“Jesus told them another joke”, we are told, “and He told this one to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and looked down on others.’
Now, I suspect that your translation probably says ‘parable’ rather than ‘joke’, but I think ‘joke’ is actually a very good translation.
We don’t tell parables any more. We tell jokes, and they’re much the same thing. Jokes and parables tend to be stories that look at life in a different way, and they can both make you wince as well as give you a good laugh.
Understood in this way, you’ll appreciate that Jesus was renowned for His jokes, especially jokes like this one, that had a punch line aimed at those who ‘trusted in themselves that they were righteous and looked down on others’.
‘Did you hear the one about the Pharisee and the tax-collector, Jesus said, who both happened to turn up to the temple at the same time to pray?’
This is a classic opening for a joke, with two natural antagonists finding themselves accidentally at the same location.
* Did you hear the one about President Bush and the President of Iran finding themselves in to the same men’s room at the same time?
* Did you hear the one about Prime Minister John Howard and Labor leader Kevin Rudd accidentally bumping into each other at the same strip club?
Sorry, perhaps that one’s a bit too sensitive. I’ll go back to the first one:
Did you hear the one about when, during his recent visit to the US, the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad coincidentally found himself in the same men’s room as US President, George W. Bush?
While the two were quietly relieving themselves at the urinal, George found that he couldn’t resist the opportunity to have a dig at his Iranian counterpart:
He says, “I hear that Ayatollah of yours doesn’t mind a bit of a drink! I know he’s publicly opposed to alcohol, but I hear that in private he hit’s the bottle pretty hard!” The President of Iran laugh it off and says, “Oh, is that right?”
George tries again, “You know, I also hear that he has quite a few women with him. In addition to however many wives he has, I hear he’s got quite a harem - all hush, hush, of course!” The Iranian says, “Is that what you hear?”
George thinks he’ll try one final dig: “You know, I hear that your Ayatollah is thinking of becoming a Christian - becoming like one of us! Had you heard that?” The Iranian says, “Well, from what you’ve been telling me, that seems to be exactly what’s happening!”
Back to the joke in Luke 18: the Pharisee and the tax collector turn up at the temple at the same time to pray. There is no sarcastic exchange at the door, but the Pharisee can’t resist making a back-handed reference to the tax-collector in his prayer. He prays out loud: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get. I am a good bloke’ .
Actually, I added that last bit. He didn’t actually say out loud, “I am a good bloke”, but he meant it, and, after all, that’s the point: he was a good bloke
Now I know that the Pharisees have gained a bad reputation over the years, and chiefly because of the way they are portrayed by Jesus in the Bible but, while it’s easy for us to pass judgement at a distance, we need to appreciate the fact that Jesus’ critique makes sense within a framework of understanding where the Pharisees were the moral, social and spiritual authorities of their day. And they didn’t get to that position of authority simply through good luck!
Pharisees were quite amazing people. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. They were pillars of their community. They were the moral and spiritual guardians of their people. And, OK, they might have been a bit stiff - wowsers, to use the modern parlance (as indeed we do see them repeatedly interfering in Jesus’ parties, concerned that He’s eating and/or drinking too much and always partying with the wrong sort of people) but, in their defence, they were people who stood for something!
They stood for purity. They stood for faithfulness. They stood for strong churches and strong families, and they were people who were willing to do whatever was necessary to see that their community held together!
If you’re not familiar with the history of Pharisaism, they had a proud history:
After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 B.C., Israel as a nation went into meltdown! Not only were the people of Israel displaced and shipped off to Iraq as refugees, but from a faith perspective, they no longer had anywhere to worship! Their temple had been destroyed!
Up to that point, all their worship had centred around the sacrificial system of the temple. When the temple was destroyed, that whole system of worship was destroyed with it! And you might have been forgiven for assuming that this would mean the end of Israelite religion and the end of the nation of Israel as a whole. And surely it would have been, except that some faithful and visionary people stepped in, determined to hold the nation together, and developed a pattern of worship that centred not around sacrifice, but around the book of the law – our Old Testament.
We are familiar with some of these great historical heroes who kept the faith alive in those days - men like Ezra the scribe whose deeds are recorded in a book in the Bible that bears his name, and groups like the ‘Hasidim’ (God’s ‘loyal ones’) and their spiritual descendants, the Pharisees, who cherished and reinterpreted the traditional Mosaic law for their own day.
These people built synagogues, taught the Scriptures, and helped to maintain a distinctive spiritual identity amongst their people, so as to resist the inroads of Babylonian and Greek and Roman culture into their traditional way of life.
As I say, after the Babylonian victory of 587 BC, most people would have predicted, I think, that the Israelites would gradually loose their distinctive ethnic and spiritual identity.
Many Jews feared exactly that: ‘How could they sing the Lord’s song is a strange land’ (Psalm 137), they asked. How indeed, we might ask, could the identity and religion of the Hebrew people possibly be maintained beyond the destruction of their land and of their sole place of worship, and with their priests and leaders scattered all around the world?
And yet, by the time we reach the time of the New Testament, Hebrew religion is thriving. Another temple has been built. The Jews are still worshipping the God of their forefathers, and they are still living a distinctive way of life. Their young children are being taught the Scriptures and are passing on those teachings on to their children!
Who had been responsible for keeping the faith of Israel alive over the generations after the conquest? It was, more than any other human figure in the New Testament scene, the Pharisee who should be given credit for keeping the people of the Bible Biblical!
Now I don’t want to spend all my time this morning, raving on about the historical role of the Pharisees, but let me make one more key point:
The Roman occupation of Israel, like the Babylonian and Greek occupations before it, created a spiritual and cultural problem, as well as a political one - namely, ‘how do you function as the people of God when you are in the middle of a godless culture?’ (does that sound like a familiar problem?)
It seems to me that there are four and only four options:
You can fight back.
That was the most popular response back then and in similar situations today it is still the most popular response to a foreign occupation. Just as many Palestinians today fight back violently against their occupation by the state of Israel, so, conversely, back then, many Jews fought back violently against the Roman occupation, as they had done against the Greeks and the Babylonians before them. Israel in the New Testament is full of freedom fighters. One of Jesus’ disciples (Simon the Zealot) probably came from their ranks. Yet, as we know, Jesus never encouraged this form of violent resistance.
A second sort of response to occupation is that you go with the flow and compromise. You say, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’, and you collaborate. This has always been a popular response. Again though, it was not one that was encouraged by Jesus.
A 3rd path was one of escape. The Essenes did that in the New Testament period (those people with whom we associate the Dead Sea Scrolls). They ran off into the desert. Some people still do. This was not a particularly popular response back then, and it is even less popular nowadays.
The fourth and only remaining response to the occupation of a politically and spiritually foreign power is that you try to stick it out in the community, and try to bring your faith and your tradition into that community as best you can, without fighting back in such a way that you compromise the very ideals that you’re trying to uphold.
This is the hard path. This is the most difficult option. This is the tough and often mundane, hard-working alternative, where you just plug away over the years by teaching the truth, by being distinct in your dress in your speech, and by showing integrity in your dealings with people, such that it testifies to the faith that is in you.
This is the path that was taken by the Pharisees, and while we know that Jesus gave them a hard time, we know too that of all the different groups that took these different paths I’ve outlined above, the Pharisees were the only group that Jesus extensively dialogued with at all!
They were in the world but not of it! They were distinctively religious people who know who they were and what they were on about. They were the pillars of their community, as historically had been the people that had held that community together. And so, when the Pharisee stands up and prays, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector’ he is surely simply telling the truth. He is not like other men. And he certainly was nothing like the wretched tax-collector.
The tax-collector was a collaborator. He was one of those wretched individuals who had seen in the tragic occupation of his people an opportunity to make money!
I won’t go into details about the practice of tax-collecting now. Let it suffice to say that these people were the drug-pushers of the ancient world. They were people who made all their money out of other peoples‘ misery. And so when we’re told that the tax-collector stood near the back of the temple and bowed his head and thumped his chest and prayed, “God have mercy on me, a sinner”, what more would we have expected him to say? He’s praying the only prayer that he’s got!
As a joke, this story from Jesus is probably not one designed to generate a lot of laughs. But it does have a good punch line. Indeed, Biblical scholar Johachim Jeremias suggests that the key to ‘getting the joke’ in this case is to recognise that by this stage of the story, most of Jesus’ original hearers would have already guessed the punch line.
Jesus has told a story about two antagonists - a Pharisee and a tax-collector who both go to pray at the same time. And knowing Jesus’ soft heart, Jesus’ hearers have by now anticipated His punch line: ‘I tell you the truth, not only the Pharisee had his prayers heard that day, but also the tax-collector!’ Not only the Pharisee, but also the tax collector.’
And yet where the real sting in the tail of this joke comes is that this not the punch line to the parable. Jesus rather concludes His story with the statement that ‘the tax collector went to his home justified and not the Pharisee!’ The tax collector and NOT the Pharisee!
The tax collector went home ‘justified’, and it’s worth noting here that this is the only time in the Gospels that the Greek, ’dikiosuner ’(justified) is ever used.
We know this word from elsewhere in the New Testament. It is the word that is used so frequently by St Paul - being justified by faith, justified before God, etc. It’s a very significant word in the New Testament that speaks of God’s grace towards the undeserving sinner, but it is only used once in the gospels, and it is here - referring to this tax collector in the temple. He went home justified - a complete man, whole before God, heard and loved and accepted and forgiven, and ready to be accepted back into the god-fearing community on full and equal terms.
The Pharisee, on the other hand, ironically, goes home still carrying the same problems that he’d started out with that day. His prayer has not registered with God! Like some email that gets caught in the Divine Spam filter, his prayer does not get through!
I heard of a preacher who ended his sermon on this parable with a prayer that began “I thank thee God that we are not like the Pharisee in this parable”.
If only that were true. For the problem is that we are the like Pharisee. All too often we are just like the Pharisee. We know that we are better than other women and men, we do consider ourselves superior, we have not sunk to the depths to which others have sunk, and at our better moments we thank God for that.
Scratch the surface just a little bit and I think you’ll find that there is a Pharisee in all of us. And the only hope for us Pharisees is to recognise that the prayer of the tax collector - ‘God have mercy on me, a sinner’ - is the only prayer we have too.
