups, we have aligned ourselves squarely with the Pharisee, on the other side from God.
In our New Testament reading this morning we see some of these ideas developed by St. Paul. The passage from the Second Letter to Timothy shows that in some ways Paul resembles both the Pharisee and the tax collector. Like the Pharisee, he boasts of his accomplishments. He has competed well; he has finished the race; he has kept the faith; he has earned a crown of righteousness. Paul never denies the character of his commitment or the extent of his success. But like the tax collector, he knows the source of his ability to accomplish these things: “The Lord stood by me and gave me strength.” According to Paul, all the glory belongs to God. St. Paul shows us the way: this parable is about God: God who alone can judge the human heart; God who determines to justify the ungodly.
If we can hear God’s judgment in the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector, then beating our breasts and saying, “God be merciful to me, a sinner,” is surely not a bad response.
Luke 16.19-31
Three friends die in a car crash, and they find themselves at the Gates of Heaven. Before entering, they are each asked a question by St. Peter himself :
“When the funeral service is taking place and your friends and families are talking about you, what would you like to hear them say about you?” asks St. Peter to each in turn.
The first man says, “I would like to hear them say that I was a great doctor and a great family man.”
The second man says, “I would like to hear that I was a wonderful husband and a teacher who made a huge difference to our children.”
The last man replies. “I would like to hear them say…. LOOK !!! HE’S MOVING!!!!!”
No, I’ve not gone mad. I start with that as an illustration: given time, I suspect each of you could come up with a joke about the afterlife and today’s Gospel reading illustrates that there were stories about the hereafter at the time of Jesus too.
What we need to recognise straight away is that the parable teaches absolutely nothing about the nature of the afterlife and it was not intended to; it does not document either heaven or hell, although it may have been the foundation for many of the erroneous beliefs about “hell” within some branches of Christianity. No, Jesus is merely playing around with a folktale. The difference is that we tell our afterlife jokes to amuse: Jesus told his to challenge a group of people – The Pharisees. The passage tells us: “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and Scribes were grumbling…”
Now the nature of a parable is that it has two levels of meaning: there is the literal meaning – what you see is what you get – but there is always another level, often more obscure and it is this level that carries the real punch. It’s a story with a hidden message: a spiritual nugget for those who understand. “I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand” we hear from Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. (Ch 13)
But this time it seems that the Disciples and the other “ordinary” folk – tax collectors and sinners – didn’t get the meaning but the Pharisees did.
But let’s not jump ahead of ourselves.
Let’s consider the literal meaning first.
The rich man in this story lives a life of ostentatious comfort, while Lazarus suffers right outside the gates of his house. The rich man’s preoccupation with wealth, and their different social status, prevents him from acknowledging Lazarus or reaching out to ease his suffering during his lifetime. Both men die: Lazarus likely of starvation and the rich man?
Well, it’s tempting to imagine his cause of death as an over-indulgence linked heart attack or stroke. Lazarus goes to heaven; and the rich man to Hades and in the afterlife their roles are reversed, with Lazarus resting in the “bosom of Abraham” and the rich man suffering the torments of Hades. As Martin Luther wrote on this passage: “He lived to himself and served only himself….and by these dreadful and wicked fruits of unbelief, he covers them over and blinds his own eyes by the good works of his Pharisaical life.”
Just because this is the literal story and Jesus’ message is really to be found in the hidden meaning doesn’t mean that we can’t take a moral from this level of understanding. We can. We can talk quite reasonably about a practical application to our attitude to wealth and status, or at least relative wealth and status. I need to make this parable real for me otherwise it will remain as a mildly interesting religious story without the power to touch me. I need to find an application to my daily life: I don’t have a starving beggar living on my doorstep but, as it happens, I do find beggars in general, alcoholics and addicts, often aggressive and all rolled into the same person, a real problem.
How about you? Who is it that you don’t see? Who is your Lazarus? Is it about race, sexuality, gender, age, disability, social class, weight, political affiliation? What? Be quite clear that in those terms you can take a valid personal application from this understanding of the story.
So the parable works on that level because there is a challenge there to living the Christian life and serving the outcast and the marginalised out of obedient discipleship and we can read the parables in this section of Luke as illustrating faithfulness or unfaithfulness to the injunction to compassion, and see the possession of wealth as a stumbling block to that compassion. The Rich Man wasn’t even a little merciful to Lazarus in his lifetime; he was blinded to the needs of compassion by his own wealthy lifestyle. Lazarus, by contrast, was forced to live a life relying on mercy and compassion.
Now this is the third in a series of parables which Jesus told to the same audience: the others were the Prodigal Son and the Unfaithful Servant and this idea of compassion versus wealth seems to work equally well for all three. Well, the ending of the parable in this interpretation is a little problematic but some scholars say that the latter verses are not original, so we could put them on one side, just concentrate on the folktale element and we have a perfectly valid application of a Biblical story which is that it is not sufficient merely not to do evil and not to do harm, but rather that one must be helpful and do good.
One is tempted to say that what happens in the death of our protagonists is a role reversal except that such a conclusion would be too literal an interpretation and would lead us down all sorts of misleading and unhelpful roads in relation to the afterlife.
Or, we could struggle with the hidden meaning where the latter verses are vital to the whole, addition or not. One of the keys to unpicking this level of understanding is to recognise that the key characters almost always stand for someone else. Well, we only have three – unless you include the dogs – The Rich Man, Lazarus and Abraham. (And it seems we should include the dogs because many scholars don’t think they are there are there as a throw away detail).
Actually, let’s start with the dogs, as they may be the key to unlocking the puzzle. Do you remember the account of Jesus meeting a gentile woman: a woman from Syrophoenecia? The story is found in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus is initially very harsh with her: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” He just called her a dog, which was how the Gentiles were seen, so who are the children in that story? The Jews.
It is the same in this parable. Lazarus, unclean because of his sores, is comforted by and associated with, the dogs: unclean animals in Jewish belief and the Rich Man would certainly not have had one in his house. Lazarus is being presented as the outsider, the Gentile. At the same time the Rich Man is being identified with the Jews. The references to his clothes as being purple with fine linen identify him symbolically with the priestly caste of Israel. So, on his death it would be only right and proper for him to go to the bosom of his father Abraham and take the seat of honour beside him. But no, it is the outsider, Lazarus who takes the place of honour at the spiritual banquet hitherto reserved for the Jews, while the Rich Man is cast away. Note too the reference to the Rich man’s five brothers, another important symbolic clue to the Rich Man’s identity: Judah, the father of the Jews had five brothers. This detail cements the identity of the Rich Man as the House of Judah – the Jews.
You and I may not have spotted that without help but the Pharisees knew their history and were proud of their heritage. They got the references alright and they didn’t like it.
Yes, well, very interesting but so what? What has this to do with me?
Well the stories of the Syrophoenecian woman, the Centurion with his Servant, the parable of the Good Samaritan and a number of others, open up the prospect that Gentile believers would become “sons of Abraham” through faith in Christ. The Jews had been Abraham’s physical descendants, but after the crucifixion the place of honour and blessing would be given to the people represented by Lazarus. That’s you and me and potentially most of the people we know.
The self-righteous, accusing Pharisees and scribes, who were the religious authorities, should have been the ones telling these people of God’s love for them. They should have been the ones teaching the sinners, exhorting them to return to God and receive His love and forgiveness. However, because of their faith in their own righteousness and their contempt for these common people who didn’t measure up to their standards, the Pharisees and scribes excluded them and considered them outside the scope of God’s grace. Jesus had already warned them in Ch 3.8: “Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’
And what of the ending which didn’t get much attention in the literal understanding of the story? It’s key here: the ending points beyond the parable to Jesus. The Pharisees will not believe even when Jesus is raised. Remember, the disciples were themselves sceptical initially.
Not even the proverbial visitor from the dead would convince the elite to recognize the needs of the poor. Neither does Jesus’ resurrection have the power to create faith, if one does “not listen to Moses and the prophets”, which consistently direct us to caring for the poor, not being greedy and to giving alms.
Now this is quite a different understanding of the story to the first and yet in many respects the outcome is the same in terms of its practical application: in either understanding of this parable we need to talk about our obedient discipleship in the way we relate as Christians to others. From the literal understanding of the story we can legitimately talk about understanding our own prejudices and recognising the other in our society to whom we need to express the love and compassion of God. We can then work out ways in which we can be servants of those people in our charitable giving, in our volunteering of time and in our attitudes when we meet them.
If we consider the hidden meaning of the parable we are confronted again with issues of obedient discipleship in the way we relate to others. This time, though, our responsibility lies in recognising that it is not for us to seek to put limits on God’s grace. The task here surely lies in our being willing to see God in those we come into contact with, regardless of who they are and to trust the Holy Spirit that those same people will see God in us. This is our Christian witness and the Spirit works through us to convict others of their sin and to bring them back to God – whoever they are.
