Jesus’ Best Joke? (A sermon on Luke Luke 18:9-14)

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
(Luke 18:9-14)
Luke chapter 18: “Jesus told them another joke”, we are told, “and He told this one to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and looked down on others.” Did you hear the one about the Pharisee and the Tax Collector who wandered into the Temple at the same time to pray.
Now I know I’m being a little free with my translation here. I know most translations say that Jesus told them a ‘parable’ rather than a ‘joke’, but I’m not the first person to suggest that ‘joke’ is actually a very good translation.

Did you here the one about the frog and the scorpion who were both trying to cross a river at the same time?

Did you here the one about the Australian Prime Minister and Opposition Leader finding themselves alone in the same elevator?

Did you hear the one about the Pharisee and the Tax-collector going into the temple at the same time to pray?
Certainly the story starts like a classic joke – depicting a scene where two natural antagonists find themselves in uncomfortably close proximity. In each case we have a naturally comedic situation where two natural antagonists find themselves (accidentally) in uncomfortably close proximity.

Did you hear the one about the PM and Tony Abbot in the elevator together?

After a few seconds of self-conscious silence the PM decides she’ll use the occasion to have a bit of a dig at her opponent. Knowing Mr Abbott to be a good Catholic she says, “you know your mate, the Pope? I’ve heard on very good authority that the man is a closet alcoholic – drinks like a fish!”

“Is that right?”, says the Opposition leader calmly.

“In fact”, she says, “I hear he’s just a crazy depressive all round – impossible to get along with, mood swings, temper tantrums, the whole caboodle!”

“Is that right?”, her opponent says, seemingly unflustered.

And just as the elevator reaches her floor she closes with, “the other thing I heard about your mate, the Pope, is that he’s seriously considering giving away the Christian faith altogether and becoming an atheist like me!”

“Well”, says the Opposition leader, “that would help explain some of the behaviour you’ve been referring to!”

OK. It’s not a brilliant joke. Jesus’ is better. But it does illustrate how, in order to ‘get’ a joke, you do need to know something about the characters involved. It also illustrates well how the laughs you get from a joke almost always come at somebody else’s expense. And Jesus’ joke in Luke 18 is no exception.

A Pharisee and a tax collector turn up at the temple at the same time to pray. There is no sarcastic exchange at the door, but the Pharisee can’t resist making a back-handed reference to the tax-collector in his prayer. He prays out loud: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get. I am one of the good guys!”

OK, I added that last bit, but it is what he meant and, in truth, what he said and what he meant were essentially correct. He was one of the good guys!

As I say, to understand a joke you do need to understand the characters, and what you need to understand about the Pharisee (and about the Pharisees as a group) is that they were an exceptional group of human beings! Sure, they could be a bit stuffy and moralistic, but these guys were the honest upright citizens that the rest of the community depended on for social stability and moral leadership!

We get a skewed image of the Pharisees, I think, when we read about them only in the New Testament, as Jesus always seems to be arguing with them, but the other side of that coin is that they were the only religious persons who were actually there on the scene, such that Jesus could argue with them!

To grasp fully what I’m saying here we need to understand something of the way Jews had been dealing with the Roman occupation of Judea. For the people of Israel at the time of Jesus were a conquered people. They’d been a conquered people for generations – first conquered by the Babylonians some 600 years earlier, then by the Greeks and then by the Romans.

The Jews were a proud people with their own distinctive culture and faith, and yet they lived under Roman rule, and so the key religious question of the day was ‘how were the people of God supposed to respond to that Roman rule?’ And you can distinguish the different religious groups of that time by the way they responded to that question, and at the risk of being somewhat simplistic, let me suggest to you that there were four basic responses, corresponding roughly to four different religious groups in the Jewish society of the time.

The most popular response to Roman rule, both politically and religiously, was to fight back and hold a ‘jihad’ against the Romans! The group generally referred to as ‘the Zealots’ were the freedom fighters of the first century – resisting the Roman occupation, staging guerrilla attacks, and trying to resist and corrupt all things Roman. These people were yearning for independence and the chance to run their own theocratic nation-state once again.

A second and far less popular response to the occupation was to compromise and we might associate this response with the Sadducees – that Jewish religious group more associated with the administration of the Temple.

The Sadducees were aristocrats, and they did pretty well under the Roman occupation, so they weren’t going to make too much of a fuss about Roman culture or Roman political interference, or Greek philosophy for that matter, which quickly became integrated into their own religious thinking.

The Sadducees do pop up occasionally in the New Testament stories, but for the most part they are not on the scene because they are not hanging around with the type of everyday people that Jesus hung around with.

The Jewish religious group that is even less obvious in the New Testament, mind you, are the monks. These were the group whose response to the Roman occupation was to run away! Running away and hiding in the desert has always been a time-honoured religious response to dealing with the evils of the world, and it was a popular one back then too. The Essenes, and those we associate with the Qumran community (of ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ fame) were amongst those who made this response to the occupation.

Some suggest that John the Baptist might have emerged from one of these monastic communities. If so, he’s the only desert-dwelling monk we meet in the Gospels, and this for the most obvious of reasons – the rest were in hiding.

Now, as I say, I’m painting the first century religious scene with very broad brush-strokes, but if we can envisage these different responses to the Romans occupation – fighting back, compromising, and running away – none of them are really going to be of much help to the average family that is trying to get on with the business of life and bring up their children in a godly way, in accordance with the religion of their forefathers.

The Zealots were busy planning an attack, the Sadducees were locked away safely in their lovely homes, and the Essenes were nowhere to be found. Who then was left to look after struggling Jewish families? Who was going to pass on the Word of God to those who didn’t have the means or the wherewithal to run away? Who was going to educate the children, provide religious teaching to ordinary farmers and labourers, and who was going to try to model a godly, restrained, and sober lifestyle in middle of an increasingly wild and hedonistic culture? Was there anybody up to answering such a call? The answer was: ‘yes, the Pharisee!’

The Pharisee was a man who stood for something. He believed in God and he believed in the unique calling of his people. He hated the pagan rule of the Romans just as much as everyone else, and yet he didn’t run away but stayed in there alongside the people. He was in it for the long haul! Pharisees stood for purity. They stood for faithfulness. They stood for strong churches and strong families, and they were people who were willing to do whatever was necessary to see that their community held together!

These people built synagogues, taught the Scriptures, and helped to maintain a distinctive spiritual identity amongst their people, so as to resist the inroads of Babylonian and Greek and Roman culture into their traditional way of life. These were the people, humanly speaking, who ensured that the Jewish faith did not disappear when its temple had been destroyed generations earlier! Because they didn’t run away or resort to mindless violence, and because they didn’t compromise and sell out their faith, these were the pillars upon which Israeli faith and culture rested, and so when the Pharisee stands up to pray, “I thank thee God that I am not like other men” he is only telling the truth and most obviously when he compares himself to the wretched tax-collector.

I’m not going to give an equally long spiel about the tax-collector, comparable to my eulogy over the Pharisee, but I will say this – that the closest thing to a first century tax-collector in our context is probably a drug-pusher! He was someone who traded off other peoples’ misery!

To be a tax-collector in the first Century you needed to be greedy, first and foremost, and unpatriotic too because it involved working as an agent for the foreign occupying power. Being power-hungry and manipulative, while not absolutely essential to the role, would have been advantageous.

And so when the Pharisee stands up and prays, “God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11) he is basically telling the truth.

He is telling the truth, just as we do when we see some poor bastard shooting up, discreetly, around the back of the church. We say, “I thank you God that I am not like other men.”

Or When we walk past the TAB and see all those men, young and old, pouring all their savings into the next race. Or when we walk past the pub and see some poor sod get turfed out on to the street, drunk, we say, “I thank you God that I am not like other men.”

Or when we turn on the news and hear about the despicable things that people do to each other – to their families, to their children, to their fellow human-beings, we say, “I thank you God that I am not like other men, and most especially not like that guy!”

“The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!'” – giving the only prayer he had! (Luke 18:11-13)

You could be forgiven for thinking that, as a joke, this story from Jesus is probably not going to generate a lot of laughs. But it does have a good punch line. Indeed, Biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias suggests that the key to ‘getting the joke’ in this case is to recognise that by this stage of the story, most of Jesus’ original hearers would have already guessed the punch line.

Jesus has told a story about two natural antagonists – a Pharisee and a tax-collector who both go to pray at the same time. And knowing Jesus’ soft heart, Jesus’ hearers have by now anticipated His punch line: “I tell you the truth, not only the Pharisee had his prayers heard that day, but also the tax-collector!”

These guys know what Jesus was like. They know he made room for tax-collectors and prostitutes and addicts of all descriptions and people suffering from mental illness and all sorts of women and men, and so they’ve guessed the punch line – “not only the Pharisee, but also the tax collector.”

And yet there’s a real sting in the tail of this joke, for the punch line that comes is not the one they expected. Jesus rather concludes His story by saying that “the tax collector went to his home justified and not the Pharisee!” The tax collector and NOT the Pharisee!

The tax collector went home ‘justified’! It’s worth noting here that this is the only time in the Gospels that the Greek, dikiosuner (justified) is ever used.

We know this word from elsewhere in the New Testament. It is the word that is used so frequently by St Paul – being justified by faith, justified before God, etc. It’s a very significant word in the New Testament that speaks of God’s grace towards the undeserving sinner, but it is only used once in the gospels, and it is here – referring to this tax collector in the temple.

He went home justified – a complete man, whole before God, heard and loved and accepted and forgiven. The Pharisee, on the other hand, ironically, goes home still carrying the same problems that he’d started out with that day. His prayer has not registered with God! Like some email that gets caught in the Divine Spam filter, his prayer does not get through!

I heard of a preacher who ended his sermon on this parable with a prayer that began “I thank thee God that we are not like the Pharisee in this parable”.

If only that were true. For the problem is that there is a Pharisee in all of us! All too often we are the Pharisee. We think that we are better than others, and at our better moments we thank God for it. For there is a Pharisee in all of us. And the only hope for us Pharisees is to recognise that the prayer of the tax collector – “God have mercy on me, a sinner” – is the only prayer we have too.

First Preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, October 2010.