Now, here is a reversal of expectations: a poor man who is proud and a rich man who is humble! Perhaps, over the centuries, we lose sight of this glaring fact about the Parable of the Publican and the Proud Pharisee. I have seen icons from previous centuries depicting the Pharisee bedecked in costly silks edged in royal purple (that most expensive of dyes) cutting a portly figure as befits a man accustomed to sumptuous feasting. He wishes to be seen making ostentatious gifts to the Temple. "I give tithes!" he exclaims. Riches are the main subject with a large collection plate full of gold coins placed in the center and foreground of these icons. Meantime, the Publican is represented to one side, in simple garb, undernourished, and bearing the itinerant's walking staff suggesting little more than a beggar. No doubt, there is a spiritual logic here. For pridefulness implies exaltation of the self and a wardrobe to match while humility always points to sack cloth.

In any case, the historical reality seen on the streets of first-century Jerusalem would have been quite the opposite. We call tax collectors Publicans because they were members of the Societas Publicanorum of the Equestrian class, just below the Senatorial class. These were highly respected men — who managed public works projects, who supplied the Roman Legions with needed goods and materiel, who ensured that the regular census was taken, and who collected taxes under the strict regulations imposed by Augustus Caesar's tax reforms. (In particular, "tax farming" had been abolished before the birth of Christ, reining in tax collectors who imposed whatever monies they could manage to extort.)

Publicans were more likely to have dined with Sadducees, Jewish aristocrats, than would have Pharisees or the ascetic Essenes. This thought may surprise us, but the Sadducees — who rejected the premise of an immortal soul, who waved off the doctrine of resurrection as being ridiculous, and who held a minimalist view of the Law — would have had more in common with Roman Publicans, Tribunes, and Senators than with lower-class Pharisees, whom they would have deemed extremists or fanatics.

We who grew up on Hollywood movies depicting an occupied Palestine with Jews in a kind of Arab dress speaking Hebrew (or at least Aramaic) persecuted by Roman Tribunes and their Legions may have difficulty seeing first-century Judea as it really was. In fact, the Levant had been an international zone for centuries by the time Jesus was born. It was not backward and dusty but, rather, cosmopolitan. Thanks to Alexander the Great, the world spoke Greek, even in Rome (where public monuments of the first century have been discovered bearing Greek inscriptions). First-century Judea was Graeco-Roman culture with its classical, white temples, its colonnades, and coliseums. Judean boys attended gymnasiums receiving a classical curriculum, or Paideia (the ancient world's version of the liberal arts), and participated in Graeco-Roman sports. A young man aspiring to influence, not to say affluence, in Roman society would not be held back on account of his Jewish parentage.

Class and ethnic boundaries were fluid in the diverse Roman Empire. Consider the case of Yosef ben Matityahu, a former rebel (in Rome's eyes) and military commander during the Jewish Wars. He became slave to an influential Roman who then facilitated his ascent into the upper echelon of class. He adopted the name Titus Flavius Josephus and became a much-read historian debating with the leading lights of his age. His books advanced the idea that the Jews represented one of the great civilizations of history standing along side Egypt or Rome, and providing us with most valuable windows into first-century Judean culture. Like the wealthy Publicans, Zacchaeus or Matthew-Levi, he would have been a familiar among affluent Judeans. He would, in a word, not have been very different from the Publican Jesus presents to us this morning in our Gospel reading — a Jew achieving material success in a pagan Empire.

By contrast, the Pharisee of Jesus' story would have been poor as a church mouse. He would have spent his days studying the Torah by way of an unending round of oral debates, analogous to the students of Socrates sitting in the shade of plane trees — posing questions and debating the various answers. We today might perceive the Pharisees' questions to Jesus as being impertinent — "What is the greatest commandment?" "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" They seem to go and on. But this was the mainstream method for instruction. Written materials would have been alien to this lively, fluid style of teaching.

Needless to say, none of these teachers, much less their students, would have received a stipend. These were scholars living in penury. We may read that their phylacteries were broad, but we must pause here; for today we do not really know what phylacteries were. Were they tefillin — the little leather boxes worn by Orthodox Jews today containing token bits of Scripture in order to honor Deut 6:8? We cannot be certain. In any case, these surely would have been affordable even to a financially deprived Pharisee.

What Jesus places before us is the very great question of the rich man and his salvation. After all, this has been a primary theme found throughout the Gospel of St. Luke. The word rich occurs six times in the Gospel of Mark, six times in Matthew, and not at all in the Gospel of St. John. It appears only rarely in the Pauline correspondence. Yet, in St. Luke's Gospel, we encounter the word eighteen times in a work having twenty-four brief chapters. Think of the Parable of the Rich Fool (Chapter 12), of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Chapter 16), and of the Prodigal Son, which related the bequest of a large estate among two brothers (Chapter 15). We hear the theme sounded from the lips of the Most Holy Theotokos:

Their question has echoed down through the ages. Medieval aristocracy, gentry, and merchants were so filled with anxiety that Biblical commentators of their time dreamed up a gate in the Jerusalem city wall named "the Eye of the Needle." This invented gate was said to be so narrow that if a rich man would only lighten his camel's load, slightly reducing his many possessions, then he could squeeze into the New Jerusalem. The message was clear: "You need not give away everything. Just remember the poor!" Is this not the bent of our time? Jesus tells us we must give away everything in order to follow Him, but we cannot bear to hear it (Lu 18:18-30).

It is in this Eighteenth Chapter where we meet the Publican and Pharisee. The Pharisee nominally has followed the religious life. Why, he has given up everything in order to pursue his religious studies! And he wants everyone to know it. But as he has stepped forward to claim his heavenly crown, Jesus poses a question through His parable: What is Heaven? Is it a score card? Is it a bank ledger comparing credits and debits? .... or, more to the point, weighing good deeds against grave sins? No. Heaven has to do with the state of the heart — whether the heart belongs to the world or it belongs to God. We pray at each Mass that we must love God with all or our mind and with all of our heart! Or is the heart restless each morning for worldly recognitions, or even honors, or for other things that are not compatible with the Kingdom of Heaven? On the other hand, does the heart seek only the love of, and for, God?

Beyond all dispute, Jesus has harsh words for Publicans. If a man refuses correction by the Church, He says, "then let him be to you as a Gentile or a Publican" (Mt 18:17). This pairing is revealing, for it lays before us plainly two worlds. On one side, we see a world of careerists seeking upward mobility. Their eyes are fixed on togas fringed with purple and their palates yearn for fine wines. On the other side are those belonging to God, whose eyes and hearts long only for the Kingdom of Heaven.

Why should God's Son not turn a flinty countenance to those who have spurned His Father? They have been fed with finest wheat, sweet honey from the rock, and the best wine. The Heir, the Prince, has dwelt among them, even in their midst .... and they have dishonored Him. He will turn the same flinty face towards the inhabitants of Capernaum and Bethsaida (Mt 11:21-23).

Yet, all of these many affronts, insults, and injuries can be amended, will be forgotten, if only such worldly hearts would turn (Jesus uses the command metanoiete), face God, and permit their hearts to melt.

This is irony set before us in our Gospel lesson today. For the one who is in possession of all worldly honors humbles himself in abject humility before God seeing that he is not worthy even to turn his face towards Heaven. Meantime, the so-called "man of God" primps and preens himself before the mirror of public attention. He pretends to a public prominence he does not possess, in effect, trading his own vain imaginings for his salvation.

What Jesus wishes us to see in His parable is the all-important moment when we see things as they are, when we reject all that is unworthy inside us, when we open a space within so that God might enter. For surely He will enter this space and stretch our hearts till they burst with Divine love. Here is the needle's eye opened for a camel. According to the Midrash Rabbah (derived from the Jerusalem Talmud):