The tricky thing about telling a parable where one of the characters is “confident of his own righteousness and looks down on everyone else” while the other is humble and repentant is that your listeners are likely to be confident that they are not the first person but the second. In order to hook them, you have to make that first person as admirable as possible, not obviously arrogant or proud or conceited, but genuinely moral. Jesus accomplishes this by making that person a Pharisee, but while I’m sure that worked well with the listeners of his time, it has the exact opposite effect for us today, especially if we’re already familiar with the Gospels. For us, the Pharisees are almost stock figures of villainy, the archetypal Hypocrites.
That obviously won’t do.
So I did my best to create a modern version of the Pharisee that my readers would connect with better. My Pharisee is a force for societal good, not just religiously but civilly, and he has every right to consider his work in the world very good work indeed. Furthermore, as I thought about who those self-righteous “some” should be whom Jesus was targeting with this parable, I realized that the surest way to make them us would be to make them the nearest proxies for us that exist in these plays: the disciples themselves, whom I hope we’ve come to know and love in the course of these plays.
At this point, you might complain that I’ve taken things too far, that the disciples, and the Pharisee in the parable, are no longer self-righteous, but simply righteous. To which I answer, “Hallelujah! This dated parable is finally working the way it was meant to again!”