Two men praying

A word for the week

Two men went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, one a tax collector. Luke says plainly whom the parable was told for: people confident of their own righteousness, who despised everyone else.

The Pharisee stood where he could be seen and prayed what amounts to a report. He thanked God that he was not like other men: extortioners, the unrighteous, adulterers, or even this tax collector over there. He fasted twice a week. He tithed everything he got. None of it was a lie. He had done these things, all of them, and more than the law asked. The prayer was accurate, and it was addressed mostly to himself, and it needed the tax collector the way a measurement needs a ruler. His righteousness ran on comparison, and comparison always needs someone underneath.

The tax collector stood far off. He would not lift his eyes. He struck his own chest, the old gesture of grief, and said seven words: God, be merciful to me, a sinner. No inventory. He had nothing to put in one. He collected money for an occupying power and skimmed his living off the top; everyone in the courtyard knew what he was, and so did he.

Jesus gave the verdict without ceremony: this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other.

The parable offers no third figure, no middle man who prays moderately well. There are only the two postures, full hands and empty hands. The full hands held real goods, honestly earned, fasting and tithes and discipline, and they could receive nothing, being full. The empty hands held nothing at all and received everything. That is the whole mechanism, stated once and left standing: mercy cannot be handed to a man who is holding a receipt.

Note where each man stood, because Luke notes it. The Pharisee stood and prayed by himself, apart, and prayer had become one more way of standing apart. The tax collector also stood at a distance, but at the other end of the room, and for the other reason: he did not believe he belonged there at all. Of the two distances, God crossed the second.

The old teachers used to say that pride is the last sin standing because it grows on virtue itself, like ivy on a sound wall. The Pharisee's fasting was real. His tithe was real. The realness is what fed the thing that undid him, because goodness, once counted, curdles. He did not go home condemned for his discipline. He went home unjustified because his discipline had become his god, and it left him no need he was aware of, and mercy only enters through a felt need.

Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, Jesus ended, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. The tax collector's prayer survives, word for word, and has been prayed in the dark for two thousand years by people with nowhere else to stand: God, be merciful to me, a sinner. It is still seven words. It is still enough.