Oct. 28, 2007

The Two Faces of Us

By Harry T. Cook

Luke 18: 9-14

The gospel writers liked to set up opposing forces in the guise of actual persons or types. Their favorites were the Pharisees against everybody else. Thus do the Pharisees take a bum rap for just about everything that was unjust, unfair and unpalatable to those who wrote the gospels.

And sure enough, in today’s reading we have the Pharisee and the tax collector. “Toll collector” is the better reading of the Greek term found here. Such a person was usually hired from the local Palestinian population by Roman authorities to collect tolls on various kinds of merchandise coming into a city. Wholesalers and retailers alike hated the toll collectors, even though the latter were doing what they were paid to do and no doubt counted on their jobs to provide for themselves and their families.

The imagined Pharisee might have been a retailer or a peddler himself, but what Pharisees were as a type were a kind of middle-class, innovators in matters of religion and generally upright citizens of the sort you’d be glad to have as neighbors.

Yet, in this parable the writer holds up the miserable toll collector as the hero and the Pharisee as the goat. The Pharisee’s supposed fault appears to be undue pride in his religious observances and his gratitude that he is not like other people who are rogues, thieves, adulterers and (who else?) this tax collector. Both the Pharisee and the toll collector, Luke says, had taken time to go to the temple for prayer. Unlikely.

Pharisees were probably allergic to temple worship except for the major festivals, inasmuch as the temple was the purview of their rivals, the Sadducees. A toll collector would probably not have risked having his pay docked by indulging in a religious work of supererogation.

However, we’ll indulge Luke in his image of the two of them at prayer: the Pharisee satisfied with his life and piety (and why should he not have been?), the toll collector embarrassed at soaking his fellow Judeans in the name of the Roman occupation. The former is happy with himself, the latter embarrassed.

How to read this contrast? I will suggest that they represent two competing factions of First Century C.E. Judaism: The first being synagogue Judaism trying to maintain some semblance of tradition in the chaos created by the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, the second being the upstart movement I call “Jesus Judaism” organized around the Nazarene’s ethical sayings.

Synagogue Judaism was clearly the establishment position, Jesus Judaism the movement challenge to it. Luke, among the several gospelers of the late First Century C.E. was clearly a proponent of the Jesus movement. That’s why the exaltation of the toll collector who was trying to reconcile what he perceived as his dirty work with, perhaps, the ethic of doing unto others . . .

I will also suggest that the contrast between the upright Pharisee and the contrite toll collector represents two sides of our own individual selves. We who try to be intentional about our religious obligations, we who part with some of our wherewithal to support a religious institution and its good works can be proud about such commitments. It is upon such commitments that the church (upper-case C right down to the local congregation) depends.

However, one can also carry that kind of thing past acceptability when it becomes what is called a “holier than thou” attitude in which one holds others who do not or cannot make such commitments in righteous contempt.

Yet even those who are observant where religion is concerned also have their inner demons that cause them to live double lives. It is said that Al Capone was a frequent communicant at mass, though he thought nothing of ordering the brutal execution of a perceived enemy – perhaps an extreme illustration, but apt in its own way.

The religious situation in Palestine of the First Century C.E. was quite fluid with boundaries as porous as ever – the Pharisee and the toll collector being poster children for two distinct poles on a continuum. Those poles and their continuum exist within each of us as, at the one extreme, we over-praise ourselves for what we are and do in the name of religion, and, at the other, obsess over perceived unworthiness.

It’s a natural kind of tension and one for which we should probably be thankful. Being all-Pharisee-all-the-time, full and spilling over with self would be intolerable. It would be as unhealthy a thing as being a perpetually contrite breast-beater. One would be as wearying as the other.

The saying that the parable of the Pharisee and the toll collector was created to enshrine is this: Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled; and the one who humbles himself with be exalted . . . meaning, I think, that a balance between the extremes of self-exaltation (undue pride in self) and self-humiliation (undue criticism of self) is a mark of good health in an individual and in a society.

The prototypical Pharisee and the prototypical toll collector probably ended up as members of the same church as time went on in early Christianity, just as they end up being two faces of us – and of each of us – in the present day.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.