Luke 18:9-14

I’ve preached this passage focusing on grace, and that’s a legitimate approach, especially given that this is the text for Reformation Sunday (which, as far as I can tell, few people observe these days). That sermon explained the tax collector is “justified” because he recognizes his sins and can accept God’s grace and forgiveness, which he has done nothing to earn. The Pharisee, on the other hand, believes he has earned his own justification, his own worthiness, and so refuses God’s grace. He is like Jesus’ audience: those who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” (Luke 18:9).

Given our current zeitgeist, what I notice in the passage this time around is not merely that the Pharisee believes he is righteous. He probably is. Pharisees worked hard to do the right things and be the right kind of people. If we lived in ancient Judea, we would have wanted a Pharisee as a next-door neighbor. He’d probably keep his yard neat and pick up after his dog. The tax collector, on the other hand, really has behaved deplorably. He’s collaborated with Rome and enriched himself by exploiting his own people.

But it isn’t the difference between these two men that I notice this year. What I notice is, “but they regard others with contempt.”

We are surrounded by contempt. Contempt is more than disagreement; it’s disgust, rooted in the inability to see the image of God in the other person. Schopenhauer said contempt is belief in the “utter worthlessness of a fellow human being.” Contempt is looking at someone and thinking, “The world would be better without you in it.”

This parable contains a couple of traps. The first trap we might fall into is romanticizing the tax collector. In a recent article in the Christian Century, a young woman describes years of church youth camp during which she felt like a failure as a Christian. She writes, “At youth group and church camp, I learned to perform my own unworthiness. … A sneering voice in my head whispered that I wasn’t good enough for God because I’d never been bad.” She writes that without realizing it, self-abasement had become her religious practice, and it took years to recognize the harm this caused. This kind of “performative unworthiness” becomes just another way to try to earn God’s love, when that love is freely given. Jesus never said, “You must be a broken, miserable sinner to be my follower.” The tax collector is not supposed to be our role model.

The second trap we might stumble into is our own contempt. We might wonder: After all, isn’t the Pharisee deserving of contempt? He begins his prayer by thanking God, but his gratitude immediately devolves into contempt for others. Pretty soon he isn’t really thanking God at all; he’s thanking himself as he looks at the tax collector with disdain.

Clearly, Jesus intends us to understand that contempt isn’t good. It’s not hard to see why: Contempt is not loving our neighbors as ourselves. Contempt is not loving our enemies (Matthew 5:44). But if we make this parable about how terrible the Pharisees were, or even how terrible this one Pharisee is, we’ve missed the point – or fallen victim to it by being contemptuous ourselves. Anytime we draw a line between who’s “in” and who’s “out,” who is righteous and who is not, who is acceptable to God and who is not, this parable asserts you will find God on the other side.

Read this way, the parable is not about self-righteousness and humility any more than it is about a pious Pharisee and desperate tax collector. Rather, this parable is about God: God who alone can judge the human heart; God who determines to justify the ungodly.

In 2025, we live in a what Arthur C. Brooks calls a “culture of contempt.” Brooks writes, “Nothing is about honest disagreement; it is all about your interlocutor’s lack of basic human decency. Thus, no one with whom you disagree is worth engaging at all. The result is contempt.”

As the government shutdown drags on into Week 4, it’s obvious that this culture of contempt is a serious problem in a society and a system of government that require collaboration. Contempt is encouraged by some of our leaders, but it just doesn’t work in a democracy and we do not have to buy into it. We can fight for justice without resorting to contempt. We can be the change we wish to see in the world, and start by swearing off contempt. Trevin Wax writes, “Perhaps the test of faithfulness in a day of moral degradation will be our love for people across chasms of difference. Faithfulness isn’t in showy displays that we hate all the right people.”

And perhaps faithfulness isn’t in showing we’re right and the other person or group is stupid or morally bankrupt, but rather in working toward achieving a shared objective. What objective might we share with those with whom we disagree vehemently? We’d have to speak with each other, without contempt, to find that out.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
McKenzie Watson-Fore, “Dear Jesus, Am I Broken Enough Yet?” in The Christian Century, July 9, 2025, https://www.christiancentury.org/features/dear-jesus-am-i-broken-enough-yet.
Matt Skinner, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-30-3/commentary-on-luke-189-14-4
David Lose, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-30-3/commentary-on-luke-189-14-2
Arthur C. Brooks, Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt (New York: Broadside Books, 2019)
Trevin Wax, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/silent-sin-kills-love/