Two Men Praying

After Lazarus walked out of his tomb, the leaders in Jerusalem met together and decided that Jesus had to die. So Jesus went away for a while to a town called Ephraim, out near the desert. When he set off again on the long road toward Jerusalem, crowds walked with him, and he taught them as they went.

Some people in that crowd were very sure they were good. They were just as sure that plenty of other people were not, and they looked down their noses at them. So Jesus told them a story.

"Two men go up to the temple to pray," he said. "One is a Pharisee. The other is a tax collector."

(A Pharisee kept every one of God's rules, and then some extra rules on top, just to be safe. A tax collector gathered money from his own neighbours for the Romans, and he usually charged them extra and pocketed the difference. Everybody admired the first man. Nobody asked the second one over for dinner.)

The Pharisee stands up near the front, where people can see him, and he prays.

"God, I thank you that I am not like other people. I am not a robber. I am not a cheat. I have kept my promise to my wife." He glances over his shoulder, in case God isn't sure which man he means. "And I am certainly not like that tax collector back there! I go without food two days every week. I give you a tenth of everything I get."

(Two days a week with no breakfast and no lunch, nothing at all until the sun went down. His stomach must have growled through half his prayers.)

Count the sentences in that prayer and see who they are about. He has come to talk to God, and he spends the time telling God about himself.

The tax collector stands far back, near the edge of the courtyard. He will not even lift his eyes toward heaven. He beats his fist against his chest, thump, thump, the way a person does when a wrong thing is too heavy to carry.

"God," he says, "have mercy on me. I am a sinner."

Mercy means kindness to someone who deserves trouble instead. He has nothing else to bring.

Jesus let the story sit a moment. Then he said, "I tell you, it was the tax collector who went home right with God, and not the other man. Everyone who lifts himself up will be brought down, and everyone who bows low will be lifted up."

If you had been in that crowd, you might have seen a few faces go red.

The tax collector went home forgiven, though he never once looked up at the God who forgave him.

But how could God be kind to a cheat and still be fair to the neighbours he cheated? Somebody would have to carry that wrong.

Jesus told this story on the road to Jerusalem, and he knew what was waiting for him there. The Pharisee in the story lifted himself up as high as his words would go. Jesus was going the other way, lower than the man at the back of the courtyard, all the way down to a cross. There he would die for people who had nothing to bring. And on the third day God would lift him up again, just as his story said.

The mercy the tax collector begged for at the back of the temple was walking up the road to Jerusalem.