Parable of the pharisee and the tax collector

“God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

— Luke 18:13 (ESV)

The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14) is Jesus’s answer to those who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt.” Two men go to the temple to pray: a Pharisee recites his own religious record and thanks God he is not like other men, including the tax collector nearby; the tax collector, unable even to lift his eyes toward heaven, can only beat his breast and plead, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” Jesus declares that the tax collector, not the Pharisee, “went down to his house justified.”

Biblical Basis

Luke frames the parable before Jesus even speaks: he told it “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt” (Luke 18:9). Two men go up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector, representing opposite poles of first-century Jewish social and religious standing. The Pharisee, Luke writes, “standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get’” (Luke 18:11-12). The tax collector, by contrast, “standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” (Luke 18:13).

Jesus’s verdict inverts the standing the two men’s own prayers would predict: “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other” (Luke 18:14). Andrew Hassler observes that Luke’s word choice at this point, δεδικαιωμένος, “justified,” is a “telling choice of words” even though it does not map exactly onto Paul’s later technical usage of the term; functionally, “one of the men was shown to ‘trust in his own righteousness,’ while the other trusted in God’s mercy for his righteousness.”¹ Jesus closes the parable with a general maxim rather than a comment on this pair alone: “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 18:14). The parable belongs to the wider body of Jesus’s parabolic teaching treated at parables of Jesus.

Confessional Witness

The wider Reformed confessional family agrees that repentance, the tax collector’s own posture in the parable, is a grace given to the sinner rather than a meritorious work earning pardon. The Westminster Confession states that repentance “is not to be rested in as any satisfaction for sin, or any cause of the pardon thereof, which is the act of God’s free grace in Christ.”² The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith states the same doctrine in wording it shares with the Savoy Declaration rather than with Westminster’s differently-phrased chapter: “Such of the elect as are converted at riper years… God in their effectual calling giveth them repentance unto life.”³ Saving repentance is itself defined as a gift, “an evangelical grace, whereby a person, being by the Holy Spirit made sensible of the manifold evils of his sin, doth, by faith in Christ, humble himself for it with godly sorrow, detestation of it, and self-abhorrency, praying for pardon and strength of grace.”⁴ That description matches the tax collector’s own prayer almost exactly.

On justification itself, the confession states that God “freely justifieth” those he effectually calls, “not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone.”⁵ The Pharisee’s fasting and tithing are exactly the kind of thing “wrought in them, or done by them” the confession excludes as a ground of justification; the tax collector, who has nothing of the kind to offer, is the one Jesus declares justified.

Doctrinal Significance

Hassler reads the parable as evidence that at least some first-century Jewish religious practice had curdled into “soteriological legalism,” trusting in one’s own obedience rather than God’s mercy, and treats it as “arguably the clearest example” of that attitude anywhere in the Gospels.¹ The Pharisee’s prayer is not fabricated piety; both his fasting and his tithing exceed what the law required. The failure Jesus condemns is not the practices themselves but what he has made of them: proof of his own standing rather than fruit of grace already received.

John Calvin draws the same contrast but frames it around humility rather than legalism specifically. Introducing the parable as Christ’s own “representation of true humility,” Calvin writes that the Pharisee, for all his “public confession” that his righteousness is God’s gift, “because of his confidence that he is righteous… departs from the presence of God unaccepted and abominated,” while “the publican acknowledging his iniquity is justified.”⁶ His general rule: no one is prepared to receive divine mercy “who has [not] thoroughly emptied himself… of a vain and blustering show of righteousness,” since “to whatever extent any man rests in himself, to the same extent he impedes the beneficence of God.”⁷

Petrus van Mastricht uses the same two men to make a related but distinct point, about the danger of mistaking common grace for saving grace. Citing the Pharisee “in the church” alongside honorable pagans like Plato and Seneca as examples of how far nature’s own resemblance to grace can reach, Mastricht warns that “myriads of pseudo-Christians still day by day deceive themselves, taking a more agreeable and humane nature for the grace of regeneration, and common gifts for signs of saving grace,” citing Luke 18:11 directly for the warning.⁸ On this reading, the Pharisee’s fasting and tithing were real; what he lacked was the tax collector’s self-abhorring recognition that such things cannot ground standing before God, treated further at common grace and assurance of salvation.

Historical Development

Reformation: humility and confession (Calvin, 1559)

Calvin returns to this parable twice in the final Latin edition of the Institutes. In his discussion of contemplating God’s judgment seat, he reads it as Jesus’s own worked example of the humility God requires before he will show mercy, contrasting the Pharisee’s self-confidence with the tax collector’s total self-abasement.⁶ Earlier, in his polemic against the Scholastic doctrine of confession, Calvin cites the tax collector’s prayer itself as the pattern true confession should follow: not an exhaustive, itemized inventory of sins recited to a priest, but an acknowledgment that one’s sins are “an abyss so great as to exceed our comprehension.” “On this rule,” Calvin writes, “we see the confession of the publican was formed, ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner.’”⁹

Reformed scholasticism: common grace and saving grace (Van Mastricht, 1699)

Writing within the developed system of later Reformed scholastic theology, Petrus van Mastricht turns to the same parable for a different, more diagnostic purpose: distinguishing counterfeit religious assurance from the real thing. Mastricht’s larger argument is that “great affinity is at times discerned between nature and grace,” so that outward religious performance, the Pharisee’s own fasting and tithing among them, can be mistaken for evidence of regeneration when it is not, a warning aimed at self-examination rather than at the historical Pharisee alone.⁸

Contemporary Pauline studies: the parable and the New Perspective (Hassler, 2011)

Writing within the debate opened by E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism and the New Perspective on Paul that followed it, Andrew Hassler treats this parable as primary-source evidence against readings of first-century Judaism as a non-legalistic “covenantal nomism.” Sanders and his successors argued that Judaism’s own theology never made obedience the ground of acceptance with God, which would weaken the Reformation’s reading of Paul’s polemic against “legalism.”¹ Hassler cites the Gospels’ own portrait of the Pharisees, this parable above all, as evidence that a self-righteous, contemptuous form of law-observance did exist among at least some first-century Jews, whatever the New Perspective says about Judaism’s official theology.¹ The wider debate over Paul, Judaism, and justification is treated at the New Perspective on Paul.

Objections and Responses

Does reading this parable as evidence of Pharisaic “legalism” risk caricaturing first-century Judaism, exactly what the New Perspective on Paul warns against? Hassler raises this caution himself: “discretion must be used to avoid statements that caricature the Pharisees and set them up as the foil for Christianity.”¹ His answer is that the caution does not require ignoring what the text itself says. Luke’s own introduction to the parable (18:9) names self-trust and contempt for others as the very attitude Jesus is answering, not a later interpretive imposition on the story; the parable targets one representative Pharisee’s prayer, not a claim about the theology of Judaism as a system.

If the Pharisee’s fasting and tithing count against him, does the parable undercut the value of such good works, which the confession elsewhere commends? Calvin and Mastricht both locate the problem somewhere other than the practices themselves. Calvin’s Pharisee “admits that the righteousness which he possesses is the gift of God”; what condemns him is confidence that the gift makes him acceptable on its own account, not the gift.⁶ Mastricht’s point is the same from the other direction: fasting and tithing can be real and still be merely common grace rather than saving grace, so their presence proves nothing about a person’s standing before God one way or the other.⁸ Good works remain the fruit of a Christian’s faith; the parable’s target is treating them as its ground.

Related Doctrines

References

Andrew Michael Hassler, “The Problem of Jewish Legalism,” in “Justification and the Individual in the Wake of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 35-69, at 64-65. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
The Westminster Confession of Faith (London, 1647), chap. 15, para. 3. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 15, “Of Repentance Unto Life and Salvation,” para. 1. Wording shared with A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and Practised in the Congregational Churches (Savoy Declaration) (London, 1658), chap. 15, para. 1, rather than with the differently-worded Westminster Confession chapter of the same title. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 15, para. 3. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” para. 1. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 12, sec. 7. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 3, chap. 12, sec. 8. ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester, from the 1699 Latin edition of Theoretico-practica theologia (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 17, “The Love, Grace, Mercy, Longsuffering, and Clemency of God,” 385-423, at 417. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 3, chap. 4. ↩