Luke 18:9 Meaning He Spoke Also This Parable to Certain

Confidence in your own righteousness and contempt for others describe one posture held by some, not a law about self-regard. Righteous was a courtroom verdict of standing clear before God, and the judge alone hands it down. Reaching that verdict yourself means stepping onto the bench and announcing your own acquittal.

Despised means counting another person a zero. Contempt is what such confidence runs on, since a verdict by comparison needs someone lower down. God gives that standing as a gift, received by trusting His mercy instead of your own record, which leaves nobody underneath to look down on.

ʿUjb: Being pleased with your own goodness Al-Ghazali gives this name to the warm feeling a person takes in their own record. The trouble starts when someone adds up their decent acts until the total becomes who they are, settled and safe. From there they stop asking whether they are kind and simply assume it, and the kindness quietly thins out.

Arrogance is turning away from the truth and looking down on people: pride named plainly The Prophet marked pride by these two habits, and they arrive together. Someone who cannot take a correction needs other people to look small, since the comparison is what holds their own rating up. Looking down settles the question of your worth cheaply, without your ever having to check it.

Ḥusn al-ẓann: Thinking well of people The tradition asks for the more generous reading of others, since you see only the outside of anyone's life. You fill in the rest by guessing, and contempt takes hold when the guesses always run downward. Giving someone the better explanation keeps you from settling their worth on evidence you never had.

A slip that leaves you humble beats an obedience that leaves you proud: what an act leaves behind in you Ibn Ata Allah put this in his short book of sayings. A failure that makes someone gentler toward others has done more for them than a clean record that leaves them hard. Each act gets weighed by what it leaves behind in the person who did it, not only by how it looked.

Faqr: Having nothing of your own Sufis use this word for the sense that you own nothing, your good qualities included. Health, upbringing, the moment you happened to choose well: none of it was made by you, and any of it could have gone otherwise. Someone who feels that has nothing left to hold over anyone, because the things worth boasting about were handed to them.