“The Pharisee in the Mirror”
By Dayle K. Barrett
Sunday, March 15, 2026
Reading: Luke 18:9-14
I have a question. One I'd like you to ask yourselves as you sit with me today.
Are you a good person? What do you think? If I were to meet you in the street and ask you whether or not you're a good person, I think most people would say... Yeah? At least a decent person, right? I mean, I'm not a saint, but I'm not the worst of sinners. On the scale of Mother Teresa to Joseph Stalin, I've fed more people than I've slaughtered, right? At least this week.
Most of us probably feel pretty good about ourselves on a day-to-day basis. We're not awful. We're pretty okay. Most of us would say we're good people. In fact, most of us would say that most people are pretty good people, right? Not winning a Nobel Prize, but also not on the Epstein list. Not too bad. But if I were to ask you why you're a good person, you might find yourself sounding quite a lot like the Pharisee in this story. If I asked you why you're a good person, you'd say, well, I'm honest most of the time, I'm not unjust. I tell the truth, you know, a little white lie here and there, but nothing egregious. I don't cheat on my partner. I don't commit crimes. Or you might even think of good things you've done. You might say, I pay my taxes. I give to charity once in a while. I even made it all the way through dry January.
When we look at ourselves, we look at the way we measure goodness, it seems like what we're really saying when we say that we're decent people is that I know some people who are better and I know some people who are worse. And compared to them, I'm doing okay. This makes me wonder what our problem is with the Pharisee in this story, because surely his prayer to God is pretty much what we would all say if we were asked whether we were good. He doesn't seem to say anything outrageous. Compared to the tax collector, it looks like the Pharisee is the arrogant one and the tax collector is the humble one, and that's what we're supposed to get from this story. Yet, if we look at ourselves and we think about what makes us good people or what makes us decent people, our answers are no different from the prayer of the Pharisee.
So why did the tax collector go away justified while the Pharisee didn't?
Well, an answer that might come to mind immediately is because the Pharisee’s a Pharisee, right? I mean, nobody likes Pharisees. I think they're the only group of people in the New Testament that we feel like we're justified to not like, right? Those are the mean ones. They were really mean to Jesus, constantly challenging him, accusing his disciples of all kinds of stuff. The Pharisees are the worst of the worst.
In fact, when we use the word Pharisee today, it's usually as an insult, isn't it? If you call someone a Pharisee, you're saying they're really judgmental or they're a total hypocrite. And yet, I don't get the impression that Jesus felt the same way about the Pharisees that a lot of us Christians do. I don't get the impression that Jesus saw them as the least favourite group among his people.
In fact, the reason why Jesus was constantly in debate with them was because he ate with them quite a lot. He was sitting around at tables with them, talking to them all the time, trying to get them to understand that the kingdom of God is sitting there right in front of their faces. Perhaps the Pharisees weren't the least loved among the people of Israel, among the sects.
I would argue that they may have been the favourites. You see, there were three main sects in Israel at this time. One was the Essenes. The Essenes were an apocalyptic people waiting for the Messiah to come. They had all these prophecies and texts that were kind of mystical in their writing. Many of them dwelt in the wilderness and in the desert where they would forsake riches and goods and wait for the coming kingdom of God. They had this clear distinction between light and darkness that overlooked everything they said and did. If you want a picture in your mind of an Essene, a lot of people think John the Baptist was one of them. A wild man with unkept hair who ate wild honey and locusts.
Then there were the Sadducees. The Sadducees were the quintessential people of the book. Five were enough. The Torah, the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible is what they based everything on. They were deeply committed to understanding Torah and living by Torah, so they rightly divided the law. They were very persistent in making sure we were living according to what the books of the law said.
Then there were the Pharisees. And the Pharisees were different because not only did they follow the books of the law, but they were also steeped in an incredibly rich oral tradition – sayings and teachings that had been handed down from generation to generation that weren't written in the first five books of the Bible. They were steeped in wisdom literature and poetry and prophecy and unlike their friends the Sadducees, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection.
I think the reason why Jesus spent so much time around them is because he thought that if anyone was going to recognize him when he came, it would be them. Because they'd heard all the teachings. They were steeped in all the wisdom literature. They were waiting for a Messiah to come who would rise from the dead. It's no surprise then when we see that it's Pharisees that are often the most converted in the Bible.
Nicodemus, a Pharisee, seems to convert to Christ in the book of John. Paul the Apostle describes himself as a Pharisee, who when he saw the risen Christ in the sky on his way to Damascus realized, wait a minute. That's the man that we were promised. That's the Messiah I've been waiting for. My argument today, friends, is that maybe the Pharisees weren't the disruptive kid in the class. Maybe they were the teacher's pet, who the teacher was really hard on because more was expected from them. Any teachers in here? Yeah, you're really hard on the genius, aren't you? Because you know that you expect the most out of that child.
Speaking of disruptive children…
There was this kid in my school when I was in secondary school. And I'm really tempted to name him, but I'm not going to because, you know, “walk by the spirit and you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” But I could not stand this kid, okay? We were in the same class, so I had to go to a lot of lessons with him. And I couldn't stand him. In fact, no one could stand him because he was just a really disruptive kid. I'm not talking about the fun-loving class clown; the one that has a few jokes, and everyone laughs. No, I'm not talking about that kid. I'm talking about the kid who makes everyone's day miserable. He'd show up like halfway through the class and interrupt everything, and then he'd be talking all the way through and get the teacher in a bad mood, and then now the teacher's being kind of mean to the class because this one person ruined her day.
He’d come in with his uniform all disheveled, he cursed all the time, and he was constantly getting into fights. I swear he had 50 detentions a week or something like that. Couldn't stand this kid. To this day when I think back, I see him as the poster child for why they should have kept corporal punishment in high schools. But things changed. I look back now and I can say, well, he probably had some problems at home and there's many reasons why he acted the way he did.
Around that time while we were in high school, schools became more sensitive to that sort of thing as well. I remember the year they started bringing in guidance counselors and people that could help people through their issues and deal with why they were acting the way they were. And this one year, they came up with this new behaviour program for certain kids in the school. What they were going to do is, depending on what you were getting wrong, they would reward you for getting things right. So, for him, the plan was, if he went through a whole week without getting a detention he'd get a prize on Friday. Slowly we start to see he comes into school and he's wearing his uniform almost correctly. Like not correctly, but way better than it used to be. He only shows up to class five minutes late instead of all the way through the class; he hands in his homework the next day instead of the next week; he's getting in fewer fights, and he's getting closer to what the expectations were in the school. So, he gets let off a bit and the teachers give him a bit of grace.
But when I saw him two rows in front of me on the bus eating that Kit Kat that he got from the teacher… I was not happy at all. Because I was on time for my classes every time. And I always handed my homework in on time. And I always wore my school uniform properly. And here's this kid getting rewarded for being slightly below average. It didn't seem fair. It didn't seem just. It didn't seem right at all.
So, you can understand how the Pharisees felt when this guy called Jesus comes along and says, “repent and believe, and you can enter the kingdom of God.” What are you talking about? I've been studying the law my whole life. I've learned all this wisdom tradition and poetry and prophecy. I've been doing what it takes to be righteous, and you want to tell me that God's just going to let these Gentiles in? Forgive them of their sins just because they believe? It's atrocious. In fact, if you spent your whole life dedicated to that, you might be so mad that you want to persecute those people… like they did.
That's the scandal of the gospel, isn't it? That we're not justified according to our righteousness, according to our works, but we're justified by the free grace of God given despite the way we've lived our entire lives. We're the ones eating a Kit-Kat bar in front of that kid that's really mad at us on the third row.
When we read this prayer in Bible study, someone said to me, I work in the legal profession, and this story doesn't make any sense. The Pharisee sounds like he's got everything right. He's not an extortioner, he's not unjust, he's not an adulterer. He fasts twice a week, he gives tithes of all that he possesses. Why isn't that enough for God? Why does God justify the sinner and leave this good man without justification?
Well, Paul, the Pharisee himself, gives us a reason. In Romans Chapter 10, he says:
Brethren, my heart desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God's righteousness and seeking to establish their own righteousness have not submitted to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.
He's saying you can't get your righteousness by fulfilling this law. You can't fulfill this law. But you can gain righteousness in the end of the law, which is Christ and Christ alone.
Okay, so we've established that the problem isn't that the guy's a Pharisee. So maybe the problem is what he said, right? It must be the prayer. The prayer must be the reason why he's not justified. Although if we look at the prayer you can't even see what he said wrong here. It begins with the words, “God, I thank you that I'm not like other men. Extortioners, the unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all I possess.” It's not like he's saying, “God, I'm such a great person all by myself.” He's grateful to God for his righteousness.
He's going to God and saying, God, it's because of you that I'm not an extortioner. It's because of you that I'm not unjust. It's because of you that I'm not an adulterer, that I fast twice a week and give tithes. He seems to be giving the glory to God for his good behavior.
Think about it yourself. If you're sitting in front of me today and you're sober, I bet you thank God that you're not an addict. If you're sitting in here in front of me and your family's together, you probably thank God that it wasn't ripped apart.
It's okay to thank God for the goodness that you're living in your life. In fact, this prayer that the Pharisee prays isn't even an uncommon prayer in the tradition at this time. Let's look at a few examples. Slide one, please.
This is from a first century text called the Talmud. It's Berakhot 28b. It says:
I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, that you have set my portion with those who sit in the house of study and you have not set my portion with those who sit on street corners. For I rise early and they rise early. I rise early for words of Torah, and they rise early for words of emptiness. I run and they run. I run toward the life of the world to come, and they run towards the pit of destruction.
In this early prayer from the same time period, we see someone realizing, ‘God, you've blessed me. You've brought me into your house of study so that I can focus on your word. And I see that a lot of people are going the other way. So, thank you, God, for not making me live in that bad situation.’ All right, we don't have a big problem with this prayer, right? You might have a problem with this second one. The Tosefta Berakhot, 618. Rabbi Judah says:
One must say three blessings every day. Blessed be God that he did not make me a Gentile. Blessed be God that he did not make me a woman. Blessed be God that he did not make me an ignorant man.
International Women's Day was last week, I thought we had to balance it out with a bit of light-hearted sexism. No, the reason why I'm using this slide is to show you that there are much worse examples of prayers from this time period than the one that Jesus brings up. While we're on the topic though, following up, “blessed be God that he did not make me a woman” with “blessed be God that he didn't make me ignorant,” sounds crazy in 2026! (Tell me you're not self-aware without telling me you're not self-aware!) But this, this kind of finger pointing, as it looks to us today, was a common way to pray at that time, because they were thankful for the distinction between them and others.
Okay, let's go to the third one. The Thanksgiving Scroll, we'll probably like this one the most. “I give thanks to thee, O Lord, for thou hast not cast my lot in the congregation of vanity, nor hast thou set my portion in the council of cunning.” You see the pattern here? A normal way to pray in first century Judea was to thank God that you were not living in sin. Thank God that you've set me apart, that you've given me your word, that you've blessed me in all these ways, and so I'm in a better situation than I otherwise would have been, were it not for you. It wasn't about being arrogant or looking down on other people. The prayers were about recognizing the special blessing of God upon one's life.
So, what's wrong with the Pharisee in this story? Well, the good news is this story appears in the Gospel of Luke. And out of all the Gospel evangelists, Luke is the best at setting a parable. If you look at the context around one of Luke's parables, he'll let you know exactly what it means. And a few times he even tells you right at the beginning of the story, like he does here. Just before this parable, Jesus says, “When the Son of Man comes, will he really find faith on the Earth?” And then Luke frames the parable like this: “He spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others.”
The problem with the Pharisee wasn't that he was a Pharisee. The problem wasn't that he was thankful to God for the goodness that he was experiencing in his life. The problem was that his faith wasn't centered on God. It was centered on himself. He trusted in himself that he was righteous and, in the process, he despised others.
In verse 11, it says, “the Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself.” And when we read that sentence, what we imagine is that he's standing there by himself with no one else around to pray this prayer. But in the original Greek, the word that we translate here as “with” is the word pros. It literally means “to” or “towards”. The Pharisee wasn't just praying by himself; he was praying to himself!
This raises a question: Are we aware that it's possible to be standing in the temple with your eyes and your hands up to heaven and not be praying to God? Do we know that it's possible to get down on your knees beside your bed and clasp your hands and start your prayer with, “God, I thank you,” while you're just talking to yourself? Because the issue here isn't that God's not listening. The issue here is that he's not really addressing the true God in the first place. He's praying to a God of his own construction. His higher self. He's setting intentions. He's put himself first as the source of righteousness before a holy and just God.
If we look at the Pharisee and think he's the only one that does this, it might be helpful to look at a few examples from our own lives. Because I've noticed the conversations around Christianity seem to sound a bit like this Pharisee's life recently. Some people say to me, “Dayle, we really need to bring back the real Christianity, you know? Instead of this hateful, judgmental stuff we see on the news today.”
Or maybe people on the other side of the political aisle will say, “We need to bring back real Christianity, you know? Not this airy-fairy, do what you want stuff that we see in the church today.”
I wonder if when liberal Christians pray, they sound a bit like this. “Lord, I thank you that I am not a right-wing evangelical Trump-supporting Republican who hates women and immigrants. Amen.”
And on the other side you have Christians praying, “God, I thank you that I'm not a radical leftist communist Christian who wants to kill babies in the womb and have open borders.”
Can you see it yet?
The Pharisee in the Mirror…
The problem with the Pharisee is that he created a God of his own construction. It's so easy as Christians to create a God out of our ideologies. We want Jesus to be as conservative as we are, or as liberal as we are. We want to pray to a God who would vote the same way we would or deal with all the social issues the way that we want to. So, many times we abandon what God clearly tells us because we're so committed to a way of thinking that was never declared to us by God in the first place. And when we do that, we stand in front of a throne with our heads up to heaven and our arms out, and we don't pray to the God of heaven; we pray to ourselves. We pray to a God of our own construction.
The truth is, friends, when we stand before a true and holy God, we don't compare ourselves to other people and feel more righteous. When we stand before the true God, the God who created heaven and earth, we realize that our righteousness isn't in comparison to somebody else. But the only person we're ever being held up to is our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
I wonder if we compared ourselves to him instead of comparing ourselves to the neighbour, if we'd still feel like we were such good, decent people. Or if, like the tax collector, we'd fall down on our faces and beat our breasts and say, “Lord have mercy upon me, a sinner.”
So, how do you repent?
Step one, be a sinner. I'm not telling you to go out and do bad things. That's not what I mean by that. What I mean is if you want to have the right attitude, the right direction when you go before the throne of God, you have to realize that you go before God imperfect. You have to know that measured up beside a Christ who never sinned once. You’re not good, and neither am I.
A Catholic priest, late in his career was asked one day, “What is the worst thing you’ve ever heard in the confessional booth?”
After some thought, he said, “I've heard everything in this booth. But the worst thing that I've heard isn't what you think it is. It wasn't murder or fraud or theft or adultery or abuse. The worst thing I've ever heard in this confessional booth was when someone came and sat down and said, ‘I have nothing to confess today, father. I'm just grateful.’”
With tears in his eyes, he stared down the camera and said, “There's no grace for such a person.”
Like I've said before, I'll say again today that when you go before the throne of God you have to pick a righteousness. You can either stand before God in your own righteousness, or you can stand in the righteousness that comes from Christ Jesus, but you can't have both. If your message before God today is that you're a good person because of some stuff you did or didn't do. You might feel justified. But if, like the tax collector, we come recognizing that compared to Christ our righteousness is as filthy rags. If we say, “Woe is me, for I am undone. I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips.” If we say, “Have mercy upon me, a sinner.” Then perhaps there's hope for salvation.
Step two, fall on the grace and mercy of God.
The confessional booth is a place that most of us Protestants aren't very familiar with. Sounds like an archaic thing from years ago. After all, you can approach God by yourself and confess your sins. Why would you tell someone else, right?
I do wonder sometimes, friends, if when we got rid of sacramental confession, we also lost something in our ability to find God's grace. You see, we often think about confession as a place of guilt and shame, and it can become that if it's not done properly. But I think confession is really our way to the grace of God.
Think about this. If you've done something you feel terrible about, and you have nowhere to talk about it, we usually find ourselves in one of two positions. We have to deal with this cognitive dissonance, this big chasm between the way we know we should live according to what we believe and the way we're actually living day to day. Because it's easier, what many of us do is try to change what we believe. Because we don't rely on the free gift of grace that God gives us, we try to convince ourselves that what we know is sin isn't sin at all. We tie ourselves into theological pretzels, trying to justify things that God has told us is wrong so that we can feel better and live a lie.
Then there's the other end. Because if you haven't done that, maybe what you're doing is carrying around a bunch of guilt and shame every single day. Feeling like you're never good enough, that you'll never measure up, that the God of heaven could never love somebody like you.
This is the power of confession. That when we go in front of a person and we're open about everything that we're feeling terrible about, that person, that messenger from God has an opportunity to agree with you. Yes, what you did was wrong and it is sin. But here's the good news: Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
A good minister might share with you the words, “May the almighty and merciful God grant you absolution and remission of all your sins, true repentance, amendment of life, and the grace and consolation of his Holy Spirit.” You might be told audibly so that you can hear it, that you are free and that God has wiped away all your sins.
They might even help you change those habits and those behaviours that are separating you from God in the first place. They might help you identify your triggers and the things that lead you astray so that you can walk with God in a way that you haven't before.
Confession isn't a way to feel horrible about yourself. It's a way to be set free. First, be a sinner. Second, fall upon the mercy and grace of God. Last but not least, get up and walk away justified. Because when we're open about who we are, and we throw it at the foot of the cross, and we allow the blood of Jesus to wash away all that sin and shame, when we believe Him who said that we could be made new. Then, we get up justified. Not that God justifies our sin, but that God forgets and forgives our sin and justifies us.
Paul, a Pharisee, reminds us of these things in Philippians chapter three, where he says:
Yet indeed I count all things lost for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness which is from the law but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.
I don't know what you're carrying today, friends. I'm not sure what battle you have going inside yourself. But I know that if you bring it to God today and you lay it at His feet, He has enough grace to wash every single bit of it away so that you might stand before Him righteous, not in your own righteousness, but in the righteousness of God. Thanks be to God.