about Pharisees

Jesus tells a story about a tax collector and a Pharisee who go to the Temple to pray. In Jesus’ day, all of his hearers wanted to be accepted and honored like the Pharisee. Tax collectors were thought to have turned their backs on any effort toward religious respectability. So Jesus’ hearers were stunned when Jesus said that God was more interested in what the tax collector had to say than in the Pharisee's prayer.

But now we hear this story very differently. Preachers hold up the Pharisees as the enemies of Jesus and examples of how baldly legalistic the religious establishment of Jesus’ day had become, making the Pharisees fair game for youth pastors everywhere. We think that we can now see through the Pharisees’ religious game-playing and power-grabbing. No self-respecting American evangelical would aspire to be like a Pharisee.

So maybe we need to re-cast this story. Instead of the Pharisee and the tax collector, we could call the story “the good Christian and the Pharisee”. And we’ll all be surprised that God is more interested in listening to a Pharisee who has a change of heart than in a good Christian who is locked in her/his ways.