According to the famous psychologist Alfred Adler, a superiority complex occurs in one who has an unrealistic and exaggerated belief that he is better than others. It is manifested by persistent attempts to correct others, discredit their opinions, and dominate them. It results in pride, over-sentimetality, snobbishness, arrogance, and narcissism (extreme self-centeredness).
This is how Jesus pegged the Pharisee in the story he told in Luke chapter 18. Two men, a Pharisee and a tax collector, went to the temple to pray. The description indicates the daily prayer for forgiveness, where a priest offered a sin offering, a sacrificed lamb, in front of the congregation, and then went into the holy place to light the altar of incense. As the incense burned people outside in the congregation were to offer prayers of repentance, asking God for forgiveness of sin. The service was designed as a means of grace, a means of returning to right relationship with God.
The superior-minded Pharisee thought he had nothing to be sorry for. As he stood to himself, avoiding contact with the unwashed masses for fear of risking being defiled, he thanked God for his piety (a common practice among Pharisees), and that he was not like others. In general terms he lists extortioners, unjust, adulterers. Then he comes out and says what is on his mind. “Thank you that I am not like that tax collector!” In his mind there can be none worse than he who stoops so low as to earn a living from the occupying Roman government, collecting taxes for them.
Then Mr. Pious backed up his claim to piety by listing his better qualities: fasting more than required and tithing more than required. In his mind he was really something. He went further than the law with actions, visible to all, that prove his piety and imagined right standing with God.
Herein is his presumed superiority. He attacked and tore down others in general, and the tax collector standing nearby in particular, in a prayer that made pretence of thanking God for his grace. All when he was supposed to be asking to apply the blood of the just-sacrificed lamb to his miserable condition.
In all their religious living, the Pharisees forgot that in God’s eyes the worse thing about sin is the broken relationship, not the broken law. They kept laws, even the ones they made up for themselves, and looked down their noses on everyone else who couldn’t measure up.
We get that way in church sometimes. We have a superiority complex when we look down our noses on the sin, living arrangements, ethnic origin, lifestyle, or economic status of those around us. Like the Pharisee we thank God we are not like “them.” Like the Pharisees we live according to rules of our own making, criticizing those who don’t. All the while we are totally unaware of the gaping breach in our relationship with God.
No one is fooled by our alleged superiority. In fact, many people say they don’t like church because they can’t abide the hypocrites. Younger generations are telling us they like Jesus, but can’t stand Christians. So they avoid church to avoid Christians. Oh, and by the way, telling folks there’s room for one more hypocrite doesn’t help. At all.
The tax collector, on the other hand, backed away from the altar, beat his chest in a gesture of great anguish, and asked God to atone for his sin. To somehow let the shed blood of the slain lamb cover for his sin. Jesus said the penitent tax collector went home justified and made right with God. Unthinkable to a Pharisee, but necessary to a mission-oriented God.
The Church preserves for our use in its prayer books the prayer offered by this tax collector. Known as the Jesus Prayer it goes, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
A good place for us all to start.
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