The Tax Collector And The Pharisee – Humility And Pride

(By Fr. Dexter Breretor)

The Tax Collector and the Pharisee in prayer – one in humility and one in pride and arrogance.

One of the most talented educators I know is a man with tremendous dedication, attention to detail, high work ethic and notoriously short fuse. I have seen many a person wilt under his wrath as they committed some stupid fault or made shambles of some simple task. The result of course is that his personal circle of friends narrowed over the years as one person after another made their exit from his life, unable to make his very high standards. I thought of his sad story as I read the phrase “…some people who prided themselves on being virtuous and despised everyone else…” All through his ministry Jesus fought mightily against the kind of pride and self-sufficiency often seen in the religious leaders of his day, a pride that made them despise the imperfections of others and turned salvation into a kind of “self-help” project.

The Pharisees were great people, concerned with showing others how to be faithful to the Law of the Lord in every situation in life. Yet, their brand of spirituality, also led to a certain ‘rigidity’ on their part, an inability to sympathize with the broken and the imperfect. There is no reason to believe that the Pharisee in this little Gospel story was anything other than a pious Jew who fasted severely twice a week and gave tithes generously on all that he had. His failing however was his inability to be respectful to someone like the tax collector, a man whose life in many ways was a life in shambles. His sense of religious perfection, instead of nurturing God-like compassion, caused him to be contemptuous of his neighbour. In a very similar way, the educator of whom I spoke was a man whose compassion for others was extinguished by his own perfectionism. Like the tax collector in our story, at the front of his mind was the realization that he was not “grasping, unjust and adulterous like the rest of mankind…” and not the fact that any goodness in his life was a result of God’s goodness to him.

The Pharisee in this story lives on in all of us, especially at those times we distance ourselves from our own faults, or the faults in ourselves that we discover in other people. We ill-speak young people for their sexual looseness, we ‘bad-talk’ politicians for being lazy or for stealing from the public purse, we gossip about the sexual indiscretions of a famous movie star. In all these ways we are like the Pharisee in this story ‘boasting’ of our goodness before almighty God.

This can happen to entire nations too. I wonder for example how many in the United States which prides itself on having a long and rich democratic tradition, after this very sordid electoral season still see themselves as the paragon of democracy and other ‘third-world’ (underdeveloped) nations as lagging way behind.

Prayer

Dear God teach us humility and self acceptance. Help us never to run from the faults that we have in ourselves. Stop us from boasting Lord “that we are not like that this tax collector” but help us to accept and embrace the fact that the Pharisee and the Tax collector both live inside of us and that we need your help every step of the way. Amen.

Gospel – Luke 18:9-14

Jesus addressed this parable
to those who were convinced of their own righteousness
and despised everyone else.
“Two people went up to the temple area to pray;
one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector.
The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself,
‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity —
greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector.
I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.’
But the tax collector stood off at a distance
and would not even raise his eyes to heaven
but beat his breast and prayed,
‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner.’
I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former;
for whoever exalts himself will be humbled,
and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”