Praying with a sideward glance - Luke 18:9-14 - Living by the Word - Column

Christian Century, Oct 11, 1995 by Paul D. Duke

THE PARABLE about the Pharisee and the tax collector neglects to mention that the Pharisee was singing "Amazing Grace" on his way to church that day. Or that as he said his prayer, there were tears in his eyes. He feels this stuff. He is awash with religious emotion, truly moved to gratitude for the life God has blessed him to live. Ask him on his way out what he thinks of the tax collector, and he will tell you, "There but for the grace of God go I." He will even think that he means it.

The parable also neglects to point out that the tax collector, when he has wiped his eyes, blown his nose and gone home, will not be quitting his shady job. He can't see any options; it's a nasty business, but he's stuck in it. Tomorrow he'll again take money from his neighbors, hand some of it over to the empire and put some aside for himself.

To see the Publican as honorable and the Pharisee as a creep makes the story false, curdles it to a dishonest (and easily anti-Semitic) morality tale and sends us straight into the trap of saying, "God, we thank you that we are not like this Pharisee!" Better to see him as he is--a thoroughly decent, generous, committed man--and to see the Publican as a compromised, certified stinker.

I know which character my church depends on. I know which one pays the bills, teaches the lesson, visits the sick, feeds the hungry. I'd love a churchful of people with his commitments--people who care enough to fast, people who tithe on all their income and who thank God that they can. As in Jesus, day, it's people like the Pharisee who hold the community together and keep the faith with diligence and passion. We can't color him sinister. He's not J. R. Ewing in a choir robe. He's a better man than I am, and probably better than you.

And is his prayer really so bad? It's very close to some classic prayers of gratitude from that time, including: "I give you thanks, O Lord my God . . . that you have not set my portion with those who sit in street corners," and "Praised be the God who did not make me a heathen . . . [and] who did not make me an uneducated man." Is the psalmist wrong to pray, "I have avoided the ways of the violent"? (17:33. Why not gaze on the mystery of having been spared a certain lot or a certain sin, and give honest thanks?

But there is a word in his prayer that is outside the Jewish form, and that one little word gives him away. He doesn't give thanks that God has spared him from being a thief, rogue, adulterer or tax collector; he gives thanks that he is not like them. "God, I thank you that I am not like other people . . . " Really? Here he crosses from the grammar of gratitude into the grammar of elitism. It can be a very subtle line and we almost never notice when we cross it, but we do it all the time. What betrays us is an unexamined refusal of kinship. It shows every time we use us--them language.

You can feel the distance in his use of the word "this": "this tax collector." Now he has stopped praying and started peeking. Coolly, he measures himself against a neighbor and is quietly pleased with the difference. Had the tax collector measured himself against the Pharisee and despaired at the difference, his prayer would have been just as false. It's the competitive sideward glance that distorts prayer.

The tax collector, wrong as he is about so much, has at least got his eyes right. He doesn't even notice the Pharisee, but is "standing afar off," entirely lost in his poor prayer. Jesus says he "would not even look up into heaven." His eyes are down to his heart, which he is beating with his fist--fitting for a man who knows he is at war with him self. Both men pray about themselves, but one of them is scanning the room, while the other is oblivious to all but his own condition.

Someone should draw a cartoon of a congregation at prayer with thought balloons over each head. Worshipers would be saying, "Thank you that I'm not like these fundamentalists" or "Thank you that I'm not like these liberals" or "Thank you that I'm above all this." Our capacity for smugness is astonishing. In the nation and in the churches, what a rage is on to assure ourselves and define ourselves by who we are not like. Could there be a better indicator that we have no idea who we are? When our eyes move away from our own shadowy hearts, there is no place left to look but at someone else, and no comfort but in claiming: Well, I'm not like that!

God be merciful to me, a sinner," whispers the man who is not at all good, but who is at least looking at his own lousy heart. And offering it. He's not unlike the woman whom Jesus would soon see in that very temple, the one who throws her last two pennies into the plate. Like the widow's gift, the tax collector's prayer is poor, not given from any abundance but from his need, and it's all that he holds in his crooked hands. And somewhere Someone cheers.

The story is set in a fine little frame. It begins, "Two men went up . . . a Pharisee and a tax collector." Now two men go down, but the tax collector is shown first, as if he leads the way. Nothing is said of his counterpart's destination, but the tax collector has a justified homecoming. After this kind of prayer, you go home. It's the grand old gospel reversal again--God undoing the order of things as they are in our temples, exalting those of low degree in a great surprise of mercy, filling those whose eye is single" with light enough to return home.