THE TAX COLLECTOR’S FEAR

Jesus told this story “to some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else” (Luke 18:9). It’s a seemingly simple story of two men who went to pray in the temple. The prayer of the first was a list of his good works—all the good things he had done “since I was a boy,” to borrow the phrase of the “ruler” Jesus would encounter only a few verses later in Luke’s Gospel (see Luke 18:18–23). In Jesus’ parable, there is no response or outcome to the prayer of the self-righteous Pharisee. But later, when a “ruler” came to Him asking about eternal life, Jesus challenged him to give up his reliance on his good deeds and great wealth. The man “became very sad, because he was very wealthy” (Luke 18:23).

The second man who prayed in the temple was a tax collector who did not dare to come near the prominent place where the Pharisee prayed.

Instead, the tax collector “stood at a distance”—like the short tax collector in Jericho who so wanted to see Jesus that he climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see over the crowd (see Luke 19:3, 4)—perhaps only a day or two later. Jesus responded to Zacchaeus’ effort to see him, spent the rest of the day with him, and heard Zacchaeus’s confession and determination to put things right, and Jesus said, “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9).

The two men who prayed in the temple were reflected in the wealthy, upstanding ruler and the short, tree-climbing tax collector. They were the characters in the story that Jesus told, come to life. The ruler was proud to proclaim his own righteousness and went away sad. The outcast tax collector was afraid to come close, but his life was turned around and accepted by God. As Jesus concluded the parable, “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 18:14).