Humility is not
self-contempt but the truth about ourselves coupled with a reverence for
others; it is self-surrender to the highest goal.
Fulton Sheen Thoughts for Daily Living, 1955: 121
Most of us, I suspect,
almost all of us don’t really like paying taxes; we know that we have to, but
we’d rather not. There were taxes in Jesus’ day and tax collectors were privatised
in the Roman Empire: they had to pay for the contract to collect the taxes, and
recouped the cost of gaining the contract by over-charging people. They were
not popular people, they were resented, they were hated, and with good reason.
We know that in this morning’s Gospel that he’s supposed to
be the villain of the piece, the Pharisee, a religious authority, is supposed
to be the person to whom we look up, the example one might expect to follow. The
parable, then, turns our understanding of the world on its head. The key to understanding
the parable lies in Luke’s opening comment regarding those: ‘who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others
with contempt’ (Lk 18:9). There is a fundamental problem with the difference
between how they think of themselves and others. The Pharisee isn’t praying, he
isn’t talking to God, he’s praying to himself, justifying what he thinks of himself,
saying to God, ‘Look at me, am I not good?’
But the tax collector, standing far off,
would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be
merciful to me, a sinner!’ (Lk 18:13). His prayer is that God will
be merciful. He is so conscious of his own sin and need of God that he opens up
a space in which God can be at work. It is in this space that we all need to
be. We need to recognise that we need God to be at work in us, that we need to
rely upon him to change us, to transform us – so that we can become the people
that God wants us to be. All the prayer, all the rituals, all the externals of
religion, are of no use unless they go hand in hand with an attitude which
recognises that we need God, that we are sinful, and need his love and his
mercy to transform us.
That is why, as Christians, we pray,
why we come to Mass each and every week to be fed by word and sacrament, so
that God’s grace and transforming love may be at work in us, transforming our
nature, making us more like him. Everything that we say or think or do needs to
be an outworking of our faith, so that our exterior life and our interior life
are in harmony with each other – so that our lives, like St Paul’s, may proclaim
the Gospel. This is what we are called to, and how we are to live. Unless we
start from the point where we know our need of God and rely upon him, where we
too make that space where God can be at work in us, in our souls and our lives,
we are doomed to be like the self-righteous Pharisee, talking to ourselves, massaging
our own egos, wallowing in selfishness and narcissism, proud and cruel.
Is
this the kind of life we really want to lead? Is this really the path of human
flourishing? Or are we called to something better, something greater, something
more lovely? So let us put our trust in the God who loves us and who saves us, let
us know our need of him and his transforming grace to fill our lives and transform
all of his creation so that the world so that it may believe and be transformed to sing the
praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be
ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and
power, now and forever.
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