Churchwarden and Salesman is based on Luke 18:10-14
People retell this parable a lot and it generally ends up being set in a church – mainly because, for Christians, ‘church’ is shorthand for ‘God will be listening,’ as well as ‘a holy place’. Another place to set the parable might be a cathedral; a place that both very pious and less pious people might end up being together.
The Original Setting
The original setting of this parable is the Temple, in Jerusalem. In Jesus’ time, the Temple was the place where Heaven met Earth; to go to pray in the Temple was to go to pray in the presence of God. The parable doesn’t mention the daily sacrifices, but the original audience would be well aware that the Temple was also where you made sacrifices to God for your sins. That holy Temple was deliberately destroyed by the Romans; the only part that’s survived to modern times is the Western Wall.
The Tax Collector in the Time of Jesus
Retelling the parable of the ‘Tax Collector’ (originally a ‘telonai’) and keeping them as a tax collector is a big mistake. Firstly, we just don’t see tax collectors nowadays in the same way. Yes, tax collectors can be unpopular. But we don’t automatically lump them in with ‘sinners’ the way the Gospels often do. Secondly, there’s a huge amount of discussion over what type of tax collectors Luke meant.
Originally, the people who translated the Bible into English thought ‘telonai’ meant ‘publican’. Cue much confusion in areas where a ‘publican’ is ‘someone who keeps a bar’. But the Roman publican was a tax farmer – someone who’d bought the franchise for collecting taxes in their area, and charged everyone a fee on top of their taxes to make their money back.
It’s easy to see why a ‘publican’/tax farmer would be disliked. They overcharge you for your taxes, and they’re working for the Romans! Sinner!
Current Views on Galilean Tax Collectors
But later research found that – in the time of Jesus – the Publican/tax farmer system had been banned by Rome. There followed much scholarly discussion along the lines of ‘they were hated because they worked for the Romans!’ The only slight problem with that is that tax collectors in Galilee wouldn’t work for the Romans. They’d work for Herod Antipas. Now Herod Antipas was very firmly under the Roman thumb, but he wasn’t a Roman. So why would everyone see his tax collectors as hated collaborators? That might be true in direct-Roman-rule Judea (where the Temple was), but it probably wasn’t the case in Gallilee.
Another possibility is that Luke is talking about toll collectors, who collect the tolls for travelling on a certain road or entering a certain area. Being a toll collector in Galilee seems to have been organised rather like being a taxi driver nowadays. Taxi drivers often pay a fee for the right to use a taxi. The toll collectors paid a fee for the right to set up their toll booth; anything they collected over that fee was theirs.
Remember, we’re talking about a cash economy. A toll collector would handle a lot of cash. A lot of untraceable cash. With no real way of confirming how many people had really travelled on that road or gone to the market. And if they decided to overcharge just a little…
Let’s just say that there’s quite a bit of evidence that people in Jesus’ time saw toll collectors as slightly less honest than the modern used car salesman. Individual toll collectors might be completely honest and rely on sufficient ‘customers’ to make a living, but as a group, people saw toll collectors as a bunch of cheating crooks.
Translating ‘Tax Collector’
In another project, I ‘translated’ the toll collector Levi as a loan shark. Truthfully, his job was probably closer in spirit to the entirely legal ‘payday lender’ – but in that case, I wanted to pick up on the ‘social outcast’ aspect of being a Galilean toll collector. They were seen as crooks, they weren’t good Jews, the money they earned was ‘dirty money’. But if they gave up that lifestyle, it was possible for them to shed their ‘sinner’ status.
The type of roles we’re looking at in retelling the parable are the car salesperson, the door-to-door seller, politicians, journalists. We’re not really looking at tramp/homeless person, drug dealer, prostitutes, the extremes of the social outcasts. Remember, it’s ‘tax collectors and sinners’. If we recast the tax collector as someone in the full-on ‘sinner’ category, we’re in danger of missing the point of the parable.
The Pharisees in the Time of Jesus
Pharisees were a devout group of Jews who popularised the careful observance of both the rules of the Biblical Torah and the oral Torah – the received (but unwritten) tradition. They weren’t usually priests – they were a group of enthusiastic lay people. Pharisees were also very highly regarded by most Jews; a point that doesn’t come across very well in the Gospels.
That’s probably because the Pharisees represented the main competition (as far as the Gospel writers were concerned). Both groups had a Way – a way to follow God, even without easy access to the Temple. The followers of Jesus followed the Way of Jesus, the Pharisees followed the Way of the Oral Torah. It wouldn’t be surprising if the Gospel writers, trying to fit far too many stories about Jesus into one scroll sized book, often selected stories that explained how ‘the Way of Jesus’ was different from ‘the Way of the Pharisees.’
The picture of individual Pharisees shows a more nuanced view. Individual Pharisees are interested in what Jesus has to say; others have reasonably friendly arguments with him. Individual Pharisees warn Jesus that Herod is planning to kill him. Other Pharisees move from the ‘Pharisee Way’ to the ‘Jesus Way’ (most famously, Saul of Tarsus). Some Pharisees absolutely hate Jesus and his followers; others think God will show whether he approves of this new movement.
Jesus, meanwhile, seems to like (and even, sometimes, approve of) individual Pharisees – but thinks the Pharisee Way, as a whole, is leading Israel down the wrong path.
What we have is two groups who want the same thing – God’s Kingdom – but who are arguing fiercely about how to get there.
The Pharisee in the Parable
If we look at the Pharisee through a prism of ‘Pharisees are the bad guys’, we miss the point that he is, in fact, doing the right things. The pharisee prays. He tithes to God, more generously than he has to. The pharisee, in short, tries to do good, not evil. He’s turned up at the Temple for extra prayer – and that prayer is based on standard Jewish prayers.
His problem is that he’s both proud of his virtue and looks down on the less virtuous. Those standard Jewish prayers are supposed to be: ‘Thank you G-d, for my blessings’. For this Pharisee, they turn into: ‘Thank you, G-d, for making me so amazing.’ Then he starts telling God how he’s so much better than other people. Like that tax collector, over there.
Out Loud?
It is possible that the Pharisee and the Tax Collector were both praying out loud. In which case, the Pharisee has not only told God (and everyone in earshot) about his own awesome amazingness, he’s also telling everyone in earshot that the Tax Collector is scum. The guy who collects tolls is little better than a robber.
From the point of view of the Way of Jesus, the Pharisee has made two errors which block out out all the good stuff he’s done. Firstly, he’s too confident about his own goodness. Secondly, he’s running down people who don’t come up to his standards. You have to ask whether any repenting tax collectors and sinners would want to go anywhere near that Pharisee. Personally, he’s doing all the right things. But if the toll collector was in the category of ‘Jewish sinner who can return to the Father’ (and his prayer suggests he very much is), is this Pharisee really helping him do that?
The Pharisee Problem
One of the big problems with this parable is that it’s a very easy parable to misuse. Firstly, it’s easy to take the picture of the individual Pharisee in this parable and apply it to all Pharisees (or, even worse, to modern Jews). We also do this when we use ‘Pharisee’ to mean someone who is joyless, smug, self-righteous and thinks themselves better than other people.
Secondly, it’s important to remember that Pharisees seem to have been well respected and popular. Originally, this would have been a very surprising parable, definitely in ‘the last will be first and the first last’ category. In modern terms, it’s a warning to people who think they’re on ‘the right side of history,’ – and who look down on the people who they think aren’t on that ‘right side’.
So Who’s a Modern Pharisee?
In a church community, a churchwarden (elder) would be a well respected person – and they’d probably expect God to feel the same way. A congregation would find it surprising if God instead decided to bless the door to door salesperson with the overpriced cleaning materials.
When retelling this parable outside a church community? The Pharisee is the charity worker, the nurse, the firefighter. The Pharisee is a respected person in a highly respected job, who spends their lives helping others.
They might even be a tax collector!
Previous parable: Churchwarden and Salesman (Luke 18: 10-14)
Next parable: The Rich Idiot (Luke 12: 16-20)
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