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Redeemer Bible Church

Unreserved Accountability to Christ. Undeserved Acceptance from Christ.
The Pharisee and the Tax Collector
Luke 18:9-14

Introduction
Conventional wisdom says that there are essentially two kinds of people in the
world: good people and bad people.

The good people are people like most of us in this room. People who hold down
respectable jobs, and who are committed to church, family, and the community.

People who are teachers and doctors and nurses and lawyers and carpenters and
plumbers and electricians and retail store managers and pastors. Churchgoing people—
people who teach Sunday school, pitch in to improve the church building, sing in the choir,
and lead Bible studies. Family people—people who are committed to their spouses and
kids, involving them in soccer and hockey and basketball and ballet and piano lessons.
Community people—people who vote and generally care about what’s happening in their
cities, maybe even engaged in local politics and certainly involved in the PTA.

These are the good people of the world.

But as you know, there are also bad people. People who live their lives in such a
way that they do not contribute to the good of society. People who abuse and hurt others,
even murdering them. People who wantonly commit adultery. Thieves—who steal from
homes and offices and schools and churches and banks and 401K’s. People who lie and
deceive in order to protect themselves from suffering consequences for their bad behavior,
who lie and deceive in order to get what they want.

And these bad people seem only interested in getting worse. The murderer becomes
the brutal dictator of a corrupt regime, slaughtering innocent people for their race or gender
or religious orientation, murdering anyone who threatens his power. Or the murderer
becomes a serial killer, hunting down and violating one person after the other in order that
he might satisfy his thirst for death. The adulterer becomes involved in all manner of sexual
immorality, prostitution, pornography, even spouse swapping. And the thief becomes a
boss for organized crime.

And don’t forget the bad people we haven’t mentioned: drug dealers, pedophiles, and
rapists.

There are two kinds of people in the world: good people and bad people. And this
conventional wisdom applies equally to ancient Palestine, the world of Jesus’ day. There

Luke 18:9-14: The Pharisee and the Tax Collector © 2005 by R W Glenn
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were good people, people you’d look up to, people worthy of respect. And there were bad
people.

One group of the good people included the popular Jewish spiritual leaders called
Pharisees.

Good People in Jesus’ Day: Pharisees

Now for those of you with some familiarity with the New Testament gospel
narratives, this may come to you as a bit of a surprise. This is because the usual modern
reconstruction of the Pharisees is that they were “a self-righteous group, full of pride and
wickedness, parading an external show of religion, misinterpreters of the law who oppressed
the common folk with their unreasonable legalism.”1

But this is not entirely true. The Pharisees numbered about 6,000 in the first century
and although it is likely that their name derives from the Aramaic word meaning,
“separate,” their separatism was not what you might think. Their interest in being separate
came from a proper understanding of the Old Testament call to Israel. In Exod 19:5-6 the
Lord says, “Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you
shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; and you shall
be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

The Pharisee was serious about obeying the Law, about being obedient to God,
belonging to his holy people. But they did not see the way of accomplishing this through
living—if you’ll pardon the anachronism—through living the monastic life, cut off from all
that is secular. On the contrary, the question that preoccupied the Pharisees was, “How can
I keep all the demands of the Law and live a normal, culturally- and politically-engaged
life?” And, “How can we get the Law into the hands of the people?”

This, by the way, explains their commitment to the oral tradition. Though often
conceived purely negatively, the tradition of the elders did not sprout from a negative root.
Its customary commandments and legal interpretations were aimed at protecting the Law of
God from being trifled upon and protecting the individual Jew from transgressing it (what’s
called, the “fence around the Law”).

The oral tradition also existed for the purpose of getting the Law of Moses into the
hands of the people so that they could be more and more faithful to God’s righteous
requirements. It not only strove to “build a fence” around the Mosaic Law, but also to put
feet to it in such a way as to make it easier to obey in changing contexts.

In addition, their theology was quite orthodox. In fact, of the competing forms of
Judaism available to Jesus during his earthly lifetime, he held most in common with the
Pharisees. They were monotheists, believing in the one true and living God, and also

1
Moises Silva, “Historical Reconstruction in New Testament Criticism” in Hermeneutics, Authority, and
Canon, ed. by Carson & Woodbridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995), 113.

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believed in angels and spirits, the sovereignty of God, prayer, the necessity of faith and good
works, the last judgment, a coming Messiah, and the resurrection of the dead.

The result of their commitment to living out and applying the Law in a changing
world was that they had a tremendous popular appeal. They were a lot like well-known
evangelical radio preachers and pastors—people like John MacArthur, John Piper, and
Alistair Begg. And through the synagogues (the local meeting houses), they had an
enormous influence on the common Jewish people.

I would be remiss if I did not add their pastoral function to the list of salutary aspects
of the lives of the Pharisees. You see, it’s not simply how the Pharisees observed the Law
and the traditions and what they believed that made them popular and respected by the
general public; it’s that the Pharisee was the one who identified with the people in their
trials and tribulations, bringing them comfort when they suffered loss and death.

The bottom line regarding the Pharisees is that they were the good people of Jesus’
day. They were not unlike many of us. They were religious people interested in applying
their religion to the stuff of everyday life.

These were the good people.

But like today, there were also bad people. Some of whom were known as tax
collectors.

Bad People of Jesus’ Day: Tax Collectors

The Romans collected tribute from all their provinces. To do so, their usual method
was what is known as tax farming. Wealthy men in Rome (called publicani) bought
contracts from the government allowing them to collect taxes in a designated geographic
region and then collect from the public as much as they wanted to recover their investment.

These publicani then subcontracted the collection rights, so that they could divide
them into smaller segments of territory. Subcontractors could collect their investment plus
interest. The subcontractors were called telw,nhj, or tax collectors.

Together, the publicani and their local tax collectors were greedy and cruel profiteers
who made their profit by collecting much more than they spent for the contracts.

Now then, when a person in Palestine became a subcontractor, or tax collector, he

ended up despised by his compatriots. Not only were they Jews working for their
conquerors, collaborators with a foreign, occupying power, but they were also extorting
large sums of money from their peers with the power of Rome to support them.

This, needless to say, was also a clear violation of many, many commands from the
Old Testament: “He who oppresses the poor taunts his Maker, But he who is gracious to the
needy honors Him” (Prov 14:31). And, “He who increases his wealth by interest and usury
Gathers it for him who is gracious to the poor” (Prov 28:8).

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Since Jews who farmed these taxes for the Romans were considered traitors to their
own people, the term translated tax collector always has strongly negative connotations in
the New Testament. In fact, Bible translators suggest that in any rendering of the gospels it
may be especially important to have an adequate marginal note designed to explain the
basis for the hostility that many people had toward tax collectors.

Our remoteness from the cultural situation of the New Testament era makes it nearly
impossible to appreciate just how despised tax collectors were. They were extreme social
outcasts in the category of prostitutes. Indeed, some scholars even suggest that in the eyes
of their fellow Jews they were one notch above child molester.

These were the bad people.

So then, the conventional wisdom that says that there are two kinds of people in the
world, good people and bad people, seems to hold up for the ancient world just as much as
our own. There were good people, like Pharisees. And there were bad people, like tax
collectors.

So if you and I had been Jews living in Palestine, we would have loved our Pharisees
and hated our tax collectors. Pharisees would have been worthy of our respect, love, and
admiration, and tax collectors would have been worthy of our disrespect, hatred, and
condemnation.

With that firmly in mind, I would like you to turn with me in your Bibles to Luke
18:10-13:

Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax
collector. 11 "The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: 'God, I thank You
that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax
collector. 12 'I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.' 13 "But the tax collector,
standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but
was beating his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, the sinner!'

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector at Prayer

Note immediately that this depiction represents what would have been a typical
experience for an observer in the Temple. Both a Pharisee and a tax collector enter to offer
prayers, which they could do at any time of the day.

The Pharisee, the spiritual leader of Israel (the good person) prays a prayer that
should not strike us as strange in any way. Verse 11 says that the Pharisee stood (a common
posture for prayer) and offered his prayer to God.

Now I say that he offered his prayer to God even though v 10 says that he was
praying to himself the Greek may also read like this: “The Pharisee stood by himself and
was praying in this way.” Since the prayer is addressed to God at the end of v 11 and since
(as we shall see) Jesus is not offering a contrast between a person that prays to him- or

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herself and a person who prays to God, it seems best to follow translations like mine and
say, the ESV.

Oh, and even if it is to be translated praying to himself, since Jesus isn’t contrasting
self-directed versus God-directed prayers, the idea would be that the Pharisee was not
praying to be heard by others. He was keeping it between him and God.

The point is that the Pharisee is doing nothing out of the ordinary. Even his prayer
makes perfect sense. He thanks God for his spiritual maturity; he thanks God for his
unimpeachable character. Look again at v 11: God, I thank You that I am not like other
people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week;
I pay tithes of all that I get.

First he thanks God for what he doesn’t do, and then he thanks him for what he does.
God, he says, I thank you that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers,
or even like this tax collector.

In other words, God, thank you that I am not a bad person; that I am not a
swindler; I am not someone who is violently greedy. Thank you, too, that I am not unjust,
that I am not dishonest in my dealings with others. Thank you that I am not an adulterer,
a married man who is illicitly sexually involved with someone other than his wife or with
another man’s wife. And I thank you that I am not even like this tax collector. Thank
you that I am not a person who exacts exorbitant taxes from his countrymen, making
money at their expense, betraying his fellow Jews to the occupying political power.

True to form, this godly man, this Pharisee, this good person does not seem to take
credit for not being like other people. He thanks God that he is not like other people, that
he is not like bad people. More than that, he not only thanks God for what he doesn’t do; he
thanks him for what he does.

God, he says, I thank you that I am not like other men: I fast twice a week and I
pay tithes of all that I get. Now although only one fast a year was required by the Mosaic
Law (on the Day of Atonement), the Pharisees made it a matter of personal piety to fast
more often. And in light of the fact that voluntary fasting was seen in the Old Testament as
spiritually valuable, it makes sense that these religious leaders would consider it one of the
ways to practice the Law more faithfully in daily life. Fasting could be practiced at any
time, anywhere.

And along with thanking God for his fasting, he also thanks God for his faithfulness
to pay tithes to the Lord on all his material acquisitions.

So what do we have here? We have a good person thanking God that he is not bad,
and thanking God that he is good. None of this should surprise you, and none of it would
have surprised Jesus’ audience.

Neither would the prayer of the tax collector.

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Let’s look at it again: But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even
unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, “God, be
merciful to me, the sinner!”

Here is a bad person, a very bad person, entering a holy place—in fact, the holy place
of the Jewish faith, the temple in Jerusalem—here is this bad person entering the Temple
and sharing space with a respected spiritual leader. In such a place and in the presence of
such a person, the tax collector felt shame. Indeed, he felt so much shame that he stood
some distance away from the Pharisee, from the good person, and was even unwilling to
lift up his eyes to heaven, unwilling to adopt the normal posture for prayer, and beating his
breast as a sign of his guilt.

And if you had been there, you would have thought, “Of course, this is exactly what
a tax collector should do—this is exactly what he should think, where and how he should
stand, and what he should pray. He is a vile, vile man, and he is at the mercy of God. It
makes sense that he would say, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner’; for that is what he
is—a sinner.”

If you had been in the original audience, you would have seen the good person as
good and the bad person as bad. And based on what Jesus relays here, you would have
thought nothing strange or surprising about what the men say or do while at prayer.

More than that, you would have drawn certain conclusions about the status of each
man with respect to God. One was righteous in God’s sight and the other was unrighteous
in his sight. And who was righteous and who was unrighteous would have been patently
obvious to you. Pharisees were righteous and tax collectors were unrighteous in God’s
sight. The just judge of all the earth could think no other way.

So it seems that there are two kinds of people in the world: good people and bad
people. Good people are in good shape with respect to God; and bad people are in bad
shape with respect to him…

Or so says conventional wisdom.

“This Man Justified”

But we need to consult a deeper source of wisdom than mere convention or common
sense. We need to hear from God. We need to see if God’s wisdom and man’s wisdom
understand the world in the same way. And we need look no further than Jesus’ words in v
14. Read it with me: I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other;
for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be
exalted.

What?! This man, the tax collector went to his house justified rather than the
Pharisee. What are you talking about? That’s impossible!

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You mean to tell me that someone as obviously evil as a tax collector, a person who
makes his money—and a lot of it—on the backs of the oppressed is rightly related to God
just because he said, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner!”

Here’s a man, the Pharisee, who has devoted his entire life to serving God, to
obeying the Law, to leading people in righteousness, to doing good deeds, to doing deeds
even above and beyond what the Law requires as an expression of his commitment to God,
and you’re telling me that he does not go to his house justified, that the tax collector is
justified instead of him! Impossible!

Let’s bring this closer to home and see if you can feel the shock of it even more
powerfully.

Let’s say a man like the BTK killer, a man who cruelly and brutally murdered his
unsuspecting victims over the course of nearly twenty years—let’s say that this man realizes
his shame, his sin, and his many transgressions of the Law of God and calls out to God for
mercy.

Now then, Jesus says, this man went home justified rather than someone like you—a
law-abiding, churchgoing, family-oriented, community servant! That is scandalous! And,
of course, the question is, “How is it possible?”

Well, let’s look to Scripture for our answer. Make note of v 9 and read how Luke
describes the people at whom Jesus takes aim: And He also told this parable to some
people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with
contempt.

We begin with this: there is a fundamental disconnect about the nature of

righteousness, or goodness on the part of the good people and their representative, the
Pharisee. Jesus is teaching that righteousness, even the righteousness of a Pharisee is
insufficient to meet the demands of God’s righteousness. Listen to what Jesus says in Matt
5:20: “For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and
Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

In other words, take the most righteous person you know, a person with so much
righteousness that you feel as if he or she is an infinite distance from you in terms of
goodness, and then Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that, you will not enter
the kingdom of heaven—period.”

Not too much later in Matthew, he shows just how extensive our righteousness must
be: “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48). Perfect
as your heavenly father is perfect—insane! That’s impossible.

Yes, it is; for…

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“Be perfect” doesn’t mean simply “be mistake-free as your heavenly Father is
mistake-free.” The idea of not making mistakes is too innocent. That’s not what
righteousness is. Because living a life without mistakes is not what the heavenly Father’s
perfection is. What Jesus is saying is that your righteousness, your goodness needs to equal
the righteousness and goodness of God. You need perfect righteousness; perfect goodness.

This is what the Pharisee in Jesus’ story was missing! Yes, it is true that in one sense
he was not (as v 11 says) like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this
tax collector. There is nothing to indicate that the Pharisee of Jesus’ parable was lying. We
can take his word for it in v 12 that he fasted twice a week and that he paid tithes of all
that he received.

The Pharisee’s problem was that he believed that this was enough. Was there never
a time when he tried to circumvent the Law in order to get away with sinning? Was there
never a time when he acted with injustice? Was there never a time when he committed
adultery in his heart, looking on a woman to lust for her? We know from Scripture how
many times this good person violated the Law.

When perfect righteousness is in view, are twice-a-week fasts enough? Wouldn’t

perfect righteousness seek to move beyond the tithe to embrace sacrificial and freewill
giving? Righteousness isn’t just negative (always avoiding what is evil); but it’s positive as
well (always doing what’s right).

This Pharisee’s problem was that (according to v 9) he had trusted and was
continuing to trust in his own righteousness and was thereby failing to realize that such
righteousness was insufficient to meet the demands of holiness and righteousness and
goodness of the holy and perfect, righteous God.

The tax collector, on the other hand, did not suffer this malady. He knew his
unworthiness before the holy and perfect, righteous God. Look again at v 13: But the tax
collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven,
but was beating his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, the sinner!'

His sensitivity to his own unworthiness is remarkable. He did not feel himself in the
same category as the holy Pharisee. And though he was willing to pray to God, he was
unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, too full of shame and guilt for the many sins he had
committed through his unlawful profession.

Nevertheless, in humility, recognizing the bankruptcy of his condition, he begged

God for mercy. And why? Because that’s all he could do. He knew that there was nothing
he could bring to God. Nothing about which he could say, “I made this.” He threw himself
on the mercy of the merciful God. And as a result of trusting not in his own righteousness
(he knew he had none), but instead trusting in God to pardon him in spite of his
unrighteousness, he went home right with God.

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Do you see the profound irony of Jesus’ story? The Pharisee said, “God, I thank
you that I am not like other people.” To which Jesus’ answer says, “Precisely! But you
should be! You need to be like this tax collector; for it is this man who went down to his
house justified rather than you.”

Now, of course, this doesn’t mean that the Pharisee should become a tax farmer;
what it means is that he needs to have the same perspective as the tax collector; he needs to
see himself as no better than the tax collector in God’s economy, according to God’s
yardstick. For if the ultimate standard of righteousness is infinitely righteous, then whether
or not you are a tax collector or a Pharisee, your condition is the same, you need an infinite
amount of righteousness in order to make up for your lack.

Rather than looking on others with contempt, as v 9 says, the Pharisee needs to say,

Even though I have devoted my entire life to purity and obeying your Law,
and even though I am not a swindler, unjust, an adulterer or a tax collector—even
though I fast twice a week and pay tithes of all I get—even though I am this way, it
isn’t good enough for you. Your justice is perfect and your faithfulness is absolute. I
should have read my Bible better: “All our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment”
(Isa 64:6). I cannot live up to the standard set by your law. Have mercy on me, too,
the sinner.

In the words of Jesus, the Pharisee needs to humble himself that he may be exalted (v 14).

The Good Person’s High Hurdle

This, I must say, is the most difficult hurdle for good people to jump. When you are
good and you compare yourself to all the bad people in the world, you cannot see how it is
possible to be in the same category as the drug dealer, the serial killer, and the sexual
predator. This is because rather than comparing yourself with the standard God gives, you
compare yourself with those who appear to fall shorter of the standard than you do.

You need to change your standard of measurement. You need to see things from
God’s perspective.

It is impossible for you, no matter how nobly you lead your life, to acquire sufficient
goodness to make up for your lack before God. If a Pharisee doesn’t cut it, neither can you!
You have rebelled against God’s laws and authority; but more than that, and worse than
that you have committed cosmic treason by believing that your level of righteousness has
been good enough for God. And to say that strikes at the very heart of the character of God.
It says that God is no better than you are.

Is that the God you want to serve? Is that what you really want? A God that is as
weak and frail and unreliable and bitter and unkind and foolish and unpredictable as you?!
I think not. You want the true and living God, the righteous and holy judge of all the earth.
You want the faithful and loving and kind and compassionate God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ!

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But I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. Jesus’ declaration that the tax
gatherer who threw himself on the mercy of God went home justified does not mean that
God just swept his sins under the rug. Since God is infinitely good and infinitely just it
means that he cannot let the guilty go free. The guilty must be punished, Pharisee and tax
collector.

And with the bar for righteousness set at sinless perfection, it means that we need a
righteousness that is not our own. We need righteousness that meets the demands of
perfection.

Well, knowing this, Jesus lived a life of perfect righteousness for those who would
throw themselves on the mercy of God in humble, penitent faith, trusting that Jesus died
and rose again so that he might justify those who would stop trusting in themselves that they
are righteous; trusting that Jesus died and rose again so that he might justify those who
would acknowledge before God that they are no different than those they once treated with
contempt.

In this regard, I am deeply concerned for you. I know how nice you are. I know
how God-fearing you are. I know that you’re good people. And I know what a stumbling
block the gospel is to people who think themselves healthy.

So let me warn you. If you continue to trust in yourself that you are righteous, then
you will not only not go home justified; you will go home condemned. For there is no third
way. You either experience God’s justification or God’s condemnation. And by
condemnation, I mean what Jesus says in Luke 12:5: “But I will warn you whom to fear:
fear the One who, after He has killed, has authority to cast into hell; yes, I tell you, fear
Him!”

If you continue to trust in your goodness for your standing with God, you will be
justly condemned to an eternity in hell for your lack of goodness. You will suffer under the
condemnation of God forever. Please don’t continue in the game of self-deception you’re
playing. Deep down you know you’re not good enough. Just admit it; see yourself as no
better than a tax collector and transfer your trust from yourself to the living Lord Jesus
Christ.

Yet with that said, I must add that this text doesn’t only speak to good people. It
speaks powerfully to bad people as well.

Some of you realize all too well how far you fall short of God’s standard. You see
yourself as a vile sinner. Perhaps you are engaged in some sin that the contemporary
evangelical church has given a special taboo. You know who you are and what those sins
are and how you feel so unworthy. Do not let your sense of unworthiness prevent you from
casting yourself upon the Lord.

This tax collector felt the same way you do. And Jesus says that because he threw
himself on the mercy of God, he went to his house justified rather than the Pharisee. Did

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you hear that?! This bad man went to his house justified instead of the supposed good man!
And you, too, no matter what you’ve done, no matter how heinous, no matter how
despicable or shameful or taboo—Christ will save you from the judgment if you trust in him
and his righteousness to bridge the gap for you.

Conclusion and Challenge

Conventional wisdom says that there are two kinds of people in the world: the good
and the bad.

In one sense, the Lord agrees. There are only two kinds of people in the world; it’s
just that they cannot be classified as the good and the bad. Instead, the two classes of
people in the world are those who trust in themselves that they are righteous and look on
others with contempt and those who trust in the righteousness of God in Christ and see
themselves as sinners indebted to God’s mercy.

Which one are you? You need to know today. There is simply too much at stake.

Be like the tax collector and yourself on the mercy of God today!

Redeemer Bible Church

16205 Highway 7
Minnetonka, MN 55345
Office: 952.935.2425
Fax: 952.938.8299
info@redeemerbiblechurch.com
www.redeemerbiblechurch.com
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Luke 18:9-14: The Pharisee and the Tax Collector © 2005 by R W Glenn