The parable of these two men is a focal passage for understanding Luke’s use of δικαιος . . . Its characters raise the question of who is genuinely δικαιος; its context is within a larger scheme whose major concern is ‘discipleship’: its concluding verse links the pericope firmly with a basic Lukan concern above all the ‘parable’ was addressed to those who were self-confident because or that they were δικαιος and accounted others of no worth. Its this lase clause which focuses the defining characteristics of δικαιος in Luke’s thought.
The characters
Luke assembles three key groups in the gospel’s drama: the audience, Pharisees, publicans or toil-collectors.
The audience. Although Luke does not say that Jesus told the parables specifically to Pharisees many commentators take this to be the case; that would match other contexts for parables, e.g. that of the two brothers in Luke 15.1132 which stands in a sequence headed by
καὶ διεγόγγυζον οἵ τε Φαρισαῖοι καὶ οἱ γραμματεῖς λέγοντες ὅτι Οὗτος ἁμαρτωλοὺς προσδέχεται καὶ συνεσθίει αὐτοῖς. εἶπεν δὲ πρὸς αὐτοὺς τὴν παραβολὴν ταύτην λέγων . . . (Luke 15.2-3)
But Luke’s address in 18.9 may be much wider; one probably errs in making the assumption that only Pharisees and their scribes had an arrogant concept of δικαιος. The possibility that Luke focused his discussion on a problem within his own church should not be too quickly dismissed. As becomes increasingly obvious, he took care to spell out a coherent description of δικαιος—and of its more corrupt versions. His own church, Luke very other institutional church, faced the possibility of reading the gospel in a way which encouraged pride in personal piety and its concomitant tendency to see people who were not obviously inside to be outside God’s chosen people. That his church probably faced such divisiveness within its own life can be seen to be the case as one traces Luke’s rewriting of Jesus’ story in a direction with emphasises the deadliness of such pride, culminating in the affirmation that it was the publican rather than the Pharisee who went back to his home δεδικαιωμενος. (Peter Doble, The Paradox of Salvation: Luke’s Theology of the Cross [Society of New Testament Studies Monograph Series 87; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 112-13)