He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am 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.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 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.” (Luke 18:9-14)
I think the pharisee was genuinely righteous – boring but righteous -- and the way he prayed was the way he understood religion to be. It is how many sincere Christian people understand religion to be. It offended him that the tax-collector was there in the temple at all, living as they did back then, by exploiting needy people. Richard Rohr, who says things lucidly, says this: Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control, power, money, pleasure and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We are often given a bogus version of the gospel, some fast food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of “Christian” countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious and addictive as everybody else…
Pharisees – and they exist in any religion including atheism and secularism -- try to do two things. One is to preserve the strictness of (in this case) the Jewish Law, the Torah and all its requirements… while on the other hand trying to accommodate it all to those who find difficulties, the rich, the influential, the powerful. As Richard Rohr puts it, in the areas of ego, control, power, money, pleasure and security. Christian pharisees assume, or they hope, as Kierkegaard wrote, that passages like the Sermon on the Mount are deliberately set as we might set our clocks, slightly fast, so that we still get there on time, as it were.
Jesus’s message to all pharisees is No. He shook the pharisee tree – in his kingdom we don’t get dispensations or what the Americans call rain passes. This pharisee in the temple actually thanked God that he was not like other people… and especially that he was not like that tax collector. I imagine he was sincere. But in Jesus’s kingdom, as he taught, this is exactly the self we are to leave behind, the self that is forever concerned about my spiritual or social standing, my reputation, my achievements, my generosity… the self that would rather like to enter heaven with my ego and my possessions.
Pharisees will always fit quite well into much popular religion… but not at all well into the faith Jesus taught, and calls us to. This is becoming clearer as we can actually watch the western church and popular religion shrinking to a memory, more and more riven by dissent and ever new forms of pharisaism, and once lovely and much loved buildings becoming night clubs and gymnasiums or trendy apartments. It is time to refresh our bond with Jesus and his way… in computer terms to hit the restore button… and that begins, as Jesus said, in the inner room.
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