PENTECOST XXIII

• Joel 2:23-32 and Psalm 65 •
• Sirach 35:12-17 or Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22 and Psalm 84:1-7 •
• 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18 •
• Luke 18:9-14

Head of a Pharisee

The short parable from Luke that the Lectionary appoints as the Gospel reading for this Sunday is easily interpreted in a way that stops it from presenting us with much of a challenge. Jesus contrasts two men praying in the temple. The first is a Pharisee – someone very well versed in the Jewish religion -- the second a ‘tax-collector’ -- which in this context means a self-serving collaborator with the occupying forces of imperial Rome. The Pharisee is complacently boastful about his good conduct, while the tax collector is suitably humble about his shameful trade. It is the second rather than the first, Jesus says, who ‘went home justified’.

The message seems plain – and pointed. Religious devotion brings its own peculiar danger; righteousness easily turns into self-righteousness. Gaining access to God’s holy presence is not restricted to those who reckon they deserve it, or have worked hard with a view to earning it.  It is freely given to even the most obvious outsider, if they open themselves to God’s mercy.

 Monk-Tax Collector in the Temple

It is easy to nod in agreement with this, while missing a key point in the message. The Old Testament reading from Jeremiah says ‘You, O LORD, are in the midst of us, and we are called by your name’, and Psalm 84 says ‘My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God’. The first asserts the presence of God, and the second the worshipper’s longing for that presence. The case of the Pharisee in this parable reveals an important possibility -- the two may fail to connect. The parable does not call Pharisee’s sincerity into doubt, and assumes the holiness of the Temple. Yet a sense of spiritual superiority gets in the way. This is not inevitable. The Pharisee too can open his heart and mind to God’s presence if he acknowledges that with the wrong attitude, all his religious observances count for nothing ; conversely, the tax-collector can put himself beyond the pale once more, if his actions speak louder than his words and nothing really changes.  

Both these possibilities speak importantly to the average church goer, who, in preparation for receiving the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, always says a ‘Prayer of Confession’. How easy it is for this to become mere words -- partly because, like the Pharisee, most of us can honestly say that we haven’t committed any of the ‘big’ sins – murder, fraud, cruelty or physical abuse, for instance. But then, like him, we are complacently led to overlook the sins of self-satisfaction, thoughtlessness, narrow mindedness and indifference that so often disfigure ordinary lives. These ‘shabby’ sins attract neither adverse headlines nor criminal proceedings. Yet the truth is that they set us at just as great a distance from the presence of God’s glorious light.

Vasily Polenov Head of a Pharisee (1884)

Konstantin Makovsky Monk-Tax Collector in the Temple (c. 1900)