Rely upon God’s mercy to reach heaven

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)
 
“The prayer of the lowly pierces the clouds; it does not rest till it reaches its goal . . .” ( Sir 35:17). These words from the Book of Sirach serve as an apt summary of our Gospel reading this Sunday. This week St. Luke’s Gospel, the Gospel of Prayer, provides yet another lesson on how to pray. Before the Lord God, Luke stresses, all must bow their heads and hearts as humble sinners.
This week’s Gospel parable is the well-known story of the Tax Collector and the Pharisee. We get a clue as to the proper interpretation of the parable in the opening sentence where St. Luke recalls that Jesus addressed this parable “to those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else” ( Lk 18:9). We must remember that the crowd to whom Jesus spoke would have considered the Pharisees as the great religious models of the day, while the tax collectors were despised as traitors who collaborated with the Romans and cheated their own people.
Jesus describes the prayer and attitude of the Pharisee first. The Pharisee, with head unbowed (a sign of boldness in prayer, as if the Pharisee was daring to look God in the eye), prayed thus: “O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity . . . or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income” ( Lk 18:11-12).
Jesus then describes the prayer of the tax collector who “would not even raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast and prayed, O God, be merciful to me a sinner” ( Lk 18:13). To this point, the description probably seemed fairly commonplace to Jesus’ audience; after all, the Pharisee was a holy man, and the tax collector was, well, a tax collector. But then Jesus added his didactic twist; he said, “I tell you, the latter [the tax collector] went home justified, not the former [the Pharisee]” ( Lk 18:14a). His audience must have been shocked at this turn of events.
The prayer and attitude of the Pharisee were lacking in two ways. First, notice the contempt for others. He was convinced of his own holiness and wanted nothing to do with those who did not share his religious practices. Rather than reaching out to call the sinner back, the Pharisees excluded him from their religious and social communities. Second, the Pharisee’s self-assurance gets him into trouble. As we listen to his list of strict religious observances, we hear the prayer of a man who thinks he has brought himself to salvation. In the mind of the Pharisee, heaven was his right because of the efforts he expended to fulfill his religious duties.
Jesus’ point, however, was that before God, we all must stand as humble sinners. The Pharisee’s principal error was in seeing salvation as something he had a right to because of his own efforts. Rather than relying upon God’s mercy and praising God for his goodness, the Pharisee chose to boast of his own attempts at religious purity. The Pharisee failed to recognize that salvation, entry into the fullness of God’s Kingdom, is always something given, not something earned. All people must rely upon God’s mercy to reach heaven.
The tax collector instinctively realized this. He recognized that he had no claim on salvation. Standing before God, this common sinner acknowledged both his sinfulness and his reliance on God’s goodness. It is this insight, Jesus says, that leads to his ultimate justification. One achieves righteousness before God not by one’s own activity, but by God’s mercy. The human posture in the face of such mercy is, as the tax collector understood, acknowledgment of God’s goodness and our complete dependence upon him. Despite whatever failings this tax collector may have had, Jesus commends him for his humble recognition that salvation is always God’s gift, and significantly, a gift which then must be shared with others. By his humble, contrite attitude before the Lord, the tax collector found himself on the blessed side of Jesus’ promise, “whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted” ( Lk 18:14b).
Msgr. Fell is a Scripture scholar and director, diocesan Office for Priest Personnel