Two Men Went Up to Pray

Two men walked into the same building to pray. One was the sort of person every parent hopes their child becomes. The other was the sort you cross the street to avoid.

You already know which one comes out well. That is the trouble: we skim the middle, where one word sits that almost nobody has explained.

Jesus was a Jewish teacher who lived about two thousand years ago, and Christians believe he was God's own Son. He taught in parables — short made-up stories, each making one point. Luke, who wrote his life down, names this story's audience in one line.

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt.

Luke 18:9

Luke means people who were sure they were good and looked down on everyone else. Both halves come back later.

The building is the temple in Jerusalem, the one place in the country where animals were killed as an offering for sin. Not a quiet chapel: smoke, blood, priests, crowds.

1. The religious man's prayer was completely true

The first man is a Pharisee — one of the strict religious teachers, respected by everyone, serious about obeying God's law.

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

He is not lying. God's law set aside one day a year for the nation's sin and told Israel to go without food on it (Leviticus 16:29). He fasts twice a week. A tithe means handing back a tenth of what you earn; he gives a tenth of everything, and Pharisees counted even garden herbs (Luke 11:42). He really is more careful than almost anyone reading this.

So what is wrong with him? Isaiah, a prophet who spoke for God, answered that centuries earlier.

All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.

Isaiah 64:6

Notice what he measures. Not our worst days — our best ones. Set beside God, the good material is the dirty laundry. Effort is not bad; it is just not what makes a person right with God. Paul, once a Pharisee himself, later called his own spotless record a total loss next to knowing Christ (Philippians 3:7-8).

But this is not "so being careful does not matter." Jesus blocks that exit.

Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:20

He does not tell them to aim lower than the scribes and Pharisees, the law experts and the strict teachers. They are the most careful people in town, and he says you need more than they have before you can belong to God's kingdom. Impossible, if you must supply it. The second man shows where it comes from.

2. The second man did not ask for mercy. He asked for a sacrifice.

A tax collector collected money for Rome, the foreign empire occupying the land. He worked for the people holding his neighbours down, and kept whatever extra he could squeeze out. Picture a neighbour collecting your rent and handing it to an invading army.

But the tax collector, 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

Most translations put "be merciful" there. That is not the ordinary Greek word for mercy. Twenty-five verses later a blind man shouts, "Son of David, have mercy on me" (Luke 18:38) — the common word, eleēson. Luke uses it elsewhere, and not here.

The word here is hilasthēti. It belongs to the family of words for making atonement — covering sin with a sacrifice so a guilty person can come near God and live. He is not asking for a better mood. He is standing in the building where sin was covered by blood, asking God to let a sacrifice cover his.

Once a year the high priest — the one man allowed into the temple's innermost room — went in carrying blood.

Then he shall kill the goat of the sin offering that is for the people and bring its blood inside the curtain… Thus he shall make atonement for the Holy Place.

Leviticus 16:15-16

The blood went onto the lid of the gold chest that held God's law. The old Greek version of the Jewish scriptures calls that lid the hilastērion — the same root as the tax collector's word.

He also does not quite say "a sinner." In Greek he says the sinner. He has stopped measuring himself against anyone. In that crowded temple there is one sinner, and it is him.

But the temple never settled the matter. The blood came back every year — its own admission that the problem was still there. Then it was settled for good.

God put [Christ Jesus] forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.

Romans 3:25

"Propitiation" is a heavy old word. The Greek behind it is hilastērion, the same word used for that lid in Hebrews 9:5. Whether Paul means the lid itself or the wider act it stood for, the word now lands on a person: Jesus is where the blood goes. The tax collector asked for something he could not see, and God answered in public, on a cross.

3. He went home right with God before he had fixed anything

Jesus gives the verdict himself.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other.

Luke 18:14

"Justified" is a courtroom word. It means declared right — a judge's ruling, not a report card showing improvement. A defendant hears it. A student cannot earn it.

Count what he has done to deserve it. He has not repaid anyone, resigned, or promised anything, and Jesus says he is right with God. That should be uncomfortable.

Paul says it in a sentence that sounds almost illegal.

To the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.

Romans 4:5

Look at the word "ungodly." Paul does not say God declares good people good; that would not be news. He says God declares guilty people right — which no judge may do unless someone else has already taken the penalty. Someone has. A gift to people who cannot repay it is what Christians mean by grace, and Paul says God set it up so nobody could boast (Ephesians 2:8-9).

Now the honest difficulty. James, another writer in the same Bible, says:

A person is justified by works and not by faith alone.

James 2:24

That looks like a flat contradiction, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. They answer different questions. Paul asks what gets a guilty person declared right. James asks how you tell a living faith from a dead one, and answers: watch what it does. One chapter later, Luke shows another tax collector giving half his money to the poor and repaying everyone he cheated four times over (Luke 19:8). Nobody set that as the entry price. It is what a forgiven man does on his way out.

4. Being sure you are good and looking down on people are one illness

Go back to Luke's opening line. Jesus aimed this at people who "trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt" (Luke 18:9). Two symptoms, one disease.

Watch it inside the prayer. The Pharisee cannot say who he is without saying who he is not: "not like other men… or even like this tax collector." Remove the other man and he has nothing left to give thanks for.

Jesus explained why at a dinner, when a Pharisee was disgusted that a woman with a bad reputation was touching Jesus' feet. He told a short story about two debtors who were both let off, then asked which one would love the lender more.

He who is forgiven little, loves little.

Luke 7:47

Your love runs on the size of the debt you know you owed. Shrink the debt in your mind and the love shrinks with it. That is arithmetic, not a call to try harder to feel warm.

Paul asks it as a question.

What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not?

1 Corinthians 4:7

Name one thing about yourself you made out of nothing. Your mind, your health, the person who taught you to read — it all arrived. You can be grateful for a gift or proud of it, but not both.

Paul never grew out of this. Decades later, writing to a younger man he had trained, he says:

Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.

1 Timothy 1:15

Not "I was." I am. The man who wrote many of the letters in the Bible still described himself the way the tax collector did: the sinner, front of the queue. It is the only address where grace can reach you.

What to do with this

Pray the tax collector's prayer this week, out loud, with nobody else in it. No names, no comparisons. Just: God, have mercy on me, the sinner.

Catch the quiet comparison. Most of us never boast out loud. We do it silently: at least I am not as bad as he is. Catch one this week and stop it mid-thought. Then say the harder thing: I do not know what he is carrying, and my own account is not clear.

Do the repaying, but keep the order right. If you have taken something — money, credit for someone else's work, an hour you were paid for — go and put it right. Be clear about why: you are not buying the verdict, you already have it.

Two men walked into the same building. One brought a list. The other brought an honest name for himself and one request: let the sacrifice count for me. One went home as he came in. The other went home right with God, the bill already in the hands of the man telling the story.