The Pharisee and the Tax Collector Explained (3 of 26)

Everyone reads this as a story about humility beating pride, and that is in it.

Underneath is something sharper. The tax collector is not asking to be let off. He is asking for a specific thing, using a specific word, at a specific moment in the temple day, and the English translation flattens all three.

What Is the Structure of the Parable?

Seven stanzas in a ring, and Bailey argues the shape carries the meaning.

Two men go up to the temple at the start. Two men go down at the end, and the order is reversed, with the tax collector named first.

The second and sixth stanzas pair: each man’s posture, then his prayer. The third and fifth both concentrate on the tax collector, and the contrast between them is the point. The third is the tax collector as the Pharisee sees him, listed among extortioners and the unjust. The fifth is the same man as the storyteller shows him, standing at a distance, striking his chest.

At the centre sits the Pharisee’s case for himself.

The turn comes just past the middle, on the words but the tax collector, which is where these structures characteristically pivot.

So the parable is built. Not a loose anecdote with a moral attached, but a composed thing with a hinge in it.

Where Is This Actually Happening?

In a service, with other people present, which is not how most readers picture it.

English separates two things that Semitic languages do not. We say prayer for what one person does privately and worship for what a congregation does together. Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic use one verb for both, which is why an Arab Christian says he is going to the church to pray and everyone understands he means the service.

Luke’s detail supports the corporate reading. Two men go up at the same hour, to a place of public worship. Shmuel Safrai’s work on temple practice describes Jews going up daily to be present at the sacrifice, to receive the priestly benediction, and to pray during the burning of the incense, with the people gathered in the court while it was offered. Ben Sirach has the people praying in the presence of the Merciful until the service was completed. Judith has someone praying at the hour of the afternoon incense while not in the temple at all.

So private prayer inside a corporate act is documented practice, and the atonement sacrifice was the only daily public service. That fixes the scene. These two men are not alone in a quiet building. They are at a service, and everyone can see them.

Which produces a consequence the Church spent centuries arguing about without noticing that the parable had already ruled on it. Two men attend the same sacrifice. One goes home justified and the other does not. Whether a rite works on a recipient irrespective of his condition is answered here, in a story, before the question was formally asked. The eleventh-century commentator Ibn al-Salibi puts it as sharply as anyone: the Pharisee’s false pride was intensified by his religious observance.^[1]

What Was Wrong With the Pharisee’s Prayer?

Nothing, on its own terms, which is what makes it dangerous.

He is not lying, and he has gone considerably further than most people realise. The written law required one fast a year, on the Day of Atonement. The stricter Pharisees built a fence around that by fasting two days before and two days after each of the three major feasts, twelve days a year. This man fasts twice every week. He has put a fence around the fence.

The tithing claim runs the same way. The law levied tithes on grain, wine and oil, and the tractate governing it spends pages on the exceptions that made a blanket rule workable, exempting things like rue and purslane and celery. He claims to tithe all that he gets, with no exceptions at all. Even tax collectors paid some tithe. If the standard is the law, he has cleared it and then some.

Read the prayer again and notice the grammar. He thanks God, which is proper. Then every subsequent clause is about himself, and the tax collector appears only as a measuring stick.

The standing apart is a legal act rather than a personality trait. Under the purity rules the Pharisees observed, the clothing of an ordinary person who did not keep those rules transmitted uncleanness by contact. Brushing against a fellow worshipper’s garment defiles him. So he places himself where nobody can touch him, and since the custom was to pray aloud, his prayer becomes a short sermon delivered to the people he is refusing to stand near.

There is a translation decision buried in the prayer’s worst line. Or even like this tax collector can be read two ways depending on how one small Greek particle is taken. If it separates two lists, he is saying he is not like category A, and also not like category B. If it joins terms that are near enough to stand for one another, then the tax collector is not a second category at all. He is the illustration of the first, and the prayer is a targeted attack on one man standing across the courtyard. Bailey counts nineteen of twenty-three occurrences in Luke going the second way.

Luke also says he stood by himself and prayed thus, and there is a real question in the Greek about whether he prayed to himself or with himself. Either way the picture is a man in a conversation with a very small audience.

What Did the Tax Collector Actually Say?

He asked for atonement.^[2]

Most English versions render it as have mercy on me, which is not wrong and is much weaker than the Greek. The verb is from the atonement family, and Bailey renders the line as God, make an atonement for me, a sinner.

The word is worth tracking, because it is rare. It appears as a verb twice in the New Testament, here and in Hebrews, where it describes the high priest making atonement for the sins of the people. As a noun it turns up four more times, in Romans, Hebrews and twice in 1 John, and every one of those is an atonement context. Behind it stands the Hebrew verb used throughout Leviticus for what the sacrifices accomplish.

Compare what happens two chapters later. A blind beggar outside Jericho shouts at Jesus to have mercy on him, and there Luke uses the ordinary word for mercy. Two different requests, two different words, and English gives them the same one. Some ancient versions did not flatten it; classical Armenian and the Harclean Syriac translate this line literally, as a request that atonement be made.

That changes the request. Mercy in the loose sense is a plea to be treated gently. Atonement is a plea for a specific mechanism, and the mechanism was running while he stood there.

He is not asking God to overlook the problem. He is asking to be included in the remedy already being enacted a few yards away.

Why Does He Stand Far Off and Beat His Chest?

Because he knows what he is, and the gesture is more extreme than it reads.

The distance is not modesty. Distance in that setting is a statement about access, and he places himself where he thinks he belongs. He will not lift his eyes.

Beating the chest is rarer than English readers assume. Bailey reports that in twenty years in the Middle East he saw it among women, and among men only at the Shiite commemoration of the death of Hussein, where the mourning is violent and self-lacerating. In the whole of biblical literature it appears twice. Here, and at the crucifixion, where the crowds who came to watch go home beating their chests.

There is a reason the blow lands where it does. Jewish commentary on the passage located evil longing in the heart, and Ibn al-Tayyib makes the connection to the saying that out of the heart come evil thoughts. The man is striking the organ he holds responsible.

Set against the Pharisee standing by himself, the two postures are almost the same physical fact and mean opposite things. One man is apart because he is above. The other is apart because he is below.

What Does It Mean That He Went Home Justified?

The verdict is legal and it is delivered in the wrong direction.

Jesus says this man went down to his house made righteous rather than the other. The word belongs to the courtroom. A declaration has been made about his standing.

Righteousness itself is worth defining before the sentence is read, because the popular English sense is the Greek one rather than the Hebrew one. In the Hellenistic world a righteous man was a civilised person who observed custom and law, which is more or less what the word still suggests. In the Hebrew Scriptures the plural of the word names God’s saving acts in history. When Micah tells Israel to remember what happened from Shittim to Gilgal so that they may know the righteousness of the Lord, some translations simply render it the saving acts of the Lord, because that is what it means. Righteousness in that register is a relationship God grants and a person keeps faith with, not a score a person accumulates.

Which is why nothing in the story explains how the verdict was reached. He has not made restitution, which the law would require of a man in his trade, and Zacchaeus later shows what that looks like. He has not left the profession. He has not done anything except name what he is and ask for the remedy.^[3]

That is the offence of the parable and it should not be softened. The man who kept the law beyond its requirements goes home as he came. The collaborator goes home declared righteous, on the strength of a request.

Is This Parable Anti-Jewish?

The charge gets made, and two things answer it.^[4]

The first is that the criticism is already inside the tradition. A generation before Jesus, Hillel is recorded in the Mishnah saying three things in a row: do not separate yourself from the congregation, do not trust in yourself until the day of your death, and do not judge your fellow until you have come to his place. The Pharisee in the parable breaks all three, in order, in four sentences. Whatever else is going on, this is not an outsider attacking a religion. It is a criticism a leading rabbi of the previous generation had already made.

The second is the passage Bailey argues stands behind the parable, and he says he has not seen the case made elsewhere. Isaiah closes his book with a scene in the temple. Arrogant worshippers are shutting a man out and mocking him. Sacrifices are being offered and the offerings are worthless because of who is bringing them. The man who trembles at God’s word is the one God regards. And the arrogant are told they will be put to shame.

Nine features line up: the temple setting, the sacrifices, the man excluded who turns out to be the one God accepts, the people doing the excluding, awe before God as the qualifying condition, and judgment at the end.

Three things do not. Isaiah is far harsher. Isaiah attacks the entire sacrificial system, where the parable mentions only the atonement offering and does so approvingly. And Isaiah ends with God bringing recompense on his enemies, where the parable ends with a man simply going home the way he arrived.

So the parable is a softened version of a scene the Hebrew prophets had already written, and the softening runs in the direction of mercy. Nobody accuses Isaiah 66 of being anti-Jewish. It is worth asking why the gentler retelling attracts the charge.

Is the Parable Just About Humility?

That is the application Luke attaches, and it is not the whole of it.

The closing line about the one who exalts himself being humbled is genuine and it is the moral. But treating the parable as advice about attitude in prayer turns it into a technique, and a man who adopts the tax collector’s posture as a method has become the Pharisee with better manners.

Luke’s own introduction says what the target is. He tells it to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others. The subject named there is righteousness and how it is obtained, which is a larger question than posture in prayer.

What the parable is actually contrasting is two accounts of how a person stands before God. One is an audit, and the Pharisee passes it. The other is a plea to be covered by something happening outside himself.

The tax collector’s prayer works not because it is humble but because it is aimed at the right thing.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the widow and the judge, which Luke places immediately before this one.

Footnotes4

1. The sacramental question is worth flagging because of how the argument usually runs. Centuries of debate about whether a rite is effective regardless of the recipient's condition were conducted with proof texts from Paul, and the clearest illustration is a story Jesus told about two men at one service. That does not settle the doctrine. It does mean the parable is doing theological work of a kind that the humility reading never reaches.
2. The atonement verb is the load-bearing detail and it is checkable in any interlinear. Once it is visible, the parable stops being about two attitudes and becomes about two mechanisms, and the tax collector's request turns out to be more theologically specific than the Pharisee's entire resume.
3. That the man is declared righteous without restitution is worth holding beside Zacchaeus, who volunteers fourfold repayment a chapter later. Luke puts them close together and does not comment. The parable establishes the ground and the Zacchaeus narrative shows what standing on it produces, in that order.
4. Raising the anti-Jewish charge and answering it is not defensiveness. The charge is made in print by serious people, and the two answers here are both external to Christian apologetics: one is a rabbinic text that makes the same criticism, and the other is a Hebrew prophet who makes it far more harshly. A reading that cannot survive that comparison should be dropped, and this one survives it.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Through Peasant Eyes, in Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, combined edition 1983), on Luke 18:9-14. Supports the seven-stanza inverted parallelism, the identification of the turning point, the contrast between the tax collector as the Pharisee sees him and as the storyteller shows him, the corporate setting and the single verb covering prayer and worship, the fence around the fence, the purity mechanism behind standing apart, the reading of the Greek particle, the rendering of the prayer as a request for atonement, the rarity of chest-beating, the Hebrew sense of righteousness, and the argument that Isa 66:1-6 stands behind the parable. In print, and in Logos.

Mishnah, Aboth 1:7 and 2:4 for Hillel's three sayings, Hagigah 2:7 for the uncleanness of an ordinary person's clothing, and Shebiith 9:1 for the tithing exemptions. Compiled c. AD 200. The complete Soncino Talmud, which carries the Mishnah text, is free in full at halakhah.com.

Shmuel Safrai, on daily attendance at the temple and on fasting twice weekly as a practice confined to certain circles, cited in Bailey.

Gerhard von Rad, on righteousness as a granted relationship rather than an ethical standard, cited in Bailey.

Ibn al-Tayyib and Ibn al-Salibi, Arabic-language commentators, both cited in Bailey. Neither has been translated into English.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 18:9-14, Luke 18:35-43, Luke 19:1-10, Luke 23:48, Isa 66:1-6, Micah 6:5, Heb 2:17, and Ben Sirach 50:19.

Where the sourcing stops: the timing of the parable's setting relative to the daily sacrifice is reconstructed from what is known of temple practice rather than stated by Luke. The reading of the Greek as prayed to himself rather than with himself is a genuine ambiguity and I have not resolved it. The Isa 66 argument is Bailey's, he says he has not seen it made elsewhere, and it is a proposal about a source rather than a demonstrated dependence. The chest-beating observation is Bailey's field experience in the twentieth century and carries the limits that go with that, though the biblical count is checkable.