The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

Jesus often told parables to bring across the wisdom of the Kingdom of God. These parables are also for us today. It depends on the reader to be open to His teachings and to appropriate these truths, but more importantly, we need the Holy Spirit to reveal these truths to us. When we depend on our own interpretations, we often ‘miss the boat’.

When reading the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, we look at the Pharisee and some of us easily judge his pride and arrogance. We choose between the two parties and can easily see ourselves as praying the tax collector’s prayer - the humble one of the two. Often, we proceed by thinking about people we know and see as ‘Pharisees’. But aren’t we doing exactly the same as the Pharisee did, when we judge the tax collector and others for being prideful? We distance ourselves from the Pharisee and place ourselves in the ‘humble category’.

Tax collectors were despised in society (Luke 18:10). They were the ones no one wanted to associate with and were judged harshly. Who would these people be in our lives today and would we really side with them so easily?

The Pharisee wasn’t really speaking to God. He was acknowledging himself and his own efforts. In the process he was judging and belittling the tax collector in order to feel better about himself and his own efforts at righteousness.

Jesus says in Luke 6:41: “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice or consider the log that is in your own eye?”.  Maybe the most important lesson in this parable is not to decide which one of the two we are, but to ask the Lord to show us our hearts. Maybe it’s to make us stop and think about how we are towards others who are different to us. It’s not about what others do or don’t do, or about what I ‘do better’, but about who I am to others in His Kingdom.