Two men went up to the Temple to pray…
In the name of the Father…
Two men went up to the Temple to pray, and one prayed badly and one prayed well.
Two men went up to the Temple to pray, and one went home justified and the other went home unjustified.
Two men went up to the Temple to pray, and one was exalted and the other was humbled.
Strip the already marvellously concise parable in today’s gospel to its bare bones and something like these three little “takeaways” is what you are liable to be left with. They are, more than likely, what ChatGPT would come up with if we asked it to summarise the parable for us. And yet the closer we attend to this remarkable little text — which has long been recognised to contain within itself an entire education in the life of prayer — the more we find ourselves wanting to dissent from this apparently natural reading of the text, the more we find ourselves wanting to cut this particular cake rather differently.
Most important, and most misleading, of all is the idea that the difference between the Pharisee and the Tax Collector is that the Pharisee prays badly while the Tax Collector prays well. On the face of it, this may appear to be the most obviously true of all three of our “takeaways”. And yet what we discover when we really listen, is that this is not in fact the distinction the parable is interested in. As is so often the case in life, the distinction that really matters here is not between those who pray badly and the those who pray well — we all pray badly, that is the only way we know how to pray — but between those who pray badly and those who do not pray at all. The point of the story is not that the Pharisee prays badly while the Tax Collector prays well, but that the Pharisee, for all his lofty words, is not really praying at all.
And if that is true, then what becomes of the two remaining “takeaways” with which we began? Well, in short, if the fundamental distinction in this parable is between one who prays and one who does not pray, then it is not so much that one goes home justified while the other does not, but rather that one goes home, while the other does not. It is not so much that one was humbled and the other exalted, but that one was both humbled and exalted, as all who give themselves to the practice of prayer must inevitably be, and the other was neither humbled nor exalted since he would not take the risk of prayer in the first place.
But that is to get ahead of ourselves, for the moment let us return to the question of whether the Pharisee is in fact praying or not since it is from this that everything else ultimately flows. It is true that the quite exemplary badness of the Pharisee’s prayer — its sanctimoniousness, its self-satisfaction, its banality — can lure us into believing that it is the self-centredness of the Pharisee’s prayer that finally disqualifies it, that prevents it from reaching the divine ear to which it is ostensibly addressed. But if that were the case then this parable would, I suggest, be very bad news indeed for us all. After all, if it were the selfishness of our prayers that finally disqualified them, then who among us could hope to escape the judgement that falls upon the prayer of the Pharisee? Who among us could be confident that a single prayer of ours had reached the ears of God? No, what we cannot finally forgive about the Pharisee’s prayer, what rightly makes us question whether it is a prayer at all, is not its selfishness but its painful artificiality, the absolutely transparent sense that here is a person who has lost touch with the reality of what he is supposed to be doing. Imagine going in the Temple, into the very presence of God, and withdrawing into a secluded corner to unburden your heart in prayer and finding yourself whispering: “God, I thank you that I fast twice a week and give a tenth of my income”. The excruciating tone-deafnesses of it is enough to make us wince. As if the Maker of all things were not well aware what you do with your income, as if the other nine tenths did not already belong to him, as if this wearisome litany of achievements was what he was really wanted to hear.
But if the Pharisee’s prayer is a particularly egregious example of this kind of artifice, then it raises a problem that all of us face at one time or another in our praying lives, and that is what we might call the problem of “finding our voice” in prayer. I have sometimes imagined that the reason so many of us are drawn to silent prayer in later life is a painful awareness of just how often, in former times, when we have been speaking to the One who knows us more intimately than we know ourselves, we have been speaking in somebody else’s voice: in the voice of our parents, the voice of our Sunday school teachers, the voice of an American televangelist, anything but our own voice, anything but the voice we would use if we really believed we were doing what we say we are doing.
Which brings us to the second of our “takeaways”: Two men went up to the temple to pray and one went home justified and the other went home unjustified. This is, admittedly, a perfectly reasonable assumption to make about the text that is before us. It is, after all, very nearly what Jesus actually says. But it is not in fact what he says. What he says is “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified, rather than the other”. In other words, unlike the Tax Collector who goes down to his home justified, we are not told that the Pharisee goes home at all, justified or unjustified, leaving open the possibility that the fundamental distinction between the two is not so much that one was justified and other unjustified, but that one went home while the other did not. And if that is true, if that is the distinction that really matters here, then there is something more we can say about it.
What we are told in the parable is not simply that the Tax Collector “went home justified” but that he “went down to his home justified”. It’s a curious little detail in a story that is manifestly a fiction. Why should it matter whether the Tax Collector’s home is up or down in relation to the Temple? It matters because the home to which the parable is referring is not a physical location of any kind, or at least not solely a physical one. And it is the Tax Collector himself makes this clear to us. While he was praying, we are told, the Tax Collector was “beating his breast and saying “God be merciful to me a sinner””. What he reveals to us with this familiar penitential gesture is that the physical and spiritual centre of his prayer, the source from which it springs, is the heart. It is from this most fundamental place in the human person that his prayer comes forth. What we learn from the end of parable is that the heart is also the home to which the Tax Collector’s “goes down”, where at last he finds rest, as all who give themselves to this prayer of the heart must finally discover. And when we see this, we appreciate for the first the true homelessness and alienation from himself that afflicts the Pharisee. What is it that he says? “God, I thank you that I not this, that I am not that…” followed by a long list of purely external observances by which he seeks to justify himself. Here is a man who knows what he is not, but not what he is, who he is, who seeks refuge in a whole host of externals and ends up, tragically but inevitably, alienated from the homeland of the heart. We cannot help but think of those famous words of St Augustine: “Late have I love you, beauty so ancient and so new, you were within, but I was outside, seeking you there…”
And so we come to the last of our three “takeaways”: Two men went up to the temple to pray and one was humbled and the other was exalted. Here again, when we listen closely, we discover that what the parable says is not quite what we have heard in the past or perhaps what we have been taught to hear. What we are told is not that the Pharisee was humbled and the Tax Collector exalted — indeed, it is the great tragedy of Pharisee’s story that, as far as we can tell, he is not humbled, that he is not led to a recognition of the absurdity of his prayer, that he is, on the contrary, allowed to go on in his blind, self-satisfied self-delusion. Likewise, there is nothing in the parable to suggest that the Tax Collector is aware that his prayer has exalted him in the eyes of the Lord, that it has led to him going down to his home justified. As far as we know he goes his way with no further conscious consolation than an abiding awareness of his unworthiness.
What the parable tells us is simply that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled” and “all who humble themselves will be exalted”. It does not assign either fate to either of its protagonists, it is we who assume that it is the Pharisee who is humbled and the Tax Collector who is exalted. But what if that is not what the parable is really getting at? What if the movement from humility to exaltation and from exaltation back to humility in fact belongs to a single inner dynamic of the life of prayer, a dynamic of prayer which belongs wholly on the side of the Tax Collector, since, as we have seen, he alone of the two is actually praying? In that case it is not the Tax Collector who is exalted and the Pharisee who is humbled, but the Tax Collector who is both humbled and exalted, since he alone enters into this inner dynamic of prayer. And that in fact, is precisely what we discover, not only in the parable, but in our own experience of prayer. It is not true that the Tax Collector does not exalt himself. He does exalt himself and he knows it. He exalts himself merely by addressing himself to God in the first place, for prayer, as we so often forget, is itself the greatest exaltation of which we are capable; and it is by his prayer, and not by any means that he contrives for himself, that he is humbled, for it is only in prayer, when we fix our eyes upon the source of all light and truth, that we are capable of seeing ourselves in truth, that can we cry out with the Tax Collector, with true humility: “God, have mercy upon me a sinner”.
What then, finally, do we learn from this parable, what does the great education in prayer we were promised finally amount to? It is quite simply this: if we seek to be justified like the Tax Collector, then we should pray. If it is to our home that we seek to go, then prayer is the path by which we will find it. If we would be humble, then the royal road to that destination is prayer. And if we seek to be exalted, then the surest means to that end has already been placed in our hands. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.