LUKE xviii. 9-14. Some interpreters find in this parable, as in that of Dives
and Lazarus, a prophecy of the rejection of the Jews, with the reception
into God’s grace of the Gentiles; the Pharisee representing for them that
whole nation which would assuredly have accepted him as embodying its ideal—the
publican, the Gentiles, with whom these hated ministers of the Roman denomination
were commonly classed. They see in the one the Jew, glorying in his own
merits, and proudly extolling himself in these, but through this very pride
and self-righteousness failing to become partaker of the righteousness
of God; in the other the Gentile, who meekly acknowledging his vileness,
and repenting his sins, obtains the grace which the Jew has missed.
So long as no more is claimed by the advocates of this interpretation than
that Jew and Gentile illustrated on the largest scale the solemn truths
which are here declared, it may very well pass. But the words which introduce
the parable, ‘And He spake this parable unto certain which trusted in
themselves that they were righteous, and despised others,' words which
must give the law to its interpretation, refute this when made the primary
intention with which it was spoken. For who were these ‘certain which
trusted in themselves that they were righteous? Assuredly not Pharisees,
nor any who avowedly admired Pharisees, as did the great body of the Jews.
What profit would it have been to hold up to such the spectacle of a Pharisee
praying as this one prays in the parable. They would have seen nothing
unseemly in it; they would have counted it the most natural and fittest
thing in the world that he should pray exactly in this fashion. But a disciple,
one already having made some little progress in the school of Christ, yet
in danger, as we are all in danger, of falling back into pharisaic sins,
such a one would only need his sin to be plainly shown to him, and he would
start back at its deformity; he would recognize the latent Pharisee in
himself and tremble and repent.’ It was in some of His own disciples and
followers, that the Lord had detected symptoms of spiritual pride and self-exaltation,
accompanied, as these will be ever, with a contempt of others; and it is
to their needs that He proceeds in the parable to apply a remedy.
‘Two men went up into the temple to pray,’ at one, no doubt,
of the stated hours of devotion (Acts iii. 1), ‘the one a Pharisee,
and the other a publican:’ a Brahmin and a Pariah, as one might say,
if preaching from this Gospel in India—the Pharisee, representing all those
who, having made clean the outside of the platter, have remained ignorant
of all the uncleanness within—have never learned to say, ‘Deliver me from
mine adversary,’ do not so much as know that they have an adversary; the
publican, an example of all those who have found their sins an intolerable
burden, and now yearn after One who shall deliver them from these and from
the curse of God’s broken law. Christ will make His disciples understand
how much nearer the kingdom of God is this man than the self-complacent
Pharisee, or than any who share in his spirit and temper; that he may be
within that kingdom, while the other is certainly without.”
‘The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself.’ It is a mistake,
growing out of forgetfulness of Jewish and early Christian customs, to
urge this, that the Pharisee prayed standing, as an evidence already
displaying itself of his pride. Even the parable itself contradicts this,
for the publican, whose prayer was an humble one stood also (ver. 13).
But to pray standing was the manner of the Jews (I Kin. viii. 22; 2 Chron.
vi. 12; Matt. vi. 5; Mark xi. 25); however, in moments of a more than ordinary
humiliation or emotion of heart, they may have exchanged this attitude
for one of kneeling or prostration (Dan. vi. 10; 2 Chron. vi. 13; Acts
ix. 40; xx.. 36; xxi. 5). The Church owes this, as so much in the
external features of its worship, to the Synagogue.’ Its stations
of prayer were so called because standing the Christian soldier
repelled the attacks of his spiritual enemy. At the same time, when we
weigh the word of the original, this ‘stood’ may very well be emphatic,
indeed we may confidently assert that it is. It implies that he, so to
speak, took his stand, planted and put himself in a prominent attitude
of prayer; so that all eyes might light on him, all might take note that
he was engaged in his devotions (Matt. vi. 5). The words are not always
combined as our Translators have combined them, but rather as follows:
'The Pharisee stood by himself, and prayed thus:’—separatist
in spirit as in name, and now also in outward act, he desired to put
a distance between himself and all unclean worshippers (see Isai. lxv.
5). The other construction, however, it is generally agreed, should be
adhered to.
His prayer at first seems to promise well: ‘God, I thank Thee;’
for the Pharisees, as Grotius well observes, ‘did not exclude the divine
help. But they who allow it and use this language are frequently ungrateful
to it, allotting, as they do, to themselves the first share in virtuous
actions, to God the second; or so recognizing common benefits, as to avoid
fleeing as suppliants to that peculiar mercy which their own sins require.’
Thus it was with this man; while a due recognition of God’s grace will
always be accompanied with deep self-abasement, confessing, as we must,
how little true we have been to that grace, how short we have fallen of
what we might have been, with such helps at command. And thus the early
promise of the Pharisee’s prayer quickly disappears; for under the pretence
of thankfulness to God, he does but thinly veil his exaltation of self;
and he cannot thank God for the good which he fancies that he finds in
himself, without insulting and casting scorn upon others for the evil which
he sees, or fancies that he sees, in them. He thanks God, but not aright;
thanks Him that he is ‘not as other men are,’ dividing the whole
of mankind into two classes, putting himself in a class alone, and thrusting
down every one else into the other. And as he cannot think too good things
of himself, so neither too bad of others. They do not merely fall a little
short of his perfections, but are ‘extortioners, unjust, adulterers,’—and
then, his eye alighting on the publican, of whom he may have known nothing
but that he was a publican, he drags him into his prayer, making him to
furnish the dark background on which the bright colours of his own virtues
shall more gloriously be displayed ;—finding, it may be, in the deep heart-earnestness
with which the contrite man beat his breast, in the fixedness of his downcast
eyes, proofs in confirmation of the judgment which he passes upon him.
He, thank God, has no need to beat his breast in that fashion, nor
to cast his eyes in that shame upon the ground.
So perfect is he in the fulfilment of the precepts of the second table.
He now returns to the first; in that also he is faultless. ‘I fast twice
in the week.’ He has his works of supererogation. Moses appointed but
one fast-day in the year, the great day of atonement (Lev. xxvi. 29; Num.
xxix. 7); but the devouter Jews, both those who were, and those who would
seem such, the Pharisees above all, kept two fasts weekly, on the second
day and the fifth. ‘I give tithes of all that I possess;’ or rather,
‘of all that I acquire.’ He, another Jacob, has made the same
promise to God as the patriarch of old: ‘Of all that Thou shalt give me,
I will surely give the tenth unto Thee’ (Gen. xxviii. 22; cf. xiv. 20).
The law commanded only to tithe the fruits of the field and increase of
the cattle (Num. xviii. 21; Dent. xiv. 22; Lev. xxvii. 30); but he, no
doubt, tithed mint and cummin (Matt. xxiii. 23), all that came into
his possession (Tob. 1. 7, 8), down to the trifles about which there was
question, even in the Jewish Schools, whether it was obligatory to tithe
them or not (Hos. xii. 8). He will thus bring in God as his debtor; misusing
those very precepts concerning fasting and paying of tithes, given to men,
the first to waken in them the sense of inward poverty and need, the second
to remind them that whatever they had was from God, and should therefore
be to God, making even these to minister to his arrogance and pride.
Acknowledgment of wants, or confession of sin, there is none in his prayer,--if
that can be called prayer which has nothing of these. ‘Had he, then,’
asks Augustine, ‘no sins to confess? Yes, he, too, had sins; but, perverse
and knowing not whither he had come, he was like a sufferer on the table
of a surgeon, who would show his sound limbs, and cover his hurts. But
let God cover thy hurts, and not thou: for if, ashamed, thou seekest
to cover them, the physician will not cure them. Let Him cover and cure
them; for under the covering of the physician the wound is healed, under
the covering of the sufferer it is only concealed; and concealed from whom?
from Him to whom all things are known.
It will aggravate our sense of the moral outrage involved in the Pharisee’s
contemptuous reference to his fellow-worshipper, if we keep in mind that
in him we behold one who at this very moment was passing into the kingdom
of God, who had come, in the fulness of a contrite heart, to make, as seems
evidently meant, the first deep confession of his sins past which had ever
found utterance from his lips, in whom amid sore pangs the new man was
born. How ugly a thing does the Pharisee’s untimely scorn appear, mingling
as a harshest discord with the songs of angels, which at this very moment
hailed he lost who was found, the sinner who repented. For let us turn
now to him. ‘And the publican standing afar off,’ not afar off from
God, for the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a contrite heart, ‘would
not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven,’ much less then his hands
and his face (I Tim. ii. 8; I Kin. viii. 54; Heb. xii. 12; Ps. xxviii.
a), to that dwelling of the Holy One; for, like the prodigal, he had ‘sinned
against heaven’ (Luke xv. 18), would have exclaimed like Ezra, ‘O my God,
I am ashamed, and blush to lift up my face to Thee, my God; for our iniquities
are increased over our heads, and our trespass is grown up into the heavens’
(ix. 6). He stood ‘afar of,’ not that he was a proselyte or a heathen,
or had not full right to approach, for he also was a Jew, but in reverent
awe, not venturing to press nearer to the holy place; for he felt that
his sins had set him at a distance from God, and until he had received
the atonement, the propitiation which he asks for, he could not presume
to draw nigher. Moreover, he ‘smote upon his breast,’ an outward
sign of inward grief or self-accusations (Nah. ii. 7; Luke xxiii. 48),
as one judging himself, that he might not be judged of the Lord; acknowledging
the far heavier strokes which might justly light upon him; at the same
time crying, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner,’ or ‘to me, the
sinful one;’ for as the Pharisee had singled himself out as the most
eminent of saints, or indeed as the one holy in the world, so the publican
singles himself out as the chief of sinners, the man in whom all sins have
met--a characteristic trait! for who, when first truly convinced of sin,
thinks any other man’s sins can equal his own?
And he found the mercy which he asked. His prayer, like incense, ascended
unto heaven, a sacrifice of sweet savour, while the prayer of the Pharisee
was blown back like smoke into his own eyes; for ‘God resisteth the proud,
and giveth grace to the humble:’ ‘I tell you, this man went down to
his house justified rather than the other.’ Not merely was he justified
in the secret unsearchable counsels of God, but he ‘went down to his
house justified,’ with a sweet sense of forgiveness received shed abroad
upon his heart; for God’s justification of the sinner is indeed a transitive
act, and passes from Himself to its object. The Pharisee meanwhile went
down from the temple, his prayer ended, with the same cold dead heart with
which he went up. By that ‘rather than the other’ Christ does not
mean that the publican by comparison with the Pharisee was justified,
for there are no degrees in justification, but that he absolutely was justified,
was contemplated of God as a righteous man, and the other not; that here
the words were fulfilled, ‘He hath filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich He hath sent empty away;’ ‘Though the Lord be high, yet bath
He respect unto the lowly; but the proud He knoweth afar off’ (Ps. cxxxviii.
6; Isai. lvii. 15; Job v. 11; xl. 11, 12; 2 Pet. v. 5, 6). And the whole
parable fitly concludes with words not now for the first time uttered by
the Lord, and which would well bear repetition: ‘For every one that
exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be
exalted’ (xiv. 11). The saying constitutes a beautiful transition
to the bringing of the children to Jesus, the next incident recorded by
the Evangelist.
