S o what exactly does Jesus want from us? We’ve been focusing on this Homecoming theme of “Finding Our Place at the Table,” but the advice from Jesus seems to be getting a little contradictory, if not downright maddening. First we’re invited to the table, sinners and tax collectors alike, then we’re told not to take the seat of honor. We’re told last week to pray and act in the world with the tenacity of the widow who badgers the unjust judge until she gets what she wants, then this week we are cautioned not to trust in ourselves. So which is it? Are we supposed to stand up? Or to bow down? Which is the proper posture for prayer? To believe in ourselves and stand up tall and fight for what we want? Or to bow down in humility asking for God’s mercy? This week Jesus says, “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Except the widow, who was the hero of the story last week, didn’t seem all that humble to me. At the end of the story, the judge, who had been in an exalted position, was certainly humbled by the poor widow, but the widow didn’t do it by acting in a very humble way.

      Perhaps we need to take another look at the parable. The first thing to realize is that Jesus’ listeners would not have viewed the pharisee as the bad guy, but the tax collector. The pharisees may have been a bit over zealous in their interpretation of the law, but the tax collectors were despised as traitors. Jesus’ listeners would have joined the pharisee in giving thanks that they were not like the tax collector. But it just may be that his act of despising was what made the pharisee’s prayer defective.

      The pharisee, Luke tells us, prayed “standing by himself.” The Greek implies not just that he was by himself, but that he was praying to himself. That is, his words were directed inward, and not outward. And as Luke writes in the introduction, he prayed with contempt for the tax collector. His prayer, rather than bringing him closer to his neighbor, drove him further away.

Prayer that is directed toward God, and not inwardly toward ourselves, has the effect of bringing us closer to our neighbor. The pharisee’s prayer had the opposite effect. His prayer created a barrier.

      The tax collector, in contrast, prays “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” It is not so much a request as it is a demand. It’s delivered in the imperative. Note that while the pharisee asks for nothing, the tax collector demands that God do something. And so, Jesus concludes, it is he who went home justified. To be justified means to be made right with God. The pharisee acts as if this is something he can do for himself. He prays to himself. He thinks about his own actions. In the end, he has no real need for God. The tax collector, on the other hand, knows that he must rely on the action of God. The tax collector goes home in a right relationship with God because God made the relationship right. In the end, it’s not the pharisee’s righteousness or the tax collector’s prayer that justifies them. It is God’s gracious mercy that justifies them both. That’s the paradox at the heart of this parable. The nature of grace is that it can only truly be received by those who have learned to behave graciously toward others.

S o perhaps there is a link between these two parables after all. The unjust judge and the pharisee are both singled out because they had no regard for their neighbor. They are self-sufficient. The widow and the tax collector, both outcasts on the margin of society who cry out to God, surprisingly find their prayers answered. And we, the listeners to the parables, somehow need to learn to pray with the persistence of the widow and the humility of the tax collector. That’s why it’s so important that we don’t go home praying, “Thank God I’m not like the pharisee.” If we do, it means we’ve missed the point of the parable altogether.

      Again, that’s the wonder of Jesus’ encounter with people. He doesn’t tell them all the same thing. Some of us need to learn to stand up. Some of us need to learn to bow down. Some of us need to value the gifts we have been given. Others need to honor the gifts of others. The widow isn’t chastised for her lack of humility. And the pharisee isn’t praised for his tenacity. Together the two parables make one point: Prayer should bring us closer to God and to our neighbor. Luke Timothy Johnson summarizes it in this way:

      For Luke, prayer is faith in action. Prayer is not an optional exercise in piety, carried out to demonstrate one’s relationship with God. It is that relationship with God. The way one prays therefore reveals that relationship. If the disciples do not “cry out day and night” to the Lord, then they in fact do not have faith, for that is what faith does. Similarly, if prayer is self-assertion before God, then it cannot be answered by God’s gift of righteousness; possession and gift cancel each other.

W hich brings me back to Stacy Perval’s provocative phrase, that we should be “prayer warriors.” The military imagery of that phrase is for me somewhat problematic, but I like the intent. What she meant was that we should pray together not just as some little add-on after we have done everything else we can think to do, because we believe that what really counts is action, and prayer is only something nice that we do when all other options have been exhausted. But that we should pray as if the change we seek depends upon it, that we should pray to goad us into action, pray in the midst of action, pray in response to action, pray with our whole heart and soul in such a way that our prayer connects us with God and neighbor alike.

      There’s an old Jewish folk parable that goes like this:

      Once there was a rabbi who was at the point of death, so the Jewish community proclaimed a day of fasting in the town in order to induce the Heavenly Judge to commute the sentence of death.

      On that very day, when the entire congregation was gathered in the synagogue for penance and prayer, the town drunkard went to the village tavern for some schnapps. When another Jew saw him do this he rebuked him, saying, “Don’t you know this is a fast-day and you’re not allowed to drink? Why, everybody’s at the synagogue praying for the rabbi!”

      So the drunkard went to the synagogue and prayed, “Dear God! Please restore our rabbi to good health so that I can have my schnapps!”

      The rabbi recovered, and it was considered a miracle. He explained it in the following way: “May God preserve our village drunkard until he is a hundred and twenty years! Know that his prayer was heard by God when yours were not. He put his whole heart and soul into his prayer!”

      May it be so for us.                              ✞