The Trouble with Exaltation

Reflections on the Lectionary for October 26th

Pharisee and Tax Collector praying, Dorfkirche Löbnitz. Digital version by Joachim Köhler - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=109043834

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I always cringe when Pharisees show up in the lectionary. I cringe because the appearance of the Pharisees in the lectionary creates a dilemma for me. I feel like I have to choose one of two bad options.

The first option is to stop and do a whole lesson on the Pharisees—who they were, how we know about them, and how they get used in gospel narratives about Jesus. And, of course, that option always includes a discussion of how “Pharisee” functions as a site of Christian anti-Judaism, and how that word gives Christians permission to be anti-Semitic in all kinds of problematic ways, both visible and invisible. That option really amounts to giving a little lecture every time the Pharisees show up in the Bible.

The second option is to skip the lecture and talk about the passage itself. If I take this path, I get to spend more time talking about the thing that the passage actually is about, but I leave “the Pharisees” open as a symbol and a site of interpretation, and I kind of forfeit the opportunity to ward off all the latent Christian anti-Judaism. It feels like you can talk about the Pharisees, or you can talk about a passage that includes mention of the Pharisees, but it’s really hard to do both.

Here is a little several-paragraph version of the first-option lecture, just so we are all on the same page. The Pharisees were a major group within second-temple Judaism, which was the version of Judaism that was dominant in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus. If you are reckoning in terms of absolute power, the Pharisees were probably not the dominant group of Jews. That distinction belonged to the Sadducees, who held a lot more institutional power and authority. And neither were the Pharisees the most avant-garde group within Judaism, probably. The Essenes, seemingly, were the most politically active sect in those days, and they were the ones making substantial interventions into everyday life (like, probably, instituting monastic-like communities and ascetic practices). The Pharisees, then, filled a niche in the middle. They were a reform movement of sorts, known for being pious and fastidious and very serious about their religion. They were active in what we might call civic life, taking part in institutions, but they were not as fully implicated in Roman rule as the Sadducees were. The Pharisees seem to have been respected as upright folk, and they seem to have been fairly numerous among the Jews of the first century.

How do we know all that stuff from the prior paragraph? Therein lies the problem. Most of what we know about Pharisees, we know from the New Testament. (Most of the rest, we know from the historian Josephus, who comes with his own numerous issues). The problem with most of our knowledge about Pharisees coming from the New Testament is that the information comes pre-weighted with bias. The authors of the New Testament have a lot of postures and orientations toward Pharisees, but none of them are neutral or objective. It’s kind of like if, two thousand years from now, we tried to describe the MAGA movement using only evidence from members of the activist left, or if we tried to write the history of the Obama presidency using only what Donald Trump said about it on FOX News. You could probably get a broad sense of things using those kinds of sources, and you would definitely understand the major points of disagreement, but in both cases the information would be biased and one-sided.

In the case of the New Testament’s descriptions of Pharisees, that is exactly what happens. The Gospels, in particular, describe Pharisees the ways opponents might describe them, which is not always very charitable or well-rounded. Pharisees are characterized in the Gospels as hypocritical, overly performatively pious, and conniving. They are sometimes seen plotting against Jesus, and in Gospel narratives Jesus often uses Pharisees as foils or as examples of bad behavior. Because this is the only way most people know anything about Pharisees, this has become the truth about them for most Christians today. It’s like that song from Hamilton, which poses an old historiographical problem: who lives, who dies, who tells your story? In the case of the Pharisees, the story has mostly been told by the followers of Jesus, and not by the Pharisees themselves.

But in the New Testament, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the story is more complicated than it seems, and that if different people were telling the story, it might read differently. If you read through the Gospels, you’ll find lots of examples of the Pharisees in conflict with Jesus. But you will also find examples of Pharisees engaging in conversation with Jesus, learning from Jesus, dining with Jesus, and even protecting Jesus from people who want to harm him. To many scholars (including me), it seems that the New Testament preserves and highlights the most critical and difficult parts of what might have been a fairly egalitarian and give-and-take relationship. Some—me included—even argue that we should think of Jesus as an ally of the Pharisees, not an enemy. In that case, we might think of Jesus and the Pharisees as essentially on the same team during Jesus’ lifetime, but that by the time the Gospels were written (a generation or more later), for whatever reason it no longer made sense to tell the story that way.

The upshot of that little lecture is twofold. First, Christians should be a lot more evenhanded about the Pharisees than we are, and we should definitely stop using “Pharisee” as a synonym for “hypocrite” and calling our religious opponents “Pharisees.” We should stop that right now. But second, we should also stop using Pharisees to stand in for all Jews past, present, and future, and we should stop using the negative stereotypes associated with Pharisees in the Gospels as the basis for modern-day Christian attitudes towards Jews and Judaism. The Pharisees were one group of Jews among many, at one moment in time among many, a long time ago and far away. We shouldn’t let the stereotypes about them found in the New Testament guide our opinions of Pharisees, but we definitely should not let stereotypes about Pharisees found in the New Testament guide our opinions of all Jews always and everywhere.

OK, so with that lecture in the background, let’s look at the lectionary passage for this week. The nice thing about this passage is that it doesn’t force you into that dilemma that I mentioned at the beginning—it doesn’t make you choose between talking about the Pharisees and talking about the passage itself. That is because the plot of this little story from Luke 18:9-14 actually turns on the stereotypes about Pharisees that I just spent all that time debunking. This is the story about how Pharisees are understood and portrayed in the Gospels, and how one particular Pharisee ended up serving as one of Jesus’ examples of how not to act.

The parable appears as a little set-piece in the heart of the Gospel of Luke. The passage begins with a bit of editorializing from Luke, in which we are told that Jesus told the parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt. Already there you can see the framing that is typical of New Testament discussions of Pharisees: Pharisees are understood from the beginning to be self-righteous and filled with self-regard. And sure enough, as Jesus begins the parable, we are presented with two characters, each playing to type in an almost-comical manner: a Pharisee, the (unfairly) paradigmatic villainous foil of the New Testament, and a tax collector, the paradigmatic morally suspect and questionable figure of the New Testament. Just by the framing of the story, the reader is being led to be suspicious of the Pharisee’s piety.

But wait! If we pause there for just a moment, we can notice that this way of telling the story of Pharisaical unrighteousness only works if the reader of Luke (or the hearer of Jesus’ parable) already expects the Pharisee to be righteous. The parable doesn’t work at all if everybody thinks of these two figures as moral equals, and it certainly doesn’t work if everyone thinks that the Pharisee is going to be the villain. The story only works because everyone knows that Pharisees are supposed to be righteous, which sort of cuts against the grain of what modern-day Christians think they know about Pharisees. It’s like jokes about nuns or rabbis or priests: those jokes only work because everyone assumes religious figures are upright and pious. Even if you know individual nuns, rabbis, and priests who are unrighteous, you know, for the purposes of a joke, that you are supposed to think they are essentially good and well-behaved people.

That’s what is going on here—the audience is supposed to already know that Pharisees are good people, so that that knowledge can be thwarted in the telling of the story. It’s only in the telling of the parable—it’s only in Jesus’ storytelling—that the expectation of a good and righteous Pharisee gets turned on its head. And it’s not even that the Pharisee turns out to be a bad person—indeed, the Pharisee simply ends up being a good person who knows that he’s a good person. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income, the Pharisee prays, confirming that he is in fact a pretty decent person. The problem with this Pharisee is that all of his righteousness is right there on the surface, and it makes others by contrast seem immoral or undevoted.

It’s interesting that Jesus tells this parable as essentially a transcript of these two men’s prayers to God. Both men’s words are spoken as private prayers. They aren’t part of the public record, exactly (though in antiquity even private prayers might be said out loud). Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisee (and his praise of the tax collector) is based on the men’s inward feelings about their own morality, and on the ways these men describe themselves privately to God. And that seems to be the place where Jesus as he tells the parable (and Luke as he tells the story of Jesus telling the parable) expects the audience to switch sides. Suddenly the pious Pharisee (who everyone already expected to be good) seems too self-satisfied, and suddenly the sinful tax collector (who everyone already expected to have his hands in dirty money) gets exalted because of his self-awareness of his badness. The upshot is that your behavior does not seem to be as important as the way you feel about your behavior. One takeaway of this parable might be that it’s ok to do the wrong thing as long as you feel bad about it, and it’s not good to do the right thing if you feel good about your own goodness. It’s kind of hard for the Pharisee to win here.

And that is where the two parts of the dilemma make contact—the place where the interpretation of this particular parable starts to matter for the big-picture question of how Pharisees are depicted in the New Testament, and vice versa. The way Jesus tells this parable, and/or the way Luke describes Jesus telling it, the Pharisee is never allowed the possibility of doing the right thing. Even though on paper the Pharisee is following the rules and doing what he ought to be doing, the very fact of his righteous obedience becomes, in the framing of the parable, a liability. And meanwhile the tax collector’s actions don’t seem to matter as much as his regret over those actions.

This is a microcosm of the ways Pharisees work in the New Testament. The Gospels seem to assume that Pharisees were, in fact, pretty good people. The Gospels assume that Pharisees were upright, law-abiding people who placed a high value on doing the right thing. That is the strength of the Pharisees, in the way the New Testament tells it, and that is also the basis on which the New Testament criticizes them. The New Testament consistently places Jesus and his followers in close proximity to Pharisees, both religiously and physically, and it consistently points out that the Pharisees were trying very hard to do the right thing. And rather than becoming an opportunity for praise, the Pharisees’ devotion becomes an occasion for criticism and even ridicule. The implication is that it might be better to be like the tax collector: sinful but sorry about it. Or it might be best to simply behave like a Pharisee but be less self-aware about it. There is something about the combination of good behavior and self-awareness that the Gospel-writers cannot abide. It’s a strange pattern, once you notice it.

Most likely what was happening, historically, was that Jesus and the Pharisees were part of the same basic slice of Jewish life: they were outsiders to the major power structures who were calling for reform and who took the interpretation of Jewish law very seriously. That’s why they were always seen hanging out together, questioning each other, and wrestling with each other’s ideas—because when you zoom out and think about the context of second-temple Judaism, Jesus and the Pharisees were pretty closely aligned. But as the Jesus movement grew and spread, and as the Pharisees and other expressions of Judaism came under intense criticism and pressure during the Jewish War (66-70 CE, about a generation after Jesus), it became important for the Christians to differentiate themselves somehow from the Pharisees. At the time the Gospels were being written, in the wake of the Jewish War, one of the best ways to stake a claim as a Jewish sect was to distance yourself from other Jewish sects, and to emphasize the differences rather than the similarities. That’s what we see in the New Testament—a lot of similarities, but a lot of emphasis on the differences.

When we read stories like the one in Luke 18:9-14 today, then, we have to be careful to interpret them in light of everything we know. We cannot simply take Luke’s framing of the story as historically objective, because we know that Luke was participating in a project of putting space between Christianity and Pharisaical Judaism. We cannot take Luke’s word for it that Pharisees were pompous or self-righteous, because we know his reasons for telling the story that way. And we certainly cannot extrapolate stories like this one into our own time and place, pretending that some random Pharisee praying in a first-century parable can stand in for all Pharisees, all ancient Jews, or all modern Jews. We have to take care not to perpetrate and perpetuate harm in the interpretation of passages like this one.

In some ways, the challenge is to take seriously the way Jesus himself summarizes this parable, in 18:14: all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted. If Christians read and interpret this parable as a story about the exaltation of Christianity over Judaism, then they will have missed the point. If we understand this as a parable of Christian superiority, we will have gotten it wrong. If we take this as evidence of the exalted status of Christianity compared to Judaism, we will have gotten it exactly wrong. But if we take the posture of the other Jewish person in this parable—if we recognize, like the tax collector does for himself, that Christian behavior and Christian teaching gives us no special status or superiority, then we will have come a long way toward grasping the point that Jesus was trying to make.