Proper 25: Jeremiah 14.7-10, 19-end; Psalm 84.1-7; 2 Timothy 4.6-8, 16-18

LUKE draws the moral from this parable before he tells it: Jesus challenges people who consider themselves righteous, but whose righteousness consists in contempt for others. Then the parable commends the opposite.

Luke had a number of possible words to choose from when expressing the Pharisee’s disdain for the tax-collector. The word that he selects occurs a few times in the old Greek Bible, but not in mainstream Ancient Greek. This hints that the idea being expressed has particular meaning for Christians. Luke uses it in Acts as well as his Gospel. Paul uses it in five of his undisputed letters. In one passage, Paul’s teaching is so close to Jesus’s message here that I think some shared perception, some common understanding of the divine message, is being revealed: “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God (1 Corinthians 1.28-29).

Part of me enjoys answering Bible questions in this wordy way: using the tools of scholarship; plunging into questions of language; wrestling with shades of meaning; comparing different historical periods and their ideas. But another part — the one that dominates in my personal encounters with scripture — takes the path of prayer, not scholarship. So, I set aside my Greek lexicon and my commentaries, and close my eyes, and open the eyes of my soul. This brings different aspects of the Gospel message into view.

To begin with, I picture myself as a worshipper on the periphery of the scene. I come to the Temple to get as close to God as I humanly can, and prepare to pray to him. But, suddenly, those thoughts of mine are interrupted. Some Pharisee is busy lecturing God on the subject of his own virtue (as if God, without being instructed, might not have realised what a splendid worshipper he has).

Picturing this scene reminds me uncomfortably of times when I have been in the gym, listening to my audiobook (through earbuds), when suddenly someone decides to have a long and loud phone conversation, which I cannot tune out, and which intrudes on my personal mind-space. It is akin to having someone start shouting into their mobile in a train carriage — thoughtfully (for their listener), but infuriatingly (for those forced to eavesdrop), they turn up their own vocal volume to be heard over the ambient racket.

Praying this Gospel, I stand in the Temple listening for God, but all I can hear is the Pharisee. His noise is even more annoying, because I must now add the sin of intolerance to the sins I arrived with. Unwanted noise is a miserable affliction “at all times and in all places” — certainly Luke’s Pharisee reminds us of Jesus’s words in Matthew 6.5; for he embodies that thirst for religious attention which loves to stand on street corners (or prime places in the Temple), raising the voice to make sure that God — and everyone else — can hear.

I have sometimes met that Pharisee in church. I have probably been that Pharisee more times that I like to admit, basking in worship’s warmth like a cat on a sunny pavement.

When I began meditating, I had not yet decided whether I was being the tax collector. Now, it is plain that I am not he: my gut reaction to the Pharisee is so unlike that of the man in the parable; for the tax-collector takes no notice of the Pharisee at all. There is no corresponding, “Lord, I wish that I could be more like that Pharisee over there!” Although the Pharisee is praying with his real attention on “other people, or even this tax collector”, the tax-collector focuses only on God.

It would be a mistake to think that Jesus was speaking this parable against Pharisees only. As a historical religious movement, Pharisaism belongs to the past, not the present. But being self-righteous and despising others are modern human failings, too. When other people’s noise intrudes, we may not be holy enough for it to escape our notice altogether. But we can choose, once we have noticed, at least to be sorry for caring too much about such trivia. The tax-collector’s prayer is always there for us — as well as for that Pharisee — to make our own, praying, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!”