Richard Mallory

Two went up to pray
Two went up to the temple to pray,
a Pharisee and a tax collector….
                                 —Luke 18.10

And I was sure I was the righteous one,
humble in my correctness,
and the other, the bigot, clearly
neither right nor humble enough….

although, in fact, we pharisees are good people,
and we tax collectors actually are scum,
and we know it, which I guess is the point,
so I’m not sure which side I’d be on:

the good one, the butt of the joke,
who’s spent a lifetime trying hard,
or the sleazeball, accepted, forgiven,
but still technically a sleazeball….

which means, in the end, all our judgments
are delusion, and there is no grace
in deserving, but only in receiving,
so we both end up praying in unison,

God be merciful to me, a sinner.

by Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Dear Friends in Christ,

Another “Short Story, by Jesus,” is how  New Testament scholar and Orthodox Jew  Amy-Jill Levine labels this parable. Simple. Elegant. Disturbing.  Another “in-your-face comeuppance diagnosis from Jesus arrives unsolicited to us as this church  year speedily comes to a close.

Dualism pervades. Who you gonna be in this story? Why, the good guy, of course. Some will hear today’s Gospel  and say to themselves, “Thank God I’m not like that self-righteous Pharisee over there marinating in his own conceit.” 

What if each of those characters resides in us? Do we shuttle back and forth from one to another? In fact, do we even have a choice?  

One of the two is the prominent character in our culture where the three A’s are enshrined as gods.” Achievement. Attractiveness. Affluence. Moreover, as Richard Rohr observes, “Every American has a PhD in Entitlement. Enter stage right the Pharisee.

The other man, the tax collector, knows how he is regarded. He is a traitor to his fellow Jews by having enlisted with the Romans to extract taxes from his  people. He knows that he is regarded as scum. He has absorbed and internalized the bias of the majority which then becomes self imposed oppression and self-rejection.

I don’t buy the view that he is wallowing in self pity. His confession is genuine. He is blessed by his ability to be brought low in the interiority of his soul.

There is a need for all to establish themselves in the first half of life and then a further need in later years to let go of so much that mattered earlier on. Perhaps our pharisee will get there. There’s nothing like a life tragedy, a major loss, hurt or betrayal for disrupting deep attachment to certainty.

Jesus is making a point about states of mind and heart. One is more amenable to receiving the good news. Each character is exaggerated from the one whose prayer is a recital of his resume to the one who might be on the verge of knowing deep peace and grace.

So, dear ones, thanks be to God for mirrors that remind us of who we have been, who we are and where we might go from here. If you wish to slough off some of your  inner pharisee, go slowly, be compassionate, and be understanding and accepting. You came by it honestly in the first place.

—Richard