2025.10.26 | Parabolic Prayer
“Parabolic Prayer”
A sermon preached at Eden United Church of Christ
in Hayward, California,
on Sunday, October 26, 2025,
by the Rev. Brenda Loreman.
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Luke 18:9-14
Copyright © 2025 by Brenda Loreman
At first glance, this parable from Luke’s gospel seems straightforward and simple. Two people went to the temple to pray. The Pharisee thanks God that he follows the rules of his faith and isn’t like other, sinful people, and the tax collector asks God for mercy because of his sinfulness. We are even given a little commentary before and after the parable to help us make sense of the story. Luke sets up the story by saying that Jesus “told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt,” (1) and at the end concludes by saying that the tax collector “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.” (2)
It all seems to be neatly tied up with a bow. We get the message: don’t be like the Pharisee. Be humble like the tax collector. But if we turn the page on the story and say to ourselves, “Well, thank God I am not like that Pharisee,” we’ve missed the whole point! Like most parables, this story is deceptive in its simplicity and its message is much more challenging than we might think. And that is the goal of the parable, the primary teaching tool of Jesus.
As a teacher, Jesus often offered what we might call direct instruction—rules or commands that we’re supposed to follow, certain behaviors we’re supposed to have. He gives us the Golden Rule and the Great Commandment and the New Command to love one another. These rules might be hard to follow in practice, but they are clear and easy to understand. But Jesus most often taught using stories. And those stories are not so clear. They offer opportunities for discussion and wrestling with meaning and challenging assumptions—they are, in fact, the best kind of teaching tool.
The stories that Jesus used for teaching aren’t ordinary stories. Rather than being nicely tied up with a bow like a Nancy Drew mystery story, parables are instead “open-ended tales that invite us to struggle with their meaning, to wonder, to see the world from unexpected angles. [New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine suggests …] that parables ‘challenge us to look into the hidden aspects of our own values, our own lives. They bring to the surface unasked questions, and they reveal the answers we have always known, but refuse to acknowledge.’” (3) But they do not end up being neatly resolved like a mystery story that bears one meaning with a single solution. Reading a parable is not like playing Wordle, with all the boxes turning green at the end and one single word as the solution.
The term “parable” is itself a rather mysterious, paradoxical word. It comes from the Greek words para, meaning “to come alongside,” and ballein, meaning “to throw.” I love how church historian Diana Butler Bass describes parables and their interpretation in her book, Freeing Jesus:
A parable is intended to be a story that comes alongside our regular understanding and, frankly, upsets it. It uses ordinary things to draw us to extraordinary ones and crafts understanding using the seen to explain the unseen. In effect, the parables are Jesus coming alongside us and ripping off our cozy theological comforters. Parables should leave us gasping, out in the doctrinal cold, and shaking with anger, awe, or surprise. Nothing is as we thought. The whole point of a parable is to disturb, disrupt, and perplex us, shaking up what we believe to be true, all without providing an easy answer or simple moral to fall back upon.
[...]
If you grew up in Sunday school, you might think you understand the parables. There is a reason for that. Teachers and preachers not only taught the parables, but they also gave students and congregants an approved interpretation, a way of understanding the story, one often passed down through generations, that we have come to accept as the only interpretation. Thus, if you are a Christian, the familiar parables you think you know are subjected to conventional interpretations, almost like a Rosetta Stone of secret knowledge: the persistent widow is always about faithfulness in prayer; parables about Pharisees are always about hypocrites; when the rich are condemned, it is always a metaphor.
Imposing interpretations on the parables is an ancient practice. Indeed, Luke employed it when he reported the original Jesus stories in his gospel. For almost every parable, Luke prefaces the story with what he wants you to think about it, he recounts the story told by Jesus, and then he finishes by restating what he (that is, Luke) thinks the story means. Throughout the gospel of Luke, the same pattern occurs: Luke, Jesus, Luke.
In other words, the parables were so upsetting and so uncontrollable that even the disciples worked to neaten them up so early audiences would understand. To experience the parable as it was first told, however, one needs to lift the frame from the story and set Jesus’s words free to do their [...] work of imagination, without the gospel writer’s editorial intrusion. (4)
So what happens when we lift the interpretive frame from this parable and set it free? What new interpretation might we find? What happens when we allow our imaginations to work on it? What happens when we allow ourselves to hear the parable for the first time, the way the followers of Jesus might have heard it? Listen to it again, without Luke’s commentary:
“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 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.’ 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!’” (5)
It sounds different without the commentary, doesn’t it? Without being told how to interpret it, we can ponder how the Pharisee now sounds like someone who’s trying hard to be a good believer, though he’s a bit obnoxious about it and lacks humility. And the tax collector sounds truly repentant—though it may be that he will leave the temple and go right back to his sinful ways.
To dig a little deeper in our exploration of the freed-up parable, it might help us to reconsider what we know about Pharisees and tax collectors and see them the way Jesus’s first followers might have:
“In Luke, Pharisees frequently appear among Jesus’ opponents — and in the centuries since, Christians have often caricatured Pharisees as self-righteous hypocrites, [which has been] an interpretive disaster [...]. First, it overlooks the fact that the Pharisee movement and the Jesus movement were in many ways cut from the same cloth, more like kissing cousins than polar opposites. This helps explain both their spirited disputes and the fact that, according to Luke, the followers of Jesus included many Pharisees [...]. In other words, for Luke, the Pharisee in this parable may be self-righteous, but Pharisees in general were not. [Also], painting all Pharisees with the same critical brush reinforces dreadful tropes in the long, bloody history of Christian anti-Judaism.” (6)
The Pharisees were not the evil opponents of Jesus. They were, essentially, the local synagogue rabbis of their time, who worked among and for the common people.
The tax collector, on the other hand, would have produced an immediate, visceral reaction from the first hearers of this story. In the first century, local tax collectors like the one in this parable were tasked with collecting Roman tariffs on transported goods, and therefore had a less-than-virtuous reputation in their communities. While the mere fact of Roman tariffs could have upset those living under Roman occupation, many tax collectors earned their wealth—and their bad reputations—through over-charging. They were hated in their communities.
I can imagine that there might have been some heated debate about which one was more righteous. Which one are we supposed to emulate? Which one does God love?
With these thoughts in mind, let’s bring this parable into the 21st Century:
Two Christians went up to the church to pray, one a United Church of Christ minister, and the other an ICE agent. The minister, standing by herself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: oligarchs, Republicans, spouse abusers, or even like this ICE agent. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the ICE agent, 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!’
How does that version sit with you? Did it rip off your cozy theological comforter? Remember—parables should leave us gasping, out in the doctrinal cold, and shaking with anger, awe, or surprise. Disturbed, disrupted, perplexed. There is no easy answer or simple moral. Which one is more righteous? Which one are we supposed to emulate? Which one does God love? Maybe the tale of the Pharisee and tax collector is not an “either-or” choice, but a “both-and” mystery. Of course, God loves both. Maybe the goal of this parable is not to have us choose, but is to challenge “our understandings of piety and grace, of how God loves and whom God accepts—even when we human beings behave self-righteously or fail to comprehend the breadth of divine love.” (7)
I’m going to leave you with a poetic parable about prayer from writer Madeline L’Engle. You may know her as a writer of wonderful books for young people, but she also wrote fiction for adults, and she was a prolific poet. Many of her poems explore theological themes, like this one does. Here—like our parable—L’Engle ponders prayer, and God’s love, whom God loves, and how we should love, and how we should pray, and what we should pray for. This is an excerpt from “Lines Scribbled on an Envelope while Riding the 104 Broadway Bus”:
There is too much pain
I cannot understand
I cannot pray…
Here I am
and the ugly man with beery breath beside me reminds
me that it is not my prayers that waken your
concern, my Lord;
my prayers, my intercessions are not to ask for your love
for all your lost and lonely ones,
your sick and sinning souls,
but mine, my love, my acceptance of your love.
Your love for the woman sticking her umbrella and her
expensive
parcels into my ribs and snarling, “Why don’t you watch
where you’re going?”
Your love for the long-haired, gum-chewing boy who
shoves the old lady aside to grab a seat,
Your love for me, too, too tired to look with love,
too tired to look at Love, at you, in every person on the
bus.
Expand my love, Lord, so I can help to bear the pain,
help your love move my love into the tired prostitute with
false eyelashes and bunioned feet,
the corrupt policeman with his hand open for graft,
the addict, the derelict, the woman in the mink coat and
discontented mouth,
the high school girl with heavy books and frightened eyes.
Help me through these scandalous particulars
to understand
your love.
Help me to pray. (8)
—
Notes:
Luke 18:9 (NRSVUE)
Luke 18:14 (NRSVUE)
Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence (New York: HarperCollins, 2021), 43.
Ibid., 45-47
Luke 18:10-13 (NRSVUE)
“The Humility Trap: SALT’s Commentary for Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost” SALT Blog, October 20, 2025. Accessed on 10/20/25 https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2019/10/22/the-humility-trap-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-twentieth-week-after-pentecost
Diana Butler Bass “Sunday Musings,” on The Cottage Substack Blog, October 25, 2025. Accessed 10/25/25 https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-bcb
“from Lines Scribbled on an Envelope,” SALT Blog, October 20. 2025. Accessed on 10/20/25. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2025/10/21/from-lines-scribbled-on-an-envelope-by-madeleine-lengle