The Pharisees of the New Testament have come too easily to be synonymous with “hypocrite,” which is more than a little unfair. The Pharisees were the ones who, amid an imploding world, kept the faith. And in the story Jesus told in Luke 18, the Pharisee was an upstanding fellow. He didn’t gouge his customers for profit, didn’t sneak around on his wife, didn’t do underhanded deals. His word was his bond; he was the sort of fellow you wanted as your neighbor, your business partner – heck, your pastor. The other fellow in the story, however, was a real scoundrel, a shady tax collector. He was, in the words of Robert Capon: “the worst kind of crook: a legal one, a big operator, a mafia-style enforcer…living for years on the cream he’s skimmed off other people’s milk money.” He was “a fat cat who drives a stretch limo, drinks nothing but Chivas Regal, and never shows up at a party without at least two $500-a-night call girls in tow.”
So the Pharisee was a good fellow, but as the story goes, he was so very full of himself, so very self-righteous, that he didn’t think he had any need for grace. The tax collector, however, was a wreck. He’d hit bottom and knew he was in a bad way. The Pharisee, because he was so drunk on his own goodness, spurned the grace he needed. The tax collector, because he could not keep up the charade of his own goodness, opened himself wide to let the grace pour in.
Of course, perhaps this is all humdrum and some of us are getting restless because I’ve hinted that this story might have something to say about a certain electoral engagement soon approaching. Well, there’s a word in this story that has not received appropriate attention: contempt. Jesus tells us that this Pharisee felt contempt for the tax-collector. To feel contempt is to disdain another, to regard them as nothing. To pour contempt on another is to dehumanize them, to reject their value and beauty as an image bearer of God. In Jesus’ eyes, contempt was the Pharisee’s severe brand of self-righteousness. But here’s the thing about self-righteousness: it makes us feel so good, so smart, so quick with the cutting wit; it make us feel superior, part of the right crowd, part of the righteous crowd. And yet it leads us into a dark hole. When we feed our contempt for another human, we drink deep from a bitter cup. We gulp in the soul’s poison.
There are, to be sure, many serious matters to be weighed with this election. There are issues of grave concern threatening severe consequences. We ought to think hard and promote ideas that are true and just and healing. But whatever comes on election day, if we’ve surrendered our shared humanity, we have surrender far too much. If we are people of faith and yet our political opinion evidences contempt for other women and men God dearly loves (in spite of who they’re voting for), then our faith, in this instance, has gone dead. It’s one thing to disagree with Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or those who support them – but contempt is something entirely different. Our contempt might feel so good in the moment. It may gain us some of those coveted thumbs up on FB or knowing chuckles at the office – but contempt will destroy our souls.
We can not say we are fighting a righteous cause or a just cause if we lie about another human, if we slander another human, if we degrade another human’s dignity. The truth as we see it may be pointed, it may even sting – but if we become contemptuous, we really need to pause and look deep in our soul.