Saturday of the Third Week of Lent
Intention: For all those who recently have suffered the loss of a loved one, that God’s comfort and healing may find and sustain them.
Today’s Gospel | Luke 18:9-14
Jesus addressed this parable to those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else. “Two people went up to the temple area to pray; one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector. The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity — greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.’ But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, ‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner.’ I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Reflection
A reoccurring theme within Scripture is that of the problem of religious hypocrisy. In particular, the great Biblical teachers often pointed to how worship and piety could sometimes turn from adoration of God into adoration of self. In the Gospels, Jesus illustrated what happens when righteousness becomes self-righteousness, both in terms of the corruption of the individual and of the injury to the community. The image of the Pharisee and the tax collector was a powerful indictment of the Temple establishment of the day, but it also served and still serves as a lesson on the relationship between salvation and humility.
The essential difference between the Pharisee and the tax collector was one of honesty. The Pharisee had wrongly decided that his affluence was a mark of holiness. He saw himself as set apart and above, justified and whole in God’s eyes, with no need either to repent or to change. Meanwhile, the tax collector had no delusions about his own brokenness and helplessness. His stance seems to suggest that he knew that he would never be able to rise up past his own sinfulness and disconnection from his brothers and sisters without God, and so he kept returning in embarrassment to beg God not to give up on him. The Pharisee arrived where he was by denying reality, whereas the tax collector arrived where he was by surrendering to it.
And so, humility is about seeing and accepting the truth. Life is filled with the evidence that to be human is to be part of a larger reality from which our existence, our identity, and our meaning all spring. We can no more claim autonomy from God and one another than we can from our own breathing. It is, in fact, both what we offer one another and what we owe one another that define us. To be humble is to live doing our part to be our part of the whole, knowing that it is the whole that contains whatever greatness and wonder there is to be known.
The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A great man is always willing to be little.” Humility comes when we embrace the truth that all good things are gifts, and that our strengths and our accomplishments find their source in grace. As St. Paul said, if we have any reason to boast, it is that we belong to a loving and caring God through whom all goodness is made possible. In this season of Lent, may we seek the greatness that is being part of God’s people and together building God’s Kingdom.
Prayer
Eternal Father, your son walked through a sinful world teaching humility and compassion. In this time of Lent, teach us, the people who bear his name, to follow his example. Help us to put aside our selfishness and pride, our judgments and divisions, our fears and indifference. May our faith, hope and love turn us back to you and to one another, so that we may share as one family in the salvation that your son has brought to all of us. We ask this of you who lives and reigns with your Son and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.