Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost: October 26, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings - Joel 2:23-32 | Psalm 65 | 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18 | Luke 18:9-14

 Growing up, I read a lot of books. From a young age, I appreciated a well-written story with expertly developed characters and the power it had to draw me in and to connect me with the people and personalities about whom I was reading. I often found – and still find – that good character development allows me to identify with a character (or a set of characters), connecting their struggles and circumstances with my own. In effect, they have the capacity to mirror back to me experiences and interpretations of my reality and often push the boundaries of my imagination about what and who I hope to become. The parables we find in Scripture often have this function of mirroring and imaginative boundary-pushing. Their grounding in “real-life circumstances” makes it easy to enter the story, to see ourselves as one of the characters, to identify an aspect of what they teach as illustrative of ourselves or our circumstances. So, when Jesus tells his hearers a parable about a Pharisee and Tax Collector praying in the temple, it feels a bit natural to want to “side” with one and “stand against” the other.

 And, if you’re anything like me, the word “Pharisee” triggers associations with other words: hypocrisy, legalism, fundamentalism, elitism, exclusion… Two-thousand years’ worth of interpretation, teaching, and preaching have conditioned us to make these associations. Moreover, in those same two thousand years countless interpreters have easily equated “Pharisee” with “Jew,” thereby adding layers onto internal biases that lead to antisemitism. And so, when Jesus begins with a caricature of a praying Pharisee, it’s nearly effortless to frame the parable as an indictment against such things and to condemn the Pharisee before Jesus even finishes telling it. But I wonder if these conditioned frames actually distort rather than clarify what Jesus intended us to hear and see in this parable.

 The first person is described as what we might today call religious. He follows the rules, dissociates himself from the contamination of sin by distancing himself from sinners. He gives generously, he prays regularly, he follows the commandments. Josephus, an ancient historian, teaches us that Pharisees, in general, were not actually like what we’ve made of them in our caricatures and through our interpretations. They lived meager lives and were concerned with holiness of life as a way of embodying the spirit of the law. By all accounts, the Pharisee in our parable fits the definition of “righteous” that both Jesus and Luke employ throughout this Gospel. And, had he not been named a Pharisee at the beginning, we might be tempted to identify with him.

 The second person is described in more humble terms – he dares not approach God with a head held high, he finds nothing in himself to exalt and cries out only for mercy. In this character, we easily see the virtue of humility we hope is a mirror of our own character. And, in the end, he is the one held up as a model, the one who Jesus claims is justified before God. Yes, it is the second person, the tax collector, that Jesus sets before us as an example, drawing us in to identify with him over and against the Pharisee. Perhaps, as Jesus concludes the parable, we breathe a sigh of relief and utter a short prayer – “Thank God I am not like the Pharisee!” And just like that, we find we have fallen into the trap of this parable. Parables can be tricky things. A surface reading and interpretation can miss the point and lead us to wrong conclusions, causing us to get stuck on details that keep us from seeing the bigger picture the parable is intended to paint. Yet, if we look at the parable from a different angle, the significance of those details seems to fade, revealing something else entirely. If we can let go of our conditioned response, we might just be able to see new details and new connections to the gospel of Jesus Christ and the liberation, healing, and transformation he came to offer. And we find Luke’s interpretive clue in the parable’s introduction when the audience is specifically named: Jesus told this parable to those who “trusted in their own righteousness and held others in contempt.”

 At issues, here, is not our biased interpretation of hypocrisy – the Pharisee is not accused of exaggerating his piety or bearing false testimony of his religious practice and convictions. Jesus seems to be telling his hearers that we can do all the right things – we can follow all the right religious rules, we can give more than is required of us, we can be rightly dedicated to the pursuit of holiness – but when we trust in these things as the ground of our justification before God, we distort our relationship with God and with one another. We fail to see ourselves accurately and instead practice spiritual dishonesty by othering those whom we judge as being less than perfect in holiness: Thank God I’m not like that addict. Thank God I’m not like those Republicans. Thank God I’m not like those bleeding-heart liberals. Thanks God I’m not like those Christians. Thank God I’m not like… With each prayer like this that we utter, we prove ourselves as the ones who trust in our own righteousness and hold others in contempt.

 Now, it is true that we can draw out some truth about “right relationship” with God by looking at the caricatures portrayed in this parable. We can, with some certainty, say that God desires a humble and contrite heart, that there is no place for self-aggrandizement in our relationship with God, that arrogance and contempt for others is a barrier to being justified before God. But, it is also true that the portraits painted of both persons, taken together, provide a more complete mirror of ourselves. That each of us is both the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

 When I look at the parable from this angle, suddenly, I find freedom from the trap. And my focus shifts from trying to identify with the winner to seeing something of the wildly merciful God who causes us to stand in the presence of the divine, freed from the barriers of sin and judgment. I find that I cannot trust in my own righteousness, regardless of whether it’s built on the human effort at holy-living or on humility. I find that I am not, in fact, the author of my own righteousness at all. My standing before God is not a product of my own making but is a divine gift that only requires to be received. This gift is an invitation – an invitation to recognize and acknowledge my need for God’s mercy; it is an invitation to respond to God’s gracious and generous benevolence with my own gratitude and generosity. Because when I am able to recognize and acknowledge that the “rightness” of my relationship with God is not based on my own holiness, my own rule-keeping, my own ability to be “right” or “perfect,” but is instead made possible because of God’s grace and mercy, I am freed from the constrains of legalism and self-abasement and find that I am compelled to give back to God with the same wild abandon that God gives to me.

 I wonder what this parable mirrors for you, for us. I wonder how it might push the boundaries of our imagination about who we are and who we hope to become. Perhaps, if we set aside our conditioned responses and interpretations, we might find an invitation to a new kind of freedom in Christ that opens us up to, rather than closes us off from, those in our midst who are most unlike us. If we are no longer bent on setting ourselves apart from those we think less holy, less spiritual, less humble, how might that freedom open us to new possibilities of wholeness and healing? What kind of transformation might we experience as the People of God in a world desperate for liberation from the tyranny of violence, oppression, and marginalization? Are we willing to do the difficult (and sometimes messy) work of seeing ourselves rightly so that we might stop erecting and reinforcing the myriad boundaries we use to keep us pure, or safe, or comfortable?

 It is difficult and humbling to truly see ourselves and not do what the world around us has trained us to do – to hide our vulnerabilities and shortcomings. The parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector invites us to not be afraid of what we’ll see in the mirror – being in “right relationship” with God is not about our own efforts or our own skills. Our righteousness is not built on anything we do. Rather, God is the one who calls us, who makes us holy, and God does this in God’s own grace and mercy – not because we deserve it or have earned it but because God offers it as gift and desires us to receive it as such. So let us open our hearts and hands to receive God’s gift of abundant grace and mercy. May God grant us the courage and perseverance to look deeply into the mirror of this parable and show us where God desires to bring transformation in our lives! Amen.