Sermon: Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
By The Rev. Cody Sanders
Faculty of Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn.
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Oct. 26, 2025)
When we are confronted with the parables of Jesus, we are meant to resist them, not like them. They are provocative, mysterious, difficult, even disturbing, and most certainly not comforting. Because parables threaten the security of the way we already habitually see the world with a starkly different perspective. And it's hard to get that when we hear these dangerous little stories over and over again, with a tidy little moral attached to them.
As a New Testament scholar, Amy-Jill Levine says, "Parables contain a surplus of meaning and reducing parables to a single meaning destroys their aesthetic, as well as their ethical potential." Parables don't make a singular point or teach a tidy lesson. They disrupt our status quo ways of making sense of life and faith. And since parables operate out of a surplus of meaning, they say much more than we first expect. And everywhere Jesus went, he told tales like this, feral little stories with a surplus of meaning that resist easy allegories with provocations and disturbances, and reminders, and confrontations that cannot be contained.
To open our perspective on this parable, there's baggage to unpack related to the two figures in this parable, the Pharisee and the tax collector. The Pharisee has held the projection of generations of Protestant interpretations of this text, which sees his performative religiosity as an expression of works' righteousness. A long tradition of anti-Jewish Christian readings of the New Testament get overlaid on this text and keep us from seeing it in its fullness.
So it's no surprise that many of us upon hearing the parable, immediately side with the tax collector. He prays like a protestant Christian, contrite, humble before God, beseeching the divine for forgiveness, not like that arrogant Pharisee. But for the first hearers of this parable, Pharisees were respected teachers. And religious practices like fasting and tithing were meritorious acts of commitment to the covenant community, not self-righteous ostentatious shows of pious religiosity, though the Pharisee in this parable does go above and beyond what would be expected in these practices.
So we can see this Pharisee figure, something like a caricature of a good Pharisee, perhaps even a little humorous to the first hearers. But nevertheless, a respectable figure to those first hearers of this story. And the tax collector, on the other hand, has become in our minds, something of a marginal figure, a spiritual misfit in the grand religious system of the temple, someone to pity because he was a stigmatized second-class figure off to the side, praying alone. But this could not be further from the truth and not even close to how the original hearers of this parable would have heard the words, tax collector, when they came up.
Tax collectors were traitors to their people. Jewish, yet collaborators with the Roman Empire that occupied the land, they were known extortionists, charging more than they needed to in order to line their own pockets. Far from marginal, they were well-connected, anything but second-class. They hosted ostentatious banquets, which we see in chapter five of Luke's gospel. If we were to modernize this parable for our context here, and every context would need different figures to occupy these positions, but for us, the figures might be something like this.
A progressive Christian pastor in the Memorial Church who prays constantly, protests for social justice causes every Saturday, shows up as an immigration court observer twice a week, serves at the soup kitchen every Sunday morning before showing up to preach two services at the church, which is thriving, and gives a 10th of her salary back to the church and more on top of that to peace and justice nonprofits, maybe even a little to Harvard, respected by all, even if she does make us feel a little bad about ourselves, in comparison. And standing far off, was an ICE agent who signed up for the $50,000 signing bonus and went off to Chicago to pull people from their homes, dragged and tackled and beaten and tased, who shoots protesting pastors with pepper balls and leaves immigrant children wondering if they'll come home from school that day to an empty house, who uses connections to move up the ranks further and further into the empire's deportation machine.
If all we have is the figures themselves, we know with whom our sympathies lie, but we also have their prayers because the hearers of this parable get to listen into their hearts. The Pharisee standing by himself prays, "God, I thank you that I am not like other people, thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector." And on the surface, it sounds pretty judgmental. We're thinking a little differently about this upright figure of the respectable religious teacher now.
But wait, who among us would not offer a prayer of gratitude that our life circumstances did not turn out such that we were stealing from our neighbors, either as petty thieves or as extortionists, collaborationists with the empire? The tax collector knows where he stands in relation to his people. So physical distance reflects a spiritual condition. He is standing far off. For all he may have done, traitorous, extortioner, collaborator with the empire, he knows where he stands. And he places himself there, eyes downcast, beating his breast and prays simply, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner."
One of them stands by himself physically and spiritually set apart by his exemplary life, thanking God that he isn't like them and he prays a prayer of gratitude. The other stands far off physically and spiritually, distanced from his neighbors because he is stealing from them on behalf of an oppressive empire and getting rich in the process, and he prays a prayer of mercy.
Now, we've often been led to believe the point of this parable is to wonder with the story, who do you want to emulate, the righteous but overly spiritually, self-confident Pharisee or the traitorous extortioner who collaborates with the oppressive empire? The one who prays, "I'm glad I'm not like those other people," or the one who prays, "God, have mercy on me, sinner." But that may be the wrong question to ask. In order to get the punch of provocation that this parable is packing in its slippery surplus of meaning, the central question in this parable may be to ask, now just exactly how are these two people related, this Pharisee and this tax collector?
If you've chosen your side, either the Pharisee or the tax collector, then you've fallen into the parable's trap and you've missed its point. The crux of this parable is this. Both the Pharisee and the tax collector stood apart from others in the house of worship. One was interpersonally cut off in his heart from his neighbors, the other was cut off from his neighbors through perpetuation of unjust relations, and both stand in the house of worship in prayer. And then Luke ends, "I tell you, this man, the tax collector, went down to his home justified rather than the other, the Pharisee."
If we remove Luke's framing of this parable for the purposes of his community, because he had a purpose in telling this parable the way he did for his first hearers, but if we try to hear the story without Luke's framing, to hear it as a story that Jesus likely told over and over again, then we don't begin with, he told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.
That's Luke already telling you what he wants you to see in this parable. And then we also don't end with Luke's little tag at the end, "For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted." And if we take away that framing of Luke, then the last line of the story becomes even more provocative, mysterious, difficult, and even disturbing, and not at all comforting. And it all hinges on the word, translated, rather than.
Levine says of this word, para, in Greek, that it's the same para we get in words like paradox or parallel. And while it can be translated, rather than, as most of our English translations do, it can also be translated next to or alongside as in parallel, side by side. I tell you, this man, the tax collector, went down to his home justified alongside the other, the Pharisee. Even more disturbing of what we think we know, para can be translated, because of. I tell you, this man, the tax collector, went down to his home justified because of the other, the Pharisee. So which is it for you? Not the Pharisee versus the tax collector, but which is the scandal of grace that most irritates you, to the point that you can hardly stand it.
Imagine just for a moment, hearing this feral little story, two unwieldy in its surplus of meanings to be pinned down to a tidy moral lesson, hearing it like the first hearers did, all hearing the same word, but possibly all hearing quite different meanings. And some of you standing around Jesus, hear the scandal of the story as the tax collector, that traitor to his community in collaboration with the empire, going home justified by God, rather than the Pharisee who is so morally upright that it's almost funny when for all we know, the tax collector goes right back to his betrayal of the community the very next day, completely unchanged, that God's grace would extend even to those who may continue working within the oppressive mechanisms of empire, that even one like that could go home justified. The scandal of grace flowing into the life of one who may not have even learned his lesson.
Or for you, hearing this parable, is it that the scandal of grace is a scandal of abundance over against the well-worn trope of scarcity? So much abundance that, of course, the Pharisee goes home justified before God, but astonishingly, so does the tax collector right alongside him. That's not fair. One did everything right, the other just prayed a little prayer.
No good thing can be in that great of abundance. Or is the greater scandal to you, the one that suggests the grace of God works in community, in communion with one another, rather than according to my individualistic religiosity of storing up spiritual treasures? A scandal of grace that provokes you in all the wrong places right now, suggesting that those whom we've deemed entirely unacceptable followers of Jesus, the overzealous ICE agent, the Christian nationalist zealot, the homophobic street preacher, that all of these are, in fact, benefited by the collective faith practice of those following the ways of Jesus in here.
If that's the case, then we've never had a handle on the wild gift of grace all along, because much to our stomach-churning surprise, the tax collector goes home justified because of the Pharisee's faithfulness. If you're unsettled about just what this parable is suggesting about God's wild, abundant gift of grace in the communion of faith, then you understand the parable completely.