30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

I once was having a conversation with a very close friend who had not been very wise in her life choices and she was now pouring out the drama that had resulted from her own poor choices and bad habits, particularly as regarded her love life. When she finally slowed down long enough to let me get a word in edgeways, I laughed saying how glad I was that I was celibate and didn’t have to deal with the drama of a love life. Without missing a beat she retorted “Isaac, you’re such an arrogant and conceited Jesuit,” which some of you may consider a tautology. Nevertheless, her words stung because I quickly realized their truth. I had taken a gift from God, the gift of my celibate vocation, one that I had been faithful to only by the grace of God and turned it into something that I felt put me above the fray and beyond the pettiness of romantic escapades. I had allowed my ego to pervert the very gift that was meant to make my life into a compassionate and safe space for her to work out the mess of her own life. Instead of giving me the freedom to welcome her story my celibacy became a weapon that I wielded to put her down and exalt myself. I think that this is precisely what is going on with the Pharisee in today’s gospel.

As we hear this parable, we need to realize that its shocking forcefulness has largely been lost to us following 2000 years of Christianity. For us moderns, the Pharisee has become a by-word for hypocrisy and the tax collector the epitome of those loved and forgiven by God. We are sympathetic to the tax collector and hostile towards the Pharisee. Jesus’ audience would have been just the opposite. For Jesus’ audience the Pharisees were the good guys, they were the people holding up the example for everyone else by helping the poor and observing the law. Many Pharisees were extremely sincere in their desire to serve God with their whole lives. Conversely, the tax collector was someone who did just the opposite of the Pharisee and instead of helping out the poor, he robbed the poor by charging exorbitant commissions on top of the taxes that he collected on behalf of the Roman occupying power. He was the worst type of crook, profiteering from the sweat of poor people and thereby exacerbating an already unjust system. In anyone’s mind, in the sight of God, it was surely the Pharisee who was the more pleasing. And yet it is the tax collector who goes home at right with God. Jesus is saying to us that looks can be deceiving. He is saying that those people who we think are holy and doing everything right may well be so preoccupied with themselves and their own holiness that they are far from God. Conversely those who look like they are mired in sin might be closer to being saved than us who look down upon them.

Jewish law at the time of Jesus required that everyone fast at least once a year – yet here we have our Pharisee going well beyond what was stipulated by the law and actually fasting twice a week. What was the motivation behind this practice? What may well have at the heart of our Pharisee’s religious zeal was what Jews called tikkun olam, which would be very similar to what we as Christians would refer to as “making reparation.” This was the notion that the righteous could freely offer up sacrifices to God in order to make reparation for the sins of their weaker brothers and sisters. This was the same reason that the Pharisee offered up tithes on all that he earned. It was actually the duty of the farmers to offer up tithes on their agricultural produce which was then used in various ways by the Temple authorities: to support the priests, to help the poor and to pay for the formation of future priests. Many farmers reneged on this duty, so in response many Pharisees decided to pick up the slack left by the famers and cover the deficit by digging deep into their own pockets in order to ensure that the poor still got fed and the work of the Temple continued. These are all really praiseworthy things. But let us examine what went fundamentally wrong in the actions of Pharisee. His actions were supposed to be directed towards the common good, not towards his own sanctification. The logic behind tikkun olam is that there are certain people who have been gifted by God with extraordinary grace such that they do not have to be preoccupied with their own salvation they can focus on helping others on the way to salvation. This Pharisee took these practices and perverted their intention – just like I had done with my celibacy – and instead of being about building up the community and helping out the weaker members of the community, these actions became all about himself. His own exceptional piety, instead of being an act of solidarity with his weaker brothers and sisters became the very act by which he sought to put them down and further differentiate himself from them.

The Pharisee had turned his religion into a series of moral achievement contests. As humans we are fiercely competitive. Very early on in our lives we discover that the quickest, surest way to affirm our self-worth is by being better than others. Whenever we find ourselves rejoicing in the downfall of another person, or relishing some juicy piece of gossip about the sins of another person, we need to be very careful. We are using their downfall to build ourselves up. If their sins make us feel better about ourselves, then we have fallen into the trap of This same mentality gets carried over to our religious observance, where we think that it is all about being good for God, and being better at it than everyone else. We forget that what Christianity is really all about is what God has done for us, and not so much what we do for God. We shy away from going to God empty-handed. When we go before God, we don’t like going before God naked, we feel we have to come to God wearing a few spiritual and moral achievements so that we can hold our heads high before God, be presentable, be lovable. The Good News is that you don’t have to dress up to meet God. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t. God wants us to before Godself naked. This is one of the most truly liberating experiences in life – to go before God as a sinner and know that you are loved just as you are. You have nothing to commend yourself to God with, you don’t have a leg to stand on, in fact, if it were anyone else, they would be throwing you out of the room, but here you are, unworthy as ever, in your most vulnerable moment and being received with open arms. When we encounter love as deep and pure as this, we realize that we can let go of our need for self-righteousness. If we are honest, we will probably see that our need for self-righteousness is not so much about wanting to please God as wanting to please ourselves.

Sometimes we need people to hold up a mirror to us so that we see how comfortable we have become in our own self-righteousness. My friend fulfilled that function for me. She was the mirror that helped me come to terms with my own ego and pride. Unlike the Pharisee in the story, I was lucky that I had this friend to call me out on my own ego and pride. This Pharisee was so filled with contempt for the tax-collector that he didn’t even deign to address a word to this publican – for that would have made him unclean. In refusing to get involved with the messy sinfulness of the world, the Pharisee effectively passed up his opportunity for someone to hold up a mirror to his face and call him out for his pride and ego. I think that perhaps the first lesson of today’s parable is that it is important for us to be friends with those who are down and out. We are inclined to be filled with sympathy for people who are suffering through no fault of their own, and condemn and disregard those whose sufferings are self-inflicted, the result of poor life choices. But perhaps contact with such people can keep us grounded, grounded in the sinful mass of humanity, a sinfulness that we are called to take upon ourselves. This is the most fundamental meaning of the Jesus’ baptism. Jesus, sinless though he was, desired to receive the baptism of John in order to be in solidarity with us in our sinfulness. Jesus could very well have exalted himself as the paragon of moral virtue and purity and set himself up as the ideal to which all humanity should asymptotically tend. But this is not what he did, he chose to save us by identifying with us in our sinfulness and then witnessing to the incomparable mercy of God.

Questions for reflection

1. When people see me, do they see a person in need of God’s mercy?
2. When was the last time I was made to realize my own pride? How did I react?
3. When was the last time I felt unworthy in God’s presence?