What does the evangelical parable about the publican and the Pharisee mean?
What does the evangelical parable about the publican and the Pharisee mean?
The Gospel narrates that Christ is oftenaddressed the people with parables. They had to awaken in the person certain moral feelings. Christ used parables as images for a clearer understanding of the basic moralistic truths of Christianity.
The parable of the publican and the Pharisee is set forth in the Gospel ofLuke. So, the Holy Scripture tells of two people who went to the temple in order to pray. One of them was a Pharisee, the other was a tax collector. The Pharisees in the Jewish people were people who had the status of experts in the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament. The Pharisees were respected by the people, they could be the religious teachers of the Jews. Tax collectors called tax collectors. People treated such people with contempt.
Christ tells us that the Pharisee, having entered into thetemple, stood in the very middle and proudly began to pray. The Jewish lawgiver thanked God for being not such a sinner as everyone else. The Pharisee mentioned the obligatory fasts, the prayers he performed for the glory of the Lord. At the same time, it was said with a sense of own vanity. Unlike the Pharisee, the publican stood modestly at the end of the temple and beat himself in the chest with humble words about the Lord being merciful to him who was a sinner.
Christ, having finished his story, announced to the people that the publican came out of the temple justified from God.
This narrative means that in a person notmust be pride, vanity and self-righteousness. The tax collector was a madman before God, for he more praised himself, forgetting that every person has some kind of sins. The publican showed humility. He felt a deep sense of repentance before God for his life. That is why the publican modestly stood aside and prayed for forgiveness.
The Orthodox Church says that humilityand the understanding of one's sins, together with penitential feeling, elevates a person before God. It is an objective view of one's sinfulness that opens the way for the Creator to the Creator and the possibility of moral perfection. No knowledge of God can be useful if a person is proud of them and puts himself above other people.
