Good Guys and Bad Guys
We like stories with good guys who are easily distinguishable from bad guys. Or perhaps we should correct our language to say that we like to find good people whom we can recognize as different from bad people. In the old Westerns you could tell who the good guys were by the color of their hats. We don’t wear hats much anymore, but we still have some ways to figure out who is on the side of good and truth and justice and who is playing for the other team. We tend to think that folks who are like us in some easily definable way must be on the good side, and we’re suspicious of those whom we can’t quite identify with.
The problem is that if we apply this test to Jesus’s parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, our rule of thumb gets messed up. Are we more like the Pharisee who can list at length all the good things he does or more like the tax collector who doesn’t even try to list any redeeming qualities? Surely the good guys are the ones who do good things like going to church and putting a lot of money in the offering plate and serving on church committees. That’s not even to mention all the shady activities they avoid. When we hear that someone has had run-ins with the law or has trouble making nice in polite society, we’re pretty sure what color hat to put on that person.
If we are decent self-respecting folks, we ought to think that we’re most like the Pharisee. But we don’t because we know how the parable ends. So, because the Pharisee doesn’t look so good in the end, we think that we must not be so like him after all. We’re really like that tax collector who knows that he needs to repent and not brag so much about his goodness. So, in the end the parable is not condemning us after all, but only those good people who unlike us haven’t learned to keep quiet about how good we are.
I once had a roommate in college whom nobody liked. What put most people off was the way he continually dropped into almost every conversation some account that portrayed him as smarter or more athletic or richer or generally better than others. If other people had a story that put them in a good light, he could always top it. My other roommates tended to think that he wanted to use his accounts of himself as a way to be accepted or perhaps respected. But most people reacted in the opposite way. They were annoyed with his need to constantly build himself up in our eyes.
I’ll bet that when I told you the story of my roommate, you didn’t immediately think, “I am just like him.” You knew by the way I was describing him that this wasn’t someone you wanted to identify with. I think I can say more generally that when we encounter bad behavior from others, we are not typically inclined to think, “I have some traits like those I find deplorable in this other person.” We’re mostly inclined to see the ways we’re like those we find admirable and not to notice the ways we’re like those who put us off. We’re inclined to make excuses for our bad qualities and to take credit for the good ones.
Here’s what’s unnerving about Jesus’s parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. We don’t really identify with the tax collector. He seems like a bad character. But we can’t identify with the Pharisee either. Despite all his good qualities, he turns out to be the villain.
Like many of Jesus’ parables, this one seems to call for us to figure out who we are in the story. But if we start thinking, “I’m like the tax collector who knows what a miserable sinner he is,” it seems a short step to thinking “I am sure glad I am not like that self-righteous Pharisee. Thank God for that.”
Here’s part of our problem. We like the idea of dividing up the world into good guys and bad guys, and we like to think that we’re on the good side. Maybe the truth is different. Maybe we ought to be thinking that none of us is either so good or so bad that it’s clear which side we’re on.
If you start thinking you’re one of the good guys, the problem may not be that you brag about it, but that the real truth is much less clear than this simplistic portrayal. If we think it is clear, we probably lack a significant degree of self-awareness. The Pharisee is in many respects a great guy, one of the best. But he’s just too sure about where he comes out in the scale of goodness. On the other hand, it’s blindingly obvious to the tax collector that he’s not one of the good guys. But in his self-awareness is the potential for something better.
Admittedly, if he never gets past beating his chest and lamenting how awful he is, the tax collector is unlikely to make much progress. On the other hand, the tax collector’s recognition that all is not well with him may be a step to genuinely appreciating the power of divine grace.
Who are you in this story? Are you the Pharisee who needs greater self-awareness to get in touch with reality? Or are you the tax collector who doesn’t have much going for him except the kind of awareness that can lead to change? Whoever you are, you need to get rid of the idea that we can draw a sharp line between the good guys and the bad guys. We would do better to think that we’re all in the same boat.
