How You Treat Others
a window to your soul
Scripture Reading: Luke 18:9-14
As with most of Jesus’ parables, the story of this story about a Pharisee and a tax collector was prompted by the conditions Jesus was encountering at that moment. Thus, Luke introduces the parable with the setting that compelled the telling of it with this line:
[Jesus] also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt.
Luke brings out two charges against the people to whom Jesus addressed this story. First, they trusted in themselves. Luke explains that what he means is these people believed they were righteous. In their minds, they did not need God’s grace and the atonement for sin Christ came to bring. Second, they treated other people with contempt.
While, in a sense, those are two different problems, they are in fact inseparable. You treat with contempt people you deem less than yourself. You deem them to be less than you when you see yourself as a righteous person.
Therefore, in the parable, the Pharisee is pictured not just as a man who “thanks God [he is], not an extortioner, unjust, adulterer…[who] fasts twice a week and gives tithes of all [he] gets.” His eyes are not only on himself, but consequently on other men and, since he happened to be a convenient example at the moment, the tax collector.
Since self-righteousness is an inward, spiritual attitude it is hard to detect by watching a person’s moral and spiritual disciplines. This Pharisee faithfully fasted and tithed. That wasn’t the problem. You don’t fix self-righteousness by acting in unrighteous ways. He wouldn’t have become less self-righteous if he stopped tithing. You can observe two men giving and not knowing which is doing so in the right spirit and which is doing so out of self-righteousness. You can’t, in all fairness, call someone self-righteous because they go to church, give, and do church stuff. You just can’t assess it that way, even though people try that trick all the time.
That is why the second half of the equation is so important here and why Jesus includes the tax collector in the story. Self-righteousness is revealed, not so much in the religious duties the Pharisee performed, but in the contempt with which he held the tax collector.
The way we treat others reveals more about what we believe about ourselves than we realize. Treating others with contempt is a sure sign that you view yourself much more highly than you should. Don’t miss the punch line to the parable…The humble tax collector who saw himself as a sinner went home justified and the proud Pharisee who saw himself as righteous went home a sinner still.
