Unto certain which trusted in themselves... — Here, as above, the purpose of the parable is stated at the outset. It is, perhaps, open for us to think that isolated fragments of our Lord’s teaching, treasured up here and there in the memory of disciples, and written down in answer to St. Luke’s inquiries in the second stage of the growth of the Gospel records, would be likely to have such an introduction.
The “certain which trusted” are not specified as being actually Pharisees, and included, we may believe, disciples in whom the Pharisee temper was gaining the mastery, and who needed to be taught as by a reductio ad absurdum, what it naturally led to.
Despised others. — Literally, the rest — viz., all others. The word for “despise,” literally, count as nothing, is again one of those which St. Luke has, and the other Evangelists have not (that in Mark 9:12 differs in form), but which is frequent in the vocabulary of St. Paul (Romans 14:3; Romans 14:10; 1 Corinthians 16:11, et al.). This universal depreciation of others would seem almost an exaggeration, if experience did not show — e.g., as in the history of Montanism and analogous forms of error — how easily men and women, religious societies and orders, drift into it, and how hard it is to set any limits to the monomania of egotism — above all, of religious egotism. It never uttered itself, perhaps, in a more repulsive form than when the Pharisees came to speak of the great mass of their brother-Israelites as the brute people, the “people of the earth.”