Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going?”
Fayan said, “Around on pilgrimage.”
Dizang said, “What is the purpose of pilgrimage?”
Fayan said, “I don’t know.”
Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”
This Zen Buddhist teaching story has been rattling around in my mind for the last couple of years, particularly the punch line: Not knowing is most intimate. I think it goes to the heart of our ongoing efforts to live a shared life of humility, hospitality, compassion, and care–care for ourselves, for one another, for our society, for the earth. All of these aspects of our life are grounded in intimacy, by which I mean living in the realization that we are not separate–that we are not separate from ourselves, from one another, from all of creation. We are all expressions, we are all manifestations, of the one ground of being that we call God; the ground that is the source and the end of all things. It is our realization of this truth that moves us to act with humility, hospitality, compassion, and care, even though our awakening, our realization, is often obscure, vague, and incomplete. It is our ignorance of this intimacy, of this non-separateness, that turns us into the path of pride, greed, anger, and hatred. And…AND…this ignorance so often is expressed, paradoxically, in our certainty that we know something. I’m thinking particularly here of how we are so often certain that we “know” other people–that we “know” what they think, what they feel; that we know who they are. We are especially good at “knowing” people with whom we have no actual personal acquaintance and especially those who are different from ourselves in how they live and what they believe…especially when their assumed beliefs are in apparent opposition to what we believe. In fact, all we actually know is what we think about others. The “known” other is just a projection of our thoughts about them. Our thoughts about others are just our thoughts, they are not the others in themselves. So, strangely, this “knowing” of others–knowing them as objects of our knowledge–this “knowing” is based on our ignorance of the fundamental truth of our life: that we are not separate, that we are intimately interwoven–that we intimately interpenetrate one another and all things…that, ultimately, we ARE one another. So, not knowing is most intimate.
By now, I expect you’ve already cottoned onto where I’m going with today’s familiar parable from Luke’s gospel. The apparent butt of the parable–the Pharisee–clearly is entangled in his “knowing”–his “knowing” of himself and of others. He “knows” himself as separate from others by virtue of his fasting and his tithing, and, by extension, he “knows” himself to be better than those others by virtue of his outward piety. He even views those others with contempt, including the tax collector, who is right there, also praying in the temple. Luke even tees things up for us before the parable is told, saying that Jesus…told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.
The tax collector, on the other hand, does not exalt himself as anything exceptional. He does not trust in himself. He does not thank God for setting him apart, for making him separate from others. Rather, he expresses his weakness, imperfection, and dependency; he recognizes his need for Divine mercy. Then the parable concludes with Jesus justifying the tax collector and repeating the exact same lesson he gave earlier in chapter 14 of Luke at the banquet in the Pharisee’s home: all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.
That’s it. That’s the lesson. Very tidy. It’s almost more like a proverb or a moral tale than a parable: bad, prideful, arrogant, contemptuous Pharisee…good, humble, self-effacing tax collector. The moral of the story is that we should be like the tax collector and not like the Pharisee. From this point of view, the parable feels too pat, too comfortable. It seems to lack the paradox and ambiguity that we expect from a parable. I say it seems to lack these qualities because I don’t think it actually does lack them. I want to explain this from two different angles, so stick with me and I’ll try to make myself clear. Humor me, I need your mercy.
First, as we look at these two guys in the temple, we need to enlarge our view of them–enlarge it beyond the two-dimensional cutout characters of a moral tale. If we look at them from the outside, within the social context of their world, we see in the Pharisee a person to be admired. He is a good observant Jew, as was Jesus. He prays, fasts, and tithes. All of these are admirable practices and should be respected. We also know that, at the time of Jesus, the Pharisees and Jesus had a lot more in common than the later gospel writers try to tell us. They both were in conflict with the temple priesthood and its collusion with the Roman occupiers. They both called for a return to the simpler, more ascetic roots of their tradition. They really were among the good guys. It was only later, at the time of the gospel writers, that the Pharisees began to be portrayed as enemies. By that time, the Pharisees were competitors with the emerging Jesus movement–competitors for “market share” within Judaism–in conflict over different visions of the Jewish way of life.
In contrast, looking at the tax collector within his social context, we have someone who definitely is not one of the good guys. His daily job is to serve the Roman occupiers by collecting exorbitant taxes from his fellow Jews. He is a collaborator with the empire, a traitor to his community. Perhaps that is why he describes himself as a sinner, too ashamed to look up when he prays.
From this external, enlarged view, then, we can see that the Pharisee and the tax collector are more complex, more ambiguous than they might seem at first blush. The more we learn about them, the less we know them with certainty. A second, and perhaps more challenging way of deepening this story into the realm of parable is by turning it back on ourselves. After all, what else are these parables for than for us here and now, for how we understand and live our lives? That said, it is all too easy to satisfy ourselves with the moral lesson of the “bad” Pharisee and the “good” tax collector. Yet, to hold this view is to commit the same mistake as the Pharisee. We condemn the Pharisee as “other” and exalt the tax collector “one of ours;” as someone with the right point of view–as someone with our point of view. This is the subtle trap that Luke’s Jesus lays for us with this parable. It confronts us with our tendency to take sides and condemn those who are not on our side. Jesus did not take sides. Instead, he preached the Kingdom of God, where there are no sides. Looking at the parable this way also takes us back to where I started this morning. Holding on to our point of view–clinging to it as the right point of view…this is the sort of ignorant knowing that cuts us off from openness to the deeply intimate reality of our lives. It cuts us off from ourselves, from one another, and from all of creation. The ground by which we are created and sustained is not a ground of knowledge, it is an infinite, uncreated, unconditioned, hidden ground of love. The anonymous 14th century author of The Cloud of Unknowing puts our call simply and beautifully: he says “…we can’t think our way to God. That’s why I’m willing to abandon everything I know, to love the one thing I cannot think. God can be loved, but not thought….Only love can help us reach God.” And so, my friends, we are, in turn, called to unknow one another. We are called to accept our incompleteness, our imperfection, our utter dependency on the mercy of God and the mercy of one another. We are called, as the letter to Timothy tells us today, to pour ourselves out as a libation. We are called to reach out with nothing but the naked, empty hand of our love.