Alongside one another: new way of living in the world

Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.

This is how Luke introduces today’s story. Not, “to the Pharisees,” not “to the crowd,” not “to the disciples.” To “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous.” Jesus has been moving back and forth in this part of Luke’s Gospel—sometimes speaking to the disciples, sometimes to the Pharisees, sometimes to the crowds. This time, the audience is intentionally blurry. The message isn’t for one group of people who “don’t get it.” The message is for anyone—religious or not—who has ever started to believe that their goodness makes them more deserving of God’s love than someone else.

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

For those who first heard this story, this would have immediately sparked an expectation: the Pharisee is the holy man; the tax collector, the sinner. The Pharisee belonged in the temple. The tax collector did not. Tax collectors were collaborators with the Roman Empire, often cheating their own neighbors to fill imperial coffers and their own pockets. So when Jesus says that a tax collector has shown up in the temple to pray, his hearers would have been shocked.

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. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.

It’s important to pause here and resist a long history of Christian misinterpretation that has turned this parable into an anti-Jewish caricature. The Pharisee is not the villain because he’s Jewish, or because he keeps the law. His devotion to the law is good—it’s faithful, even generous. He gives more than he’s required to give. He fasts more often than expected. The problem isn’t his faithfulness. It’s his isolation. “The Pharisee stood by himself.” His prayer is self-referential, even self-congratulatory. It’s gratitude twisted into comparison: “God, I thank you that I’m not like them.” He is praying, but he’s not in relationship. His prayer has become a performance of goodness, not an encounter with grace.

Perhaps we understand that impulse. We compare ourselves to others all the time—out of arrogance, out of fear, out of insecurity. We measure our worth by someone else’s failure or success. What if I’m not enough? What if I stop doing, stop performing, and God’s love dries up? The Pharisee’s prayer, for all its confidence, might just be hiding a deep fear that he needs to earn God’s affection.

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!

If the Pharisee represents confidence turned inward, the tax collector represents honesty turned toward God. He doesn’t posture or perform. He can barely look up. His prayer is simple, heartfelt, desperate. And yet—it’s not perfect either. He asks for mercy, names his sin, but offers no change. His prayer is raw and true, but incomplete.

Here’s where many of us fall into the parable’s trap. We hear the two prayers and instinctively side with the tax collector. We think, Thank God I’m not like that Pharisee! And in doing so, we have just become him. That’s the genius of this parable—it refuses to let us claim the moral high ground. It catches us in the act of comparison, even when we’re trying to avoid it.

Jesus ends the story like this: “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.”

This ending might sound simple to us: the humble tax collector is justified; the arrogant Pharisee is not. End of story.

But in Greek, that little phrase—“rather than the other”—uses the word para. It can mean “rather than,” but it can also mean “because of,” or “alongside.” What if Jesus wasn’t setting these two men against each other, but beside each other? What if he was saying, “This man went down to his home justified alongside the other”—that they were both, in some way, drawn into God’s mercy together?

In first-century Jewish thought, righteousness wasn’t individual; it was communal. People understood themselves as bound together in covenant life. The faithfulness of one could benefit the community; the sin of one could wound it. In that light, maybe the Pharisee’s extra fasting and giving overflowed to the tax collector. Maybe the tax collector’s humility softened something in the Pharisee. Maybe both were changed by the other’s presence.

This is where the parable touches the heartbeat of liberation theology, especially the witness of Black theologians who have long taught that salvation and freedom are never private matters. James Cone wrote that “to know God is to know the God who liberates the oppressed.” Fannie Lou Hamer declared, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

To trust only in my own goodness—to build walls of superiority—is to cut myself off from the very mercy that could heal me. To regard others with contempt is to deny the image of God in them—and in doing so, to deny it in myself. To see the world as us and them, my people and those people, only draws us further apart from the beloved community God desires for us. The Pharisee and the tax collector are not opposites to be sorted into “saved” and “lost.” They are neighbors in need of one another’s grace.

The Pharisee’s goodness without humility is hollow. The tax collector’s humility without transformation is incomplete. But together, their prayers begin to paint a fuller picture of faith. When we remember that we belong to one another, that the line between sinner and saint runs through every human heart, then justification—being made right—becomes a shared gift. Our liberation, our salvation, is collective.

What’s tragic in this parable is that both men leave the temple alone. Both pray in isolation. Neither turns toward the other. Neither relationship nor reconciliation takes place.

And yet, every Sunday, we are given the opportunity they missed. When we gather for worship, our liturgy gives us the pattern for communal transformation: We confess not “I have sinned,” but “we have sinned.” We exchange peace across differences. We come to commune, side by side, sinner and saint, feeding on grace we did not earn. We go out into the world together—justified not by comparison, but by communion. Liturgy forms us for this work, but we have to practice it beyond these walls. Otherwise we risk turning worship into another kind of Pharisee’s prayer—a ritual of self-congratulation instead of shared healing.

Jesus is reminding us that humility is not self-hatred; it’s relational honesty. It’s the release of the illusion that I can save myself. It’s the willingness to see God’s mercy working through those I least expect. Self-trust and contempt for others go hand in hand. When I rely on myself, I look down on others to feel secure. When I trust God, I begin to see others not as threats to my goodness, but as partners in my redemption. This is the kind of humility that doesn’t shrink—it connects. It doesn’t diminish our worth; it reveals that our worth is shared. As Desmond Tutu once said, “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”

Maybe that’s where transformation really begins—not in perfect prayers, but in honest ones. Not in who prays best, but in who dares to pray together. The Pharisee and the tax collector both came seeking God, both bearing truth, both limited by their isolation. What they missed—and what Jesus longs for us to see—is that God’s mercy moves most freely where walls come down and people meet each other face to face. When we tell the truth about our need, when we let down our defenses, when we stop comparing and start connecting—something holy happens. Grace begins to circulate. The line between the righteous and the sinner blurs into one shared humanity, beloved and flawed and capable of redemption. Here in this house of prayer, that’s what we practice each week: the humility of confession, the courage of reconciliation, the shared table of grace. These are not just rituals; they’re rehearsals for a new way of living in the world. So may we go down to our homes today justified—not rather than, not instead of, but alongside and because of one another. And may we remember that the mercy of God is not a private possession but a shared inheritance, that righteousness is not competition but connection, and that our liberation—yours, mine, the world’s—is forever bound together in love.