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.
