A Preposition of Grace - Luke 18:9-14

One of the joys of parenting teenagers is getting regular reports about what’s going on in their world. This, of course, comes with plenty of sermon illustrations. Take the other day, for example, when the 10th graders at Central High spent second period watching Little Shop of Horrors, the new musical starring their classmates. Everyone was enjoying the show until, midway through one girl’s solo, a student started heckling. Soon others joined in. Our brave soloist kept going, but I can imagine how hard that must have been. After several failed attempts to restore order, the show was stopped.

As my 10th grader said later, “This is why we can’t have nice things.” She also noted that she was grateful her parents had taught her manners—implying that the unruly students’ parents had not. “I thank you, Lord, that I’m not like those people.” Once you see it, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is everywhere.

Jesus tells us that “two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.” The Pharisee thanks God that he’s not like other people—thieves, rogues, adulterers, or that tax collector. He lists his religious achievements: fasting twice a week and tithing. We see him as proud and self-righteous. Meanwhile, the tax collector, standing far off, can’t even look up and simply says, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” We label him humble and sympathetic. Luke adds his favorite moral twist: those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

But this parable is a trap. The moment we decide who the “good guy” is, we’ve fallen into the very comparison Jesus warns against.

To get out of the trap, we need to revisit what we think we know about these characters. As scholar Amy-Jill Levine reminds us, both figures are caricatures. The Pharisee is the Pharisee of all Pharisees, going far beyond what Torah requires. And maybe he’s not actually bragging; maybe he’s genuinely grateful that he’s been spared a life of dishonesty. Don’t assume arrogance.

And the tax collector? Notice what’s missing in his prayer for mercy—any hint that he plans to change. This is a sharp contrast to the story of the short and wealthy tax collector named Zacchaeus, who a little later in the Gospel, is not only sorry for how he mistreated people, he comes up with a plan to make amends (Matt Skinner, Working Preacher). Today’s tax collector makes no such plan as far as we can tell, so we can’t assume actual guilt or contrition for taking advantage of his fellow Jews.

So why does Jesus say that he went home “justified”? Justified means “made right” or “in good standing” with God. Why does God’s favor fall on the seemingly unrepentant sinner and not on the faithful Pharisee?

Maybe we’ve been reading this story wrong. Levine suggests that we have been mistranslating a tiny but critically important preposition in the parable. We hear that the one went home justified rather than the other. The word for “rather than” is the Greek word “para” which is normally translated as “along side.” In other words, it is possible, perhaps even preferable, to hear that both men went home justified, alongside one another. This changes everything. Suddenly the parable is no longer about humility or self-righteousness, about a winner and a loser. It’s about the mercy of God on both.

This parable aligns with other parables, like the prodigal son and the laborers in the vineyard, in which God’s grace upends our sense of fairness. This confounds us, because we want to put conditions on grace. We want righteousness to be earned and honored, but God’s mercy doesn’t play by our rules. These stories unsettle us precisely because they undo our compulsive need to compare ourselves to others.

And if both men go home justified, there is a profound spiritual lesson for us to hear. Our spiritual lives are deeply connected. When someone in our community is thriving, saying their prayers and faithfully keeping their religious practices, that has a good effect on the whole community. Likewise, when someone has fallen from grace, that pain belongs to all of us. Like the two men who went to the Temple to pray, we are in this together.

The great twentieth century public theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that in our modern world, the primary sin we fall into is hubris, or pride. We overemphasize our own importance and power. We do this to quiet the anxiety that comes with our freedom, which is a complicated argument. But the evidence is clear, he wrote. We see hubris all around, in the pride of power, the pride of knowledge, or the pride of virtue, and it is the root of most of our social and political problems. He published this idea in 1939 (The Nature and Destiny of Man), and it still rings true.

Yet, there was a voice that challenged Niebuhr on his basic premise in 1960. It belonged to an unknown graduate student named Valerie Saiving. She said that for some people, the sin of pride might be the core problem, at least for men with a certain amount of privilege and power. For women, she argued, the more prominent temptation is the sin of self-negation — or losing oneself (“The Human Situation: A Feminine View”). In other words, sin looks different, depending on whether you have a high vantage point like the Pharisee or the lower view like the tax collector. And God is merciful to both, because that is who God is.

So whether you struggle with self-righteousness or self-negation today—or shift between the two, as we all do—this parable is for you. It’s for the high school hecklers and for those who were offended. Each of us knows both positions: pride and shame, self-assurance and regret. God’s mercy meets us in both.

And remember, whatever comparisons we make, we are in this together, justified side by side by grace. Once you see it, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is everywhere—in us and all around us. And so is the mercy of God.