to the caress of a reassuring feather. We know all about good Samaritans.
Even more is that true of the parable to which we turn in this chapter. I have retold it in modern dress in an attempt to help us feel more powerfully the contradiction of conventional expectation that it represents.
Think about it for a moment. Two men went up to the temple to pray. A self-evidently laudable ambition, you would have thought. Both came to pray and both went home believing sincerely that they had prayed. Yet the extraordinary lesson of this parable is that while one of them truly did have dealings with God in his devotions that day, the other, in spite of his avowed good intentions, was conducting a soliloquy all the time he was in the temple.
The text which our translation renders 'prayed about himself' (verse 11) could equally be translated, 'prayed to himself'. The prayer was indeed a soliloquy. That alone should be sufficient to worry us, shouldn't it? Yet Jesus says it is possible to come to church thinking that you want to meet with God, and leave believing you have done so, and all the time be self-deceived. What a disturbing challenge to the reality of our own spiritual experience that must be!
But the paradox is even sharper than that. And it's here that the modern reader so easily forfeits the scandalous element in the story. For Jesus tells us that the man whose prayer was heard was a tax man. For us, that occasions no surprise. In our society, representatives of the Inland Revenue, generally speaking, are pillars of the Establishment; we make occasional sarcastic jokes about them, but none of us would question their respectability.
Not so this tax man. In Jesus' day a tax man was a crook, a treacherous, despicable collaborator with the Roman enemy, who made himself rich by exploiting his fellow countrymen. Think of some provincial mayor in France lining his fat pockets during the days of the
