Monday 28 October 2019

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 2019


The general theme remains on prayer whilst spotlight has shifted. Last Sunday, we were counselled to pray persistently. This Sunday, the attention is now centred on the person who does the praying, that is, on the pray-er himself.
 
The first reading is clear on this point. For sure, God hears our prayers. However, He does not listen to prayers based on the merit of one’s station in life. There is no hierarchy of honour in the sense that God only listens to the prayers of powerful personalities. As the Psalmist rightly suggests, “The poor man called; the Lord heard him”.

The Gospel follows a line of thinking that whilst God hears our prayers, it is the attitude that we bring into our prayers that becomes the deciding factor in God’s answer or justification of the person.

The Pharisee was not condemned for his praying. In fact, he should be commended for he belongs to the elite of the praying-class, if you like. Matthew described them as wearing broader phylacteries and longer tassels. They followed the injunction of Deuteronomy 6: 6-9 “to tie and bind the commandments as symbols on the hands and forehead” but they forgot that the law should first and foremost be impressed upon the heart. Thus, an inflated sense of self-righteousness derived from adhering to the letter instead of cleaving to the spirit of the law, took away from him God’s justification. Smugness or self-satisfaction opens no celestial doors. Heaven bends its ear down instead to the tax collector, one who is the opposite of the Pharisee and who belongs to the class of the despised because he stood well-aware of his poverty before God. In his self-awareness, he came away from his prayers justified.

These two opposing portraits can tempt us into complacency, tepidity or apathy. On the one hand, we might be tempted to think that we are nowhere near the Pharisee. The negative characterisation of the Pharisee sounds closer to a caricature than it is to reality. You would reason for yourself that who in the right frame mind would want to be like that? Self-righteous and judgemental. In fact, words like “bigot” or “racist” are the best weapons to shut out dissent. This fear of being labelled is one reason why we have stopped using our faculty of “right judgement”. For example, in the area of sexual identity, no one wants to be called a “bigot” simply for upholding Church teachings. In general, no one thinks of himself a Pharisee because it is a word synonymous with hypocrisy.

On the other hand, instinctively we also do not quite identify with the Tax Collector. It is not so much as non-identification with his humility as with his sinfulness. What do I mean by that? Firstly, since we are nowhere near the Pharisee, we can take it that we are quite “humble”, so to speak. Secondly, and more importantly, nobody sins anymore. Fulton Sheen spoke of this in one of his works on Mary.I never could see why anyone in this day and age should object to the Immaculate Conception; all modern pagans believe that they are immaculately conceived. If there is no Original Sin, then everyone is immaculately conceived. Why do they shrink from allowing to Mary what they attribute to themselves? The doctrine of Original Sin and the Immaculate Conception are mutually exclusive. If Mary alone is the Immaculate Conception, then the rest of us must have Original Sin”.

Fulton Sheen was right. Many of us behave as if we were immaculately conceived. Or, we may think of us as sinners but our self-perception can be rather diffused in the sense that we accept it but at the same time feel that we cannot be that sinful, can we? What is this ambiguity but a kind of spiritual smugness or complacency and this can be observed in our Catholic confessionals. Without breaking the seal of confession let me illustrate a possible scenario in the confessional that priests do encounter from time to time. Some people who come in to confess do it similarly to what the Pharisee did in the Temple. They dare to sing their own praises. In a matter of fact, they declare that they go Church regularly and whatever needs to be done is religiously followed. And the sins they confess are usually the sins of their spouses or colleagues. If not, they justify their sins in the form of blame: Someone made me do it. A priest-friend related this that he would tell some parishioners, “You came into the confession without sin but you leave with four sins, namely, (1) the sin of boasting or pride, (2) the sin of self-righteousness (which is a form of obstinacy and a refusal to repent thereby rendering it a sin against the Holy Spirit, (3) the sin of complaining and finally, (4) the sin of lying (to oneself that one is not a sinner when through and through one is but a sinner)”.

To be justified, like the Tax Collector, is to be made right before God. Only sinners need justification. If we were immaculately conceived, like Mary, there would not be the need for justification. We should be able to stand tall before the Lord. Yet, we know that we are nowhere near Mary’s sinlessness.

In summary, our take-away lesson today is not that we are superior to the Pharisee in the sense that we are not that judgemental. We may be but that is not the point here. The lesson we can learn is that the Pharisee looked at outward appearances whereas the Tax-Collector focused on the heart. (Cf 1 Sam 16:7) He could stand right before God not because he was humble but because he had come to recognise that the heart was where the devious thrived—the battleground between sin and grace, between condemnation and justification and between hell and salvation. That was why he stood not looking up but acknowledging the shame of his sinfulness whilst waiting for God to make him right.

Salvation is indeed a tricky business. If we are not sinners and if we have no sin, then there is no need to be saved for only sinners need redemption. Otherwise, we can stand like the Pharisee in our self-righteous judgement of other.

There can be a latent Pharisee in us if we do not realise that God is touched when we forget the self. For, if we are too full of ourselves, there really is not much room for God’s grace to work. The tax collector gave no excuse for his sin and for that, God’s grace was able to work its best by granting him justification and thereby saving his soul. Let us be mindful that only the prayer of the humble sinner can throw open the door to God’s liberating mercy.