NOTES for Luk 18:9-14
Is it bad to fast regularly, pray, and carefully fulfill religious prescriptions? Some, commenting on the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee, say yes, it is bad. It is bad because this distracts from the main thing, from spiritual life as such, from a living relationship with God, and makes a person admire himself. Others object: no, it is not bad; the parable is about something else. It is about the pride that makes one exalt oneself and humiliate the neighbor standing nearby. If there is no pride and self-exaltation, then everything is in order, and one can fulfill all religious duties without becoming like the Pharisee in the Gospel.
With a closer look at the situation, it is not hard to see that both sides are right, each in its own way. The Pharisees really were deeply religious people. How sincere they were, and what stood behind their religiosity, is another question. Most of all, there was here what always hides behind any religiosity: a certain measure of sincerity, an occasional deep and rich spiritual life, and much more often superficiality covered by more or less zealous legalism. In short, everything was as it is with religious people of every age and tradition.
If such a religious person set out on the spiritual path and followed it to the end, he usually outgrew his religiosity so thoroughly that it practically ceased to define his life, only slightly touching its surface, though from the outside, to people whose gaze did not penetrate deeper than that surface, such a person might seem deeply religious.
Jesus, however, condemns in the Pharisee neither his religiosity nor even pride as such; pride is only a consequence. He draws attention to what gives birth to pride, to its spiritual root. That root is a person's gaze fixed on himself, on one or another of his abilities or qualities. This inner gaze, shifted by a person from God to himself, destroys all his spiritual efforts, redirecting them from their true goal and real object to a supposed goal, to an object that is in essence only an illusion, a mirage generated by the effort of a falsely directed human will.
The point is not even that fallen humanity is almost always inclined to overestimate its abilities and qualities, seeing itself as better than it really is. The point is that, if we speak specifically about spiritual life, fallen humanity has no abilities or qualities at all. Righteousness is not a property of a fallen person, but his state, derived from that dynamic of relationship between the person and God without which no righteousness can be spoken of at all. By examining and analyzing himself, a person loses that dynamic.
Even if, in such examination, he perceives something true, that truth turns out to be relative; it is only a static cross section of spiritual dynamics that cannot be grasped while spinning before the psychological mirrors set up in one's own soul, as the Pharisee does in the Savior's parable. This shift of attention from the process of living communion with God to its reflection in one's own soul is what breaks a person's spiritual life and destroys his relationship with God, even though outwardly it may seem that everything is in order. In the religious sense, he really remains as devout as he always was. Now, however, behind that piety there is spiritual emptiness, and this is what Jesus warns about in His parable.