Your church may not have the book of Sirach, only a few denominations do. It was written a few hundred years before the gospels, a time that is not well documented. Some say this book predicts, or at least portends the coming of Christ. It could give us a little insight into the changing ideas of what God is, but there is not much to go on.
Joel is a minor prophet of unknown authorship and dating, possibly around 800 BC. He predicts a plague of locusts, but since we don't know when that was written, we can't know it is actually a prediction. Which is a nice way of saying it isn't.
Luckily we are saved with an entry from William R. Herzog II's “Parables as Subversive Speech”, with the parable of the Pharisee and the Toll Collector. It's going to be a while before we see another on of those, so I'll give this my full attention.
Luke 18:9-14
Herzog uses the term “toll collector”, your Bible's text might say “tax collector”. Tax collectors would be from the Roman government and would be people with some education and a stable job. Toll collectors are much lower on that hierarchy and can be easily replaced. They are not liked by their employer or by the people they are collecting tolls from. Their work is not specifically condemned by the Torah but it is assumed they are scraping off some of the tolls for themselves, because it is unlikely they could survive if they didn't. This is why he is standing “far off”. He is taking a position in the temple that indicates he is of a low status.The men meet in the temple, a place where everything is a symbol. Where you stand, when you are there, and what you say are meaningful to everyone watching. When he beats his breast, the breast is the seat of the heart, the source of evil and sin, so it is a symbol of great distress. He does not “even look up to heaven”, just as you don't raise your head when you are feeling shame. In his prayer, he doesn't make a list of sins or virtues, the Pharisee has already done that. What we seem to have here is a bit of witty banter.
The toll collector knows his place, and he knows he can't make good with his offering at the temple. He doesn't have the means, and he collects from so many, virtually anonymously, as they are traveling with their goods, that he couldn't even find who to repay. But he has come here to make a statement.
To understand his humble prayer, we have to understand the Pharisee. Herzog paints a picture of 1st century Palestine that makes the Pharisee a different kind of toll collector. First, where is the Pharisee? He is “standing by himself”, probably also off to the side, but in his case, it is to keep his distance from the “unclean”, the ones who shouldn't be touched.
Although arguable, Herzog goes with the interpretation that the Pharisee's prayer is done in a manner that he would be heard. It seems necessary to advance the parable as a public conversation and reach the conclusion in the last verse. He lists some unrighteous behavior, commends his own, and makes it clear he is talking about the toll collector. There is tension, is he suggesting the toll collector be ushered out? The mentions of fasting and tithing are not arbitrary. He is claiming to be in line with the Day of Atonement, the fasting schedule to acknowledge Moses' 40 days in the wilderness, and tithing above and beyond the minimum, including the agricultural tithe. This guy is good, or at least he is making sure he looks good.
And because he is good, and in line with Mosaic law, he is the arbiter of a different kind of toll, the debt codes of the Torah. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt… and I have come down to deliver you from the Egyptians, and to bring you up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exod. 20:2; 3:8). Herzog goes into more detail, and a complete discussion is even further beyond our scope, but over time, this kind of code generates the very society it was designed to restrict. As Herzog puts it, “The very desire to accumulate wealth in order to realize the blessing activated the 'aggressive violence' that turned against the neighbor's source of subsistence and sought to gain even more at the expense of others (Exod. 20:15, 17). This was the hidden contradiction contained in the debt codes of the Torah.” You can google the book and find more on pp. 183 and 184. Briefly, instead of the codes working to adjust the society by putting the burden on the elite to make corrections, it made those in debt impure and unable to satisfy those debts. This should sound familiar to many points in history, such as debtor's prison or the Jim Crow laws.
At this point in time, the elite religious leaders are not about to give up their demands for tithes, despite the Romans asking for more and not caring much about the religious obligations. The poor were getting squeezed. How does all this relate to the framing of this parable? The Luke author introduces it with a statement about “some” who are righteous, but which of our two characters is he referring to? He then tells the moral in the second half of the last verse, it seems our humble toll collector will be exalted.
But are those the words of Jesus or an earlier teacher, or of a later writer? Herzog tells us of a modern scholar, Pheme Perkins (1981) who knew of a Galilean proverb, “Even you would rather be a tax collector than a Pharisee”. But this could easily be a statement that any precondition, any history, does not prepare you for an audience with God. So we are left with some degree of uncertainty about just what this parable is or where it came from.
The problems with interpreting the parable as praise for a toll collector are many. If God is so radically changing the rules to say a toll collector is more pious than a Pharisee, then what is this saying about the rules? The toll collector may have few choices but nonetheless has made choices far outside any acceptable code of conduct, just what are the rules? How would anyone square this with “fulfillment” of the law claimed elsewhere (Matt 5:17)? If the authority of the Temple is beneath this man, what authority is there? Is this parable suggesting a complete dismantling of the culture? It is no wonder Jesus was crucified.