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Special to United Methodist Insight | Oct. 22, 2025
Luke’s parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is often treated as a one-act morality play about humility. In fact, it is an assault on a mechanism that has survived two millennia without losing its malign power. The story takes aim at the religious habit of using God as a mirror in which one sees not God but one’s own impeccably curated virtue.
Two men go to pray. The first embodies the ideal parishioner: fasting, tithing, and avoiding trouble. He presents a picture of religious dedication with polished prayers. However, his praise is mainly self-congratulatory, cloaked in religious language. Instead of thanking God for mercy, he thanks God for not being like others. He has constructed a moral balcony from which to look down on others.
The other man remains distant, beats his chest, admits his fault, and seeks mercy. He doesn’t compare himself to others, argue his case, or sugarcoat his record with pious words. His prayer isn’t a press release. It is a genuine confession.
Jesus then delivers the literary punch. That man, not the visibly virtuous one, goes home justified. In other words, the external credentials of religious probity count for nothing in the divine calculus. The religious professional is morally disqualified by his own self-regard. The social outcast is morally preferred because he has no lies left to protect.
It is worth pausing on how insulting this is to the religious ego. The Pharisee of that world is not a cartoon villain. He is the man everyone else assumes is morally safe. Yet he is the one whose soul is declared bankrupt. The tax collector is not the hero. He is simply the one who has ceased performing. In the eyes of Jesus, performance is the problem.
The parable does not teach that humility is pretty. It teaches that religion itself breeds the opposite. Where people assemble to congratulate themselves for being the people on God’s side, contempt is not an accident but an inevitability. In the story, religion has done precisely what its critics say it does. It has created a caste system of the righteous. It has made God a kind of heavenly certification board for one’s own moral superiority.
It is striking that a text so often cited by believers functions as an indictment of religious culture as believers actually practice it. The Pharisee’s prayer has been updated in our century with new vocabulary. It now sounds like: Thank you, God, that I am not like progressives, or secularists, or Republicans, or Democrats, or Muslims, or Catholics, or evangelicals, or whomever the preferred out-group may be. The template still works. The self-glorifying prayer merely changes jerseys.
Read literally, this is a warning about God’s preference for honesty over credentials. Read as literature, without any divine underwriting, it is a cold fact about human psychology. The only thing that interrupts self-deception is truth-telling. The one thing religion is structurally poor at encouraging is truth-telling. Religion offers social rewards for appearing holy rather than being honest. It is the creation of moral optics.
The parable concludes with a statement that is seldom believed in practice: Everyone who exalts themselves will be humbled, and everyone who humbles themselves will be exalted. In today’s religious scene, those who seek the spotlight are still rewarded. The self-promoting saints still have microphones, and public displays of piety continue to sell, while the genuinely humble rarely trend on social media.
This small story, if taken seriously, would blow a hole through the religious economy that prevails in actual congregations. That explains why it is domesticated into a harmless moral about not being arrogant, instead of what it truly is. It is an untidy reminder that the thing religion claims to cure is the thing it is best at producing. The parable is not evidence of the moral beauty of religion. It is evidence that even within the New Testament, there was a dim awareness that religion corrupts the moral self before it corrects it.
Richard Bryant
Richard Bryant served United Methodist congregations for over twenty years. He is a writer and teacher of adult English learners in North Carolina, with a long-standing interest in how religion, language, and power shape people's beliefs about themselves and the world. His essays draw on scripture, history, and skeptical argument to test whether religious claims can survive contact with moral scrutiny and lived experience.