Mercy, Mercy, Me
For Pentecost +20 Preached at St. Paul United Methodist Church October 26, 2025Luke 18.9-14 - The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector
9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ 13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Prayer - John Milner White
O God, the Holy Spirit, come to us, and among us;
come as the wind, and cleanse us;
come as the fire, and burn;
come as the dew, and refresh;
convict, convert, and consecrate many hearts and lives to our great good
and to thy greater glory; and this we ask for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.
Opening
Rather than make you wait for it, I’m going to give you
the good news of this text from the start. Ready?
Grace will always surprise, and mercy will always turn us inside out.
I’m also going to give you
the challenging, confusing, and frustrating news from this text. Ready?
Grace will always surprise, and mercy will always turn us inside out.
Now what could possibly make both things true?
The parables of Jesus.
Now, Jesus didn’t invent parables, but according to the Gospel writers, he was a master at telling them.
We know Jesus was a teacher, but he didn’t lecture.
He did some preaching, but didn’t have a podcast,
and he surely didn’t post on social media.
Isn’t it amazing how many people do that in his name
as if they’ve got it all figured out?
Although I did see one post depicting Jesus
with arms stretched wide and a disconcerting gaze
saying, “Disappointed in all of you!”
That may be the most accurate post out there!
So in the parlance of the social media world,
The parables Jesus told were his “content.”
What is it about these parables
that entices, befuddles, frustrates, and inspires?
What are parables, anyway?
Parables are a type of story.
Cousins to the prophet’s allegory, the sage’s riddle, and the visionary’s dream.
Yet where allegories explain, parables provoke,
refusing to let us stay comfortable with our first reading.
They start simply enough:
a farmer sowing seed,
a woman sweeping her house,
a father waiting on the porch,
You know, a story about someone else,
allowing us to peer safely into their lives,
bringing with us our opinions about those characters and their choices.
The very word “parable” comes from the Greek παραβολή (parabolē, pah-rah-bo-LAY), meaning “to throw alongside.”
Parables toss one image, idea, or situation alongside another so that,
through contrast or collision, truth comes into focus.
The thing about parables, though, is that they function simultaneously on multiple levels,
so that as we observe one situation alongside another,
the larger truth of the parable is tossed alongside ours,
leaving us with questions about our lives that we had no idea we needed to answer.
I think about what NT Scholar John Dominic Crossan says of parables, the gist of which is:
“A parable is not a tidy moral tale but a story that never [actually] happened and [yet] always does, because it keeps catching us in our certainties, undoing our assumptions, and showing us that the world of God is not the world as we’ve arranged it.”
If you listen closely to Luke’s collection of Jesus’ parables,
you’ll hear a familiar rhythm:
the last become first,
the proud brought low,
the lost found
the forgotten lifted,
the wayward welcomed home.
Luke’s Jesus is always drawing the circle wider,
where grace always surprises and mercy turns us inside out.
Now don't forget that part; you’ll hear it again.
That’s where we find ourselves today, in a story told only by Luke, the second of two parables in Luke 18 that focus on prayer. The Gospel writer wants us to know why Jesus tells this parable. The first parable is most commonly known as the one about “the widow and the unjust judge.”
He starts it with these words: “[he] told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” It’s the kind of introduction that makes you want to lean in and listen deeply because who among us hasn’t found a time in life when it was tempting to lose heart.
But it’s how he introduces what’s next that piques our curiosity:
“He told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.”
Luke chooses his words carefully.
The phrase “regarded others with contempt” comes from ἐξουθενέω (exoutheneō, ex-oo-the-NEH-oh). The word for contempt means “to despise, to treat as nothing, to be beneath notice.” You’re not even worth the breath it takes to say you’re nothing.
It’s into the places where contempt abounds, that Jesus would like a word…and here it comes.
The Pharisee’s Prayer
Two men go up to the temple to pray.
One is a Pharisee, the other a tax collector.
The contrast is already clear, as it would have been to Luke’s first hearers.
The Pharisee, a devout and respected teacher, was faithful in his practices of faith, disciplined in prayer, tithing, and fasting, and deeply committed to honoring God through obedience.
The Pharisee stands ready to pray the prayers that have long shaped his life. There’s nothing unusual about this. His words would have sounded perfectly normal in any synagogue or temple. It’s the kind of prayer any devout person might have prayed: gratitude for moral clarity, thanksgiving for living rightly, joy at being set apart from corruption.
It begins well enough:
“God, I thank you…”
But there’s a shift. It isn’t the words that stray, but the heart, turned from humility to hubris, from grace to comparison.
Four “I” statements in two sentences? Really?
“I thank you that I’m not like other people, thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all I possess.”
Let me say, there’s nothing wrong with thanking God for where you are in life.
Isn't that what "There but for the grace of God, go I” is all about?
Although I recognize that we have to wade through the archaic syntax of that sentence to get to its meaning.
But that’s not what’s going on here. His thanksgiving for what he’s not drips with disdain, pointing out someone else who is also there to pray.
When he says “this tax collector,” Luke uses a word οὗτος (houtos, HOO-tos), meaning “this one,” a pronoun echoing the sneer of the self-righteous.
You can almost hear it, can’t you?
“This one. That one. You people.”
The Pharisee thanks God for being better than someone else, thereby justifying his contempt, at least in his mind. Because if he, in his self-righteousness, has contempt for someone like that, he’s quite certain God does, too.
I think of the quote attributed to Voltaire,
“If God created humanity in the divine image,
we’ve been returning the favor ever since.”
And that’s the Pharisee’s tragedy, no less than our own, when contempt toward the other takes up residence in us: when self-righteousness becomes certainty, when we are convinced that God sees people exactly like we do, then mercy for them feels like blasphemy.
It never occurs to him that this one, that one, you people might just be the apple of God’s eye. Does it ever occur to us?
The Tax Collector’s Prayer
Meanwhile, in the shadows, there’s another prayer being prayed.
It’s softer, nearer the floor; the air is heavy with regret.
There is no posture of praise here,
only a heartbeat against the stone floor, weighted in shame.
The tax collector has come to pray at temple, too. But let’s not romanticize it. He wasn’t just a sinner with a bad reputation. He was part of a system built to exploit his own people.
Tax collectors worked for Rome, but their pay came from whatever they could squeeze beyond the quota. You could call it a protection racket: “Either pay me now, or I’ll make sure the soldiers pay you a visit.”
They skimmed off the top, padded the numbers, took their cut, the vig, as gamblers, bookies, and loan sharks call it.
It’s easy to see him as contemptible.
He’s complicit with the principalities and powers
that propagate suppression and meanness while profiting from it.
Complicity with principalities and powers
peddling pain and fear while profiting from it.
Can you imagine such a thing? Heaven forbid.
No, literally, heaven forbid.
So when he comes to the temple, he’s not simply guilty; he’s standing in the house of God, carrying the weight of every dishonest transaction, every home emptied, every neighbor bled dry.
Turns out, sooner or later, there’s a cost to extortion for the one demanding payment, too.
His whole being cries out in contrition and shame. It’s an embodied confession.
As New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine reminds us,
“Compassion can be felt in the gut; mercy needs to be enacted with the body.”
His very stance, his trembling, his beating chest, his plea come from the same place mercy is meant to live: deep within the body, made visible through movement.
He’s not asking for pity, and not just forgiveness. He’s asking for restoration, justification. To be covered up. Made right. His whole posture is an act of trust that God’s mercy can still reach one such as him.
The Reversal
If we stop here, we’d just have a story about two men and their prayers.
But Jesus never told parables just for comparison; he told them for revelation,
for the gospel hiding in plain sight.
He says:
“This man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
To those who first heard this parable, no different from us who are hearing it now, this is a scandalous encounter. In this reversal, the Pharisee’s sin isn’t self-centeredness; it’s separation. He can’t see his neighbor as kin, as one beloved of God.
In fact, he can’t conceive that such a thing is even possible.
And mercy, mercy me, have we ever mastered “othering” — in our behavior, our rhetoric, and our policy. “This one… that one… you people.”
How is it that we can find more satisfaction in our contempt
than freedom in the surrender to mercy?
But watch out! The parable isn’t done with us just yet; it’s still unfolding.
Don’t forget, parables occur within the story itself, as it does with us in our hearing of it.
So how do you feel about this story? Do you resonate more with one than the other? If, upon hearing it, we say, “Thank God I’m not like that Pharisee,” the parable has caught us too, because we’ve become the very thing we despise.
AJ Levine again:
“If we stereotype the Pharisee as arrogant and hypocritical, and the tax collector as humble and justified, we risk repeating the very sin the parable condemns: looking down on another.”
Whew! Sit with that for a second. Humbling, isn’t it?
Every parable, somewhere beneath its twists and turns,
reveals something of God’s character as it exposes ours.
And boy, this one does that in spades.
It tells us about the kind of God who refuses to let contempt define holiness. It tells of the God who names,
claims,
justifies,
forgives,
loves,
and liberates not because of who we are,
but solely because of who God is.
Why? Because grace will always surprise, and mercy will always turn us inside out. (see, there it is!)
When the day comes that we can celebrate what grace and mercy can do in another's life as gladly as we do in ours, then we're no longer trapped by this parable.
But let’s be honest, it’s a ‘fer piece from here to there.
The truth is, every one of us walks into God’s house with a story to tell and a prayer to whisper. Some of us come standing tall, others barely able to lift our heads. Sometimes our prayers emerge from the depths of our pain, accompanied by cries of confession and repentance. And sometimes our prayers are a bit more self-congratulatory than they ought to be, especially when we start comparing ourselves to someone else.
I wonder, as the lives of the characters in this parable are cast alongside ours, what the work is for us to do today? Maybe it’s the conversation we’ve been avoiding with someone we tend to look down on. Maybe it’s forgiving someone for whom the words “contempt” and “disdain” are real, and we’re pretty sure they don’t deserve forgiveness. Ours, or God’s.
We do call it “Amazing Grace,” after all, right? But that’s the point, isn’t it?
You want to know why folks think less and less of the Church? I’m sure the reasons are many, but I bet you most can be distilled into some version of this question. It’s one I’ve heard many times: How is it that people who immerse themselves in the language of love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation so poorly live it out with one another?
But here’s the good news: God meets us right there — in that trembling space where pride finally gives way to mercy, where the language of love becomes the life of love.
Wherever this parable touches your life today,
may grace surprise you,
may mercy undo you,
and may love send you
—to mend what has been broken,
to restore what has been lost,
and to bear witness that mercy still has power in this world.
Mercy, mercy me, indeed. Amen.
Works Cited
Luke 18:9–14. (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition).
Prayer, Eric Milner-White
John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 3–5, adapted, Jeffords.
Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York: HarperOne, 2014), p. xviii.
David Buttrick, Speaking Parables: A Homiletic Guide (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 174–176.
Amy-Jill Levine, The Pharisees (Eerdmans, 2021), p. 471.
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