We live in an ironic age. So we have to be very careful when we take up Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, because this is a profoundly ironic parable, and the danger is that, since we are habitually ironic people, it will only confirm what we assume we already know. Here, we think, is a parable about righteousness. The Pharisee is the epitome of self-righteousness: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ What a fool, we say: righteousness doesn’t work like that; you don’t get to mark your own homework.

What a ridiculous prayer, to list before God one’s own accomplishments: it’s not really a prayer at all, but a command to God to recognise an application form for the kingdom that’s laden with all the due qualifications. The tax collector is the soul of humility: that’s what God wants – our recognition that nothing in our hands we bring, simply to Christ’s cross we cling. It’s a straightforward critique of judgementalism. It gives us full licence to be judgemental about those we perceive to be judgemental.

Which is where the irony turns round to bite us. Because we end up saying, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: self-righteous, judgemental, or even like this Pharisee. I’m tolerant and inclusive; I only exclude those who exclude me.’ And all of a sudden, we end up on the wrong side of the parable. It’s circular. However hard we try, we never get to keep our ironic distance and end up on the right side of the story. We’re skewered.

So how should we consider other people, particularly when we know their professions but not their characters, their appearances but not their stories?

The Pulitzer Prize-winning 2014 novel All the Light we Cannot See is set in Europe during the Second World War. It contrasts two characters. Escaping from a disintegrating Paris is Marie-Laure. Marie-Laure cannot see. She began to lose her sight aged 11 and now as a teenager cannot see at all. In her life are two crucial figures. Her father Daniel is a locksmith, whose biggest goal in life is to give his motherless child a reason for living despite her fragile sight. He constructs models, first of their neighbourhood in Paris, then of the town of Saint-Malo on the northern coast of Brittany, to which they flee on the fall of Paris in 1940. Marie-Laure’s great-uncle is Etienne, made agoraphobic by his experiences in the trenches of the First World War, who has a love of ham radio.After Daniel is arrested, Marie-Laure, with remarkable courage, joins the resistance by couriering messages wrapped up in loaves of bread she’s learnt to fetch from the boulangerie and passing them to her great-uncle who transmits them on his radio to the Allied forces preparing for their D-Day Normandy landings.

The second main character in the book is Werner. Werner’s an orphan growing up in Hitler’s Germany. What enables him to escape the horrors of Berlin, as not much more than a child, is his extraordinary gift for electrical engineering. He’s more than capable of constructing his own radio, and listens in to broadcasts from all over Europe. He’s taken away to a special boarding school for boys who may have a genuine contribution to make to the Nazi war machine. From there he’s sent around Europe tracking down radio hams who’re sending secret information to Germany’s enemies and to the Resistance.

Werner’s contrasted with two characters. One is Frederick, his close friend at the boarding school, whose futile opposition to the cruel regime and absurd ideology of the school leads to his being beaten to the point of profound brain damage. The other is Reinhold, who uses his rank of sergeant major to track down precious jewels, and deduces that the most precious stone in France has been placed in the elaborate model of Saint-Malo designed by Daniel for his daughter Marie-Laure. Reinhold is an example of a person who found a way to benefit from the Nazi regime but whose hubris and greed become a metaphor for what has overtaken Germany as a whole. The question is, will Werner find an alternative between the futile sacrifice of Frederick and the mercenary acquisitiveness of Reinhold?

Here we have, on the face of it, a righteous Pharisee and a sinful tax collector – a noble member of the French Resistance, and a technocratic Nazi invader. The climax of the story is of course when their two narratives converge: Werner realises that the transmissions he’s picking up in Saint-Malo are from exactly the same broadcaster he years ago enjoyed listening to as a child, scanning the radio waves across Europe; and we realise that broadcaster is Etienne, Marie-Laure’s great uncle. Marie-Laure, distraught about her father’s arrest and disappearance, is determined to use what life she has left to bring liberation to her people. Marie-Laure cannot see the light because she is blind; Werner cannot see the light because he’s enmeshed in the Nazi war machine, so much so that the boy who sided with the martyr Frederick in boarding school has since been engaged in rooting out and killing those seeking to outflank the German army. For both Werner and Marie-Laure the radio becomes the route to all the light they cannot see – and eventually to each other.

Whether the story of Werner and Marie-Laure unfolds as a tragedy, a romance, or a comedy I’ll leave for you to find out for yourself. What it does demonstrate is the multiple identities of the two main characters and how, when they come to meet one another, those identities are superseded by something deeper and kinder and truer. They’re both trapped – Marie-Laure by her blindness, by her virtual orphanhood, by the Nazi occupation of France, made crueller by the nearness of the Allied liberators after D-Day; and Werner by his own orphanhood, the horrific nature of his education, and the inevitability that his skills would be used by the Nazis for nefarious ends. But they’re also both liberated – Marie-Laure by finding a way despite her isolation and disability to participate with great courage in the Resistance, Werner by transcending his military duty and Nazi ideology to realise the treasure he has met in Marie-Laure. Both are blind. But both turn out not to be defined by their blindness. Both come more deeply to see.
The novel All the Light we Cannot See and the meeting of Marie-Laure and Werner offers us a way to respond to the challenge of the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. If we respond to the parable by continuing to make judgements on virtual strangers from afar, we get swept into the vortex of the parable and end up subject to its condemnation. The constant danger of our perception of others’ self-righteousness is that our sharp observation simply cultivates a self-righteousness of our own.

By contrast All the Light we Cannot See invites us to recognise how complex and textured our own narratives are, how elements of courage and kindness are interwoven with entrapment and complicity and impatient cowardice. And each person we meet is a mixture of such qualities, just like ourselves. Every single time we’re tempted to condemn another’s actions we must ask ourselves whether in doing so we’re seeking to assure ourselves of our own righteousness, somehow to jump the queue and draw ourselves closer to God. But the truth is there is no queue. Grace and mercy are not scarce rations doled out by a weary God to those who’ve worked hardest to deserve them or jumped the queue to snatch them from others’ grasp. We have nothing to gain by the misadventure of others – only growth in wisdom, compassion, and mercy.

The final irony of this parable is that the two characters are both wrong, and both right. The tax collector is wrong to collaborate with Israel’s enemy, the Romans, by extorting money on their behalf. And the Pharisee is obviously wrong to gloat and compare and parade before God his self-designated superiority. But don’t miss the fact that while the tax collector is right to recognise God wants nothing but his unalloyed repentance, the Pharisee is also right to seek a holy life, of tithing and fasting and frequent prayer. The truth at the bottom of this parable is that the Pharisee and the tax collector need each other. Their tragedy lies not so much in their sins of collaboration and self-righteousness, but in their isolation from one another. In All the Light we Cannot See Marie-Laure and Werner discover their salvation lies in one another. Their challenge is to overcome layers of fear and prejudice and judgement so as to make that encounter possible. That’s our challenge too.

Church isn’t a place where we identify and lambast Pharisees while searching out and applauding tax collectors: it’s a community where we meet one another, learn the complexity and texture of one another’s stories, wonder at the grace and mercy by which our paths have crossed, realise with gratitude that our salvation lies in one another, and turn together in humility to recognise, like never before, our need of God. When Werner as a child before the war first hears Etienne broadcasting on the radio, Etienne concludes his broadcast by saying, ‘Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.’ Perhaps what we’re first called to see is the complexity and wonder of one another. God’s message to both Pharisee and tax collector is in the end, the same: if you can’t recognise the gift of one another, you’ll never enjoy the gift of me.