Every so often, a phrase just sums up a complex situation perfectly. Prayer with peripheral vision is just such a phrase. Instead of prayer as a sacred communion with God, in which the content of one’s heart flows out and in which one’s greatest fears and joys spill out in deep longing or profound gratitude, prayer with peripheral vision instead reveals that one truly sees neither God nor neighbor (Luke 18:9-14).
The Pharisee cannot see the tax agent (telōnai) in the deepest sense of the word; he sees only what he wants to see. He sees someone who is hated by all, someone who collaborates with the foreign occupiers by collecting their taxes while adding his own commission to the tax bill. With a peripheral glance, the Pharisee cannot accurately read or interpret the situation. The tax agent stands at a distance (too ashamed to draw close), his head lowered (humility), beating his breast (an acknowledgement of sorrow in the face of his sin), and cries out for mercy (his repentance finding voice). The Pharisee sees only a man whom the community has rejected (18:13).
The Pharisee stands before God, the epitome of pride. Pride is the greatest of sins, as Karl Barth describes it, because it confuses Creator with creature: Giver with gift. The Pharisee cannot see his own faults and sins, only those of other people. And not only in comparison with the tax agent – for when he says, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers…” he is actually saying, “I thank you that I am not like the rest of people” (hoi loipoi – verse 11 – has an elitist edge to it). The tax agent is merely an example of “the rest of people.” In a concise and insightful summation, one scholar describes the Pharisee’s prayer as consisting of his telling God how fortunate He is to have such a wonderful worshipper! (vs. 11-12).
The Pharisee is filled with scorn and contempt – exouthenēo is the word used to describe Herod’s contempt of Jesus (Luke 23:11) and of stone that the builders rejected (Acts 4:11). The text translated as, “The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus…” (vs. 11) can be literally translated as “The Pharisee stood and prayed these things to himself.” Either he was praying quietly to himself; or his prayer was solely a reference to himself; or perhaps he was praying to himself and not to God. Whether he realized it or not, he was perhaps doing all three!
The smug self-love of the Pharisee is in such contrast to the humility of the tax agent. Yet, by the end of the parable the latter possesses the very righteousness that the Pharisee mistakenly believes to be his alone. As Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, the tax agent “requires God’s gift of righteousness because he has none of his own. And because he both needs and recognizes his need for the gift, he receives it.”
