[A sermon preached to Hinckley Unitarians on Sunday 23rd of October 2022]
(Readings: The Tortoise and the Hare by Aesop and Luke 18:9-14)
The story of The Tortoise and the Hare must be one of the most well-known in the world. Yet, I struggle to think of the last time I heard it read or even read it myself. I suspect that the reason is that I did not really need to read it again. Aesop’s fable is so simple and so well drilled into our children through schooling that we could all probably tell it from memory. A comment such as “slow and steady wins the race” comes to our minds so easily and so often, and with it all the imagery of tortoises and hares to last a life time. All of this is likely what makes it such a successful fable. It is a simple story that presents the moral it wishes to impart to us clearly and with consistency.
On first glace, The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector that we heard from our reading form Luke’s Gospel today seems to share many of the same qualities as Aesop’s fable.
Each story features a more virtuous character who we are meant to identify with: The steady Tortoise and the justified Tax Collector. They both also feature a less virtuous character that is convinced they are better than their opponent but is ultimately let down by their actions: the self-righteous Pharisee and the fast paced overly confident Hare.
Both stories also feature a suppressing switch at the end that seems to disrupt our assumed natural order of things: The slow tortoise beats the fast hare in a race. The sinful tax collector ends up having a better relationship with God then the religiously devout Pharisee.
So, two very similar stories. But I believe one to be far better, literarily speaking, than the other and I think some of you will be surprised to learn that I think Aesop’s fable does a far more constant job of communicating its message than Jesus’s parable, at least how it is told by Luke.
I say this with a somewhat heavy hart. Luke’s gospel is my favourite after all. Yet, this parable suffers from two significant problems.
The first is that it easily guides the reader into committing the very same sin that it is trying to guard against. If we read this parable, learn that we are to identify with the tax collector and learn to pray with similar lack of pride, it is very easy for us to fall into the flaw of thinking to ourselves, “look how we confess our sins to God with true contrition, unlike that proud Pharisee, thank God we are not like him!” In short, this parable can all too easily lead us into the pitfall that it wants us to avoid! In aiming to become like the tax collector, it is all to easy for us to take the place of the Pharisee in looking down upon others, even if we are looking down upon the Pharisee from the story.
The second flaw lies in trying to understand who this Pharisee in the story is, and this is a very dark flaw in the text.
This dark flaw has a name: antisemitism. I would hazard a guess that many modern readers of Luke’s Gospel do not make any distinction in this text between “Pharisee” and “all Jews”. Now whether this was overt antisemitism on Luke’s part or is this has been read into the text in more recent times is up for debate. But I do think this is a discussion worth having. Especially in relation to a parable that calls us to identify the Pharisee as “bad”.
Luke repeatedly casts the Pharisees as being in opposition to Jesus’s teachings throughout his Gospel, they accuse Jesus of blasphemy, of breaking the sabbath etc. in return, Luke calls them “lovers of money” and reports Jesus calling them “hypocrites”. The casting of this Pharisee from our parable today as self-righteous can easily be seen as adding another little snippet to an anti-Pharisee polemic.
This polemic begins to look like a crude and inaccurate caricature when one looks at other sources from the time. For example, far from being “lovers of money,” The Romano-Jewish historian Josephus seems to describe the Pharisees as living meagrely and shunning excess.
However, so long as we make sure to note that the Pharisee in this parable may have little in common with a typical historical Pharisee, we can still learn some useful lessons from it. Indeed, this parable has much to teach us about avoiding a ‘holier than thou’ attitude.
Unlike the race that Aesop’s characters set out on, holiness is not a competitive sport. We cannot look over our shoulder at our neighbours to gauge how far ahead we are of them and thus how much closer we are to the finish line. If we become more holy, we do so in comparison with ourselves not with anyone else. We can certainly be inspired by the good we see in others, yes, but holiness is a self-transformative process and is bound to effect people differently.
Still, a ‘holier than thou’ attitude is so easy to adopt in many matters of religion. For example, I have known some religious liberals (even a few Unitarians) adopt such an attitude towards Roman Catholics, being quick to leap to denounce their religious practices as “medieval” compared to their own enlightened, liberal, and inclusive religious attitudes – all without any sense of irony!
To be far though, I’m sure there are times when I have adopted such an attitude when confronted with religious beliefs and practices that I do not share, whether consciously or unconsciously. And I am sure I am not the only one!
Is there any hope for us in getting out of this mess? Are we forever doomed to place ourselves on false, lofty pillars of pride and judge those we consider beneath us?
An answer might be found when looking at the tax collector in this parable. Tax collectors at the time were reviled not simply because they collected tax, but because they collected it on behalf of an oppressive occupying power. Not only this but the Roman authorities, in a masterful example of divide and rule tactics, allowed local people from among the occupied population to bid to be tax collectors, if you won the contract to be the tax collector of, say, a certain dock or market, you could set your own rates so long as you paid over to the Romans the rate you had promised, and simply pocket the difference for yourself.
Corruption was rife in this system and tax collectors would have essentially been seen as the mobsters of their day, as well as devious collaborators who put money above their own people. This man in our parable was not beating his breast and describing himself as a sinner in a display of false modesty, it was more likely an entirely accurate description of the nature of his life.
This is what would have made the ending of this parable so stunning to hear for the people who would have heard this from Jesus. At the end of the day, it is this corrupt traitor and evil collaborator who goes home in a state of justification – having restored a righteous relationship with God. All this without promising to change, without promising to give up his corrupt job or make amends in some other way.
As a result of his humbling prayer of confession this villain of a tax collector receives God’s grace, a grace so generous and forgiving that it is beyond our understanding.
Maybe the fault of the Pharisee was not just that he considered himself to be better than the tax collector, but that he falsely considered the tax collector to be beyond God’s grace, forgiveness, and loving mercy?
If there is hope for a tax collector then there is surely hope for us when we make this same mistake of holding others in contempt. And, with that forgiveness, comes the healing that allows us to try to be better, if not holier than thou, then holier than ourselves.
Amen.
