Thread by @Delafina777

I'm going to talk about a parable that I think is relevant right now.

It's from the New Testament. So, while I'm pretty emphatically Not Christian, I think Jesus was an excellent storyteller, especially within his cultural context. He told great parables. There are problems with how people tend to hear them today, however.

I've heard a lot of sermons--I used to be a professional wedding musician, and I went to church with my dad sometimes as a kid--and it's frustrating to hear parables told and talked about like they're Aesop's fables.

They get treated like they're short stories that are intended as allegory, with a clear and simple moral at the end. And those morals are generally fairly comforting--and banal. You should pray a lot. You should be nice to other people.

Nonsense. Jewish parables are intended to make you think. And they're usually used not to comfort, but to indict.

The Jewish parable par excellence is when Nathan tells David (who's just had a dude killed so he can marry his widow) a story about a rich man who takes a poor man's lamb, asks what David thinks should be done to the rich man, and when David's indignant..

...says to him אתה האיש, "you are that man." But there's a lot more than the punchline if you unpack it, which I'm not going to do here because this is a sidenote to my point.

The Jewish interpretive tradition has a TON of allegory in it, but before you jump to allegory, you take the story as it's told: if there's a father in the story, before you jump to the assumption that he's a stand-in for the Eternal, you read him simply as a human father.

And I think the Christian interpretive tradition has this habit of immediately leaping to allegory, *preemptively* hearing the story as allegory, going in with the assumption that it's allegory before hearing the story itself, because of Luke.

That guy felt the need to stick a Moral Of The Story at the end of every parable he related, and sometimes--to my professional storyteller mind, unforgivably--BEFORE he relates the story itself. That's just bad storytelling, my dude.

Which is how you get the story of the widow and the judge being read as an instruction to pray a lot, which makes ZERO sense in light of the actual story--I couldn't tell you what the Moral was to that one, honestly...

...but I'm pretty sure that if Jesus actually told that story, he didn't tack on that framing.

But anyway, my point is, if you're reading/hearing Jesus's parables, you shouldn't be listening like a 1st-century Greek, expecting an Aesop-style fable. You should be listening like a 1st-century Jew, because that's who the audience was.

So, with that lengthy preface out of the way, let's talk about the parable I actually meant to talk about. This one.

In this one, Luke actually puts the "moral of the story" in Jesus's mouth. I honestly don't think that if Jesus actually told this parable, he included that.

Here's the thing: if you read the gospels outside their historical and cultural context, you're going to come away with a negative view of Pharisees and a positive view of tax collectors.

You lose the sense of how against the grain this was. Like, you know, okay, people respected the Pharisees and didn't like tax collectors, but YOU don't really have the bone-deep sense of why. It's hard to read it as against the grain when the grain is gone.

So, refresher: the Pharisees were a movement that was anti-occupation, and trying to decentralize worship from the Temple and center it on synagogues and the home. They were seen as of the people, and were immensely popular (in contrast to the Roman-infiltrated Sadducees).

Tax collectors were quislings. They were collecting taxes on behalf of a brutal occupying power, and were closer to mafia enforcers/protection racket goons than anything else.

So you've got this parable that has two men praying: a Pharisee who's expressing gratitude for not being like other people in his ability to fast and tithe, and a tax collector who's begging forgiveness.

And the temptation is to say, "oh, that tax collector is humbling himself, praying for forgiveness, as opposed to that awful self-righteous Pharisee who's judging other people."

אתה האיש.
You are that man.

Welcome to parables. They're bear traps.

Because here's what we know from that story (if you take off Luke's glosses):

Now you've got a guy expressing gratitude that he's not like people who do terrible things. And, okay, he gives 10% of his income to charity, and fasts (physicalizes repentance). He's glad he hasn't given into temptation. Maybe that's a bit self-righteous.

But you know what? I'm not sure I care if he's self-righteous. Because I care about what he's DOING. And even if it's not phrased in a way I like, "thanks for not letting me become the sort of person I'm afraid of becoming" is actually a legit thing to be grateful for.

Hell, "thanks for giving me a life in which I don't HAVE to be a tax collector" is a legit thing to be grateful for. So I dunno. His prayer isn't "look at me! On my own I have avoided being a bad person!" It's "thanks for helping me to not be a bad person."

And the tax collector? He's sorry. Cool.

Does he quit his job? He wants forgiveness. That's nice. We all do things for which we want forgiveness.

But forgiveness is the END of the process, not the start. You want to be forgiven, you STOP DOING THE THING.

So, recognizing that he's doing a bad thing is a good first step, sure, but before we decide that he's the good guy here, what's he DOING to stop being a bad guy?

Without Luke's gloss--or the words I think he put in Jesus's mouth about the tax collector being justified--I think this parable is illustrating two ways NOT to be.

The Pharisee's problem in this story seems to me to be that he's writing off people--rather than focusing on being grateful for the circumstances that have left him largely safe from the temptation to do things that hurt others, he's just happy he's not like Those People.

And the tax collector wants forgiveness on tap. He thinks he can discharge the guilt for the harm he's doing just by regularly apologizing for it, rather than finding ways to stop doing the harm.

And it's set up in a way that you're tempted to pick one or the other as doing it right. And as soon as you've done that, the parable's snapped shut on you. Because it's a parable, not a fable, and it's intended to indict the listener.

We've got a lot of people talking at us these days, with mics of varying loudness, and I think this story--the actual STORY, not the glosses--is pretty damn relevant. Look at what people are DOING. And don't assume that just because you haven't yet really been tested, you're ok.