I love that joke that Jesus tells in Luke 6, verses 41 and 42 – “Why do you look at the
speck in your brother’s eye, with never a thought for the plank in your
own? How can you say to your brother,
“Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,” when you are blind to the
plank in your own?” It is such a
ridiculous picture. It makes us laugh,
or it should. Yet it is often there in
real life, and that is why the idea is a good basis for a parable as with the
little story that we can read in Luke 18, the one we usually call the 'Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector'. They are both praying. The Pharisee doesn't mind who sees him. Indeed, we get the impression that he wants to be seen. He lives the good life that he should, and he wants to be recognised as a good role model. The Tax Collector takes a very different stance. Making himself as unobtrusive as possible, his prayer is a begging of God's forgiveness. It is a story of contrasts. This is almost a competition set up by the
Pharisee. As with most of the parables,
we know the story so well that we know it is not going to end in a good
place. But put yourself in the place of
Jesus’ original listeners. The
tax-collectors were a despised
bunch. They worked for the
Roman occupiers. They cheated. They extorted.
They got rich at the expense of their fellow countryfolk. Those who were listening to Jesus would not
expect him to say anything good about such a person. A Pharisee offers a stark contrast to
such a person. We don’t like the
Pharisees because they always seemed to be clashing with Jesus. But they were the folk who got it right, and
the people of Jesus’ time knew it. They
provided the models to which anyone ought to aspire. But Jesus turns the conventional thinking of
his day on its head.
Those who were listening to Jesus needed to
learn that God does not always use the sources we might expect. They needed to learn that they needed to look
for what God is doing, recognising that it might not be what they expected.
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