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.

What Was Wrong With the Pharisee’s Prayer?

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

He is not lying. Fasting twice a week goes beyond what the law required. Tithing everything he possessed goes beyond it as well. If the standard is the law, he has cleared it and then some.

Read his 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.

Luke 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.

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.

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.

The temple was not a quiet building. Public prayer gathered around the times of sacrifice, which means the man beating his chest is standing within sight and smell of an altar where an animal is being offered for exactly the purpose he is naming.

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?

Because he knows what he is.

The detail 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. He strikes his chest, which in that culture is a gesture of grief and self-accusation rather than a formal ritual.

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.

Nothing in the story explains how. 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.

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 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.

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 parable of the talents.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Through Peasant Eyes, in Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes (Eerdmans, 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, and the rendering of the prayer as a request for atonement. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 18:9-14 and Luke 19:1-10.

Where the sourcing stops: the timing of the parable’s setting relative to the daily sacrifice is standard background about temple practice rather than something Luke states. The reading of the Greek as prayed to himself rather than with himself is a genuine ambiguity and I have not resolved it.

Footnotes

1. 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 résumé.
2. 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.