Cartoons
Cartoons
I don’t remember a time in my childhood in which I did not have ready access to cartoons. I don’t mean the kind of cartoons on television, but rather the cartoons found in newspapers and magazines. In particular, the collections of pen and ink drawings found in two rather-the-worse-for-wear volumes I still count among my most cherished possessions:
The New Yorker Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Album (1925-1950) and
The Best Cartoons from Punch, published in 1952, bearing the subtitle “Collected for Americans from England’s Famous Humorous Weekly.” …I’m still not sure whether this collection was an effort to provide Americans with the very best Punch had to offer, or whether they thought these were the only ones we might possibly be able to understand.
And a few years later, after my family packed up and moved from Nebraska to Philadelphia so that my dad could attend seminary, another small volume was added to the collection: The Reverend Mr. Punch, which, as you might surmise, is a collection of cartoons about the English clergy, the church, and, occasionally clergy families.
One which caused me no end of glee as a child shows, in the background, a priest deep in conversation with a distinguished woman. In the foreground, the priest’s young daughter stands next to her mother, who is seated in a chair. Upon hearing that her father has just earned his Doctor of Divinity degree, the daughter leans over and whispers in her mother’s ear, “Is that lady doctor one of those that make people better, or is she like Daddy?”
A good cartoon works because it’s able to rocket right past our presuppositions and catch us by surprise, often revealing a different way of looking at a situation, or pointing out an absurdity. Political cartoons (which have been around as long as there has been any kind of government anywhere) pick a point of view and drive it home through caricature. A caricature is “a picture, description, or imitation of a person in which certain striking characteristics are exaggerated in order to create a comic or grotesque effect.” They are stereotypes. Celebrities and leaders of any stripe are fair game for caricature, and whether they offend us or make us laugh, there is never any doubt as to the identity of the cartoonist’s subject. Think of Jay Leno’s massive chin, Barack Obama’s triangle head and rail-thin body, Hilary Clinton’s dark eyebrows, Donald Trump’s swoosh of hair. We know in an instant who they are, and the narrative surrounding them.
In the same way, in Luke’s day everyone would have been familiar with the types of people represented by Pharisee and Tax Collector. They are so recognizable, in fact, that Luke doesn’t even need to give them names. Every good Jew knew that there was nobody genuinely better than a Pharisee, and hardly anyone lower on the totem pole than a tax collector.
And yet, Pharisees almost always draw the short straw in Jesus’ stories. We’ve been conditioned to think of them as the rule-heavy, overly-pious, hypocritical bad guys. But in order to understand the punch that this parable had for people in Luke’s day, it’s important to step away from our 21st century conditioned thinking and look at the characters of Pharisee and Tax Collector as they would have.
Pharisees were the good guys, the kind of son every first century Jewish mother would be proud to have. They were highly respected in the Jewish community because of their devotion to the law of God. They were considered to be particularly holy, because they focused so intently on obeying every little detail of the Mosaic law that their outward manner of life was noticeably different from that of the common person. 1 The apostle Paul was a Pharisee.
On the other hand, tax collectors were generally regarded as traitors to Israel for their willingness to take part in the funding of the occupying Roman forces in Palestine by collecting taxes.1
It would be hard to find a more unlikely couple than these two men who went up to the temple to pray, one the epitome of virtue, the other considered by his fellow Jews to be worse than something the dog coughed up on the rug.
The manner in which the Pharisee is going about his prayers in the temple seems terribly pretentious to us, but would not have seemed out of place to a first-century Jew listening to Jesus speak. The fact that he was standing apart, praying out loud wasn’t unusual – we still see worshipers praying like that at the Wailing Wall today. Even the “God, I thank you that I am not like other people” prayers he offers follow the form of the birkhot ha-shahar, or the “dawn blessings” devout Jewish men prayed every morning.
The people expected Jesus to commend the Pharisee for living a life blameless before God and his neighbors. They expected Jesus to encourage them to follow the Pharisee’s shining example. The Pharisee did everything right, and yet, Jesus said that he got it all wrong. It was the miserable tax collector who went down to his home justified.
When I was thinking about this parable and wondering what on earth I could offer that would mean anything, I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I stopped thinking and instead started drawing, which for me is a kind of meditation. I sketched the two men in the parable, but what came out didn’t bear any relation to the way Jesus set out the story. And that is ok – meditations are supposed to take you off the beaten path, and allow you to explore new territory.
In my sketch, the two men were right next to each other. The Pharisee stood with his feet firmly planted, lifting his his hands toward the sky, praying out loud, his whole being exuding confidence, and paying no attention whatsoever to the Tax Collector, who was bent double in his grief, his face to the floor, one arm stretched out in supplication, the other beneath his head. The men were so close that the Pharisee was actually stepping on the other man’s hair, pinning him to the floor. Was this aggressive dominance, or was he that heedless of the other man?
Why had I drawn the two men like that? Was there something else I could learn from the way my imagination played with this story? As I meditated on the sketch, it struck me that perhaps the reason the two men were so close was that they were, in fact, one person. Me. At times blindly, heedlessly arrogant, and at other times brought to my knees by my need of God’s mercy, and healing.
I also noticed that I had made the Pharisee really short in comparison to the tax collector. I hadn’t seen that at first. Were he to stand up, he would tower over the Pharisee. And for some reason, that changed everything about the drawing for me.
It now told me that God’s mercy was far larger and stronger than anything I could put in its way. That it was possible to slip out from under the weight of the Pharisee’s sandal, stand up, take the Pharisee firmly by the hand, and go down to my home justified.
And if you’re wondering why I didn’t leave the arrogant Pharisee to fend for himself, I’ll tell you what my imagination told me. When God forgives, that forgiveness extends to every part of the self. It unites what was once separated, and heals what was cut in two.
Because God is indeed, to quote part of what the little girl said to her mother, the kind of doctor that makes people better.
1 Ligonier Ministries, ligonier.org)