On Prayer
Wednesday was my turn to do the devotional for my church's weekly prayer meeting. This task is always a little foreboding as most of the people there are far "better" (for lack of a, uh, better term) at prayer and are usually at least 30-40 years older than me, since us twenty-somethings are not well represented. I am like the 3 year old telling his parents how to drive.
The comforting and yet simultaneously unnerving thing about doing a bible study is that the text itself is greater than my own mediocre delivery system. Luke 18 was what I used to try to come up with some principles and examples of what prayer looks like and had several things that particularly struck me.
One was the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Ironically, while Jesus told the parable to confront people with their self-righteousness and to subvert their notions of who is righteous, I tend to think we re-subvert the message. We know the outcome of the story, so we read it assuming that the Pharisee is the "bad guy" and the tax collector the "good guy." We, of course, automatically associate ourselves with the tax collector, the "good guy," and not that loathsome hypocrite, the Pharisee.
Yet a reading of the text and an understanding of the historical context throws a wrench into all of that. If you look at what the Pharisee was actually like, he probably was a decent guy - as we judge decent guys. He was probably sincere about his efforts at piety, he was faithful to his wife, honest with his money, and did all the things that would be judged today as good moral deeds. On the contrary, the tax collector was probably corrupt, a thief, and possibly seen as apostate. If Jesus were to use modern examples, perhaps he would say something like, "a missionary to Africa and a drug dealer went into church to pray ..."
Of the two characters, the white, middle-class, evangelical model of piety and righteousness looks much more like the Pharisee than the tax collector. And that, I think, is Jesus' point: if honest we identify, or would like to think we identify, with the Pharisee. Yet we are to come to God not confident that God will hear us because we've been doing ok; we come to God simply because he does hear and he does forgive and we are painfully aware of how much we need that.
July 1, 2005 11:27 AMTrackback URL for this entry: http://baltiblogs.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/6181
