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The story about the Pharisee and the tax collector is a very familiar story to those of us who have been brought up in the Church. So familiar that we may just miss out on what Jesus is trying to teach in this particular parable. When reading this story it is so easy to see that Jesus is holding up the hated tax collector as having made a better prayer than the highly respected Pharisee. This is a shocking story for Jesus’ readers. Jesus takes the accepted norm of His time and turns it upside down.
In Jesus’ time the Pharisees were the pillars of Jewish society. They were the ones who meticulously upheld every part of the Jewish law. The Pharisees were seen as the most righteous of the Jews. They were also the ones who were the most outspoken against Jesus’ ministry, especially His healing of others on the Sabbath, His forgiving of sins and His associating with known sinners. In Jesus’ teachings, it is the Pharisees whom Jesus continually points to as examples to NOT follow. Please turn to page 1171 in your pew Bible. We will be looking at parts of chapter twenty-three from the gospel of Matthew. Let us begin with the first verse.
“Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, ‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.’”
Now why in the world would Jesus say this about one of the most respected groups in the Jewish society? Well, if we read through verse thirty-six we would read a litany of ways in which the Pharisees taught one way, but lived their lives as hypocrites. It wasn’t that they weren’t following the Law of Moses, but rather the reason for which they were obedient to the law. Their obedience was done in order to bring attention to themselves as being better than others.
In verses five, six and seven we read, “They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the market places, and to have people call them rabbi.’” In other words, the Pharisees lived their righteousness to gain the respect and honor of men.
Yet, Jesus reprimands the Pharisees for only being righteous on the outside and not the inside. In verses twenty-five to twenty-eight we read,
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.’”
These are rather strong accusations that Jesus makes against the Pharisees. It is their hypocrisy that most disturbs Him, for it is the heart of a person that is judged by God. We can do all the right things expected of us in this world and we can follow the teachings of Christ to the letter; but if we are not doing good works to glorify Christ, and not ourselves, we are just as deceived as the Pharisees. For they truly believed that they were better than people outside of their religious sect. This was the prayer of the Pharisee to God. It was to give glory to himself and not to his Creator. In the gospel reading from Luke for today we read, “The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’”
Although the Pharisee fulfilled the law, his good works were not enough to satisfy God. In Matthew chapter five, verse twenty Jesus says, “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
How does one exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees? It is by serving the Lord from one’s heart out of love for Him that our works become acceptable to God. In Proverbs 21:2 we are told, “All deeds are right in the sight of the doer, but the Lord weighs the heart.’” You see, the Lord looks upon our hearts, then our deeds. If our heart is not in the right place, then our good deeds are as rubbish to Him.
God preferred the prayer of the tax collector over that of the Pharisee, because the tax collector prayed from a broken and humble heart. We are told that he was so distraught over his sins that he could not ‘even look up into heaven’. Instead, the tax collector was “beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” Unlike the Pharisee, the tax collector who was of ill repute, because of his known sins of over taxing the people to line his own pockets, is forgiven and healed of his sins.
It is when we come before the Lord in humility, admitting our own inadequacies that the Lord hears our prayer and heals us. The psalmist best sums this up for us in these words, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Let us follow the example of the tax collector and come before our Lord in great humility of our own unworthiness, knowing that it is not our righteousness that justifies us, but rather the blood of our precious Savior, Jesus the Christ, who alone is worthy to stand before our Father in heaven, that gives us access to the throne of the Living God.
As St. Paul teaches us in his letter to the Ephesians,
“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”
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