Sunday of Week 30 of Ordinary Time (C) – Additional Commentary
Commentary on Sirach 35:12-14,16-19, 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18 and Luke 18:9-14
The Pharisees regularly come under fire from Jesus and today is no exception. However, we should be aware that when Jesus speaks about ‘Pharisees’ he is not so much speaking about a whole class of people but about a certain kind of mentality. There is no doubt that many of the Pharisees were good people and took their religious obligations very seriously. We need to remember that Nicodemus, the man who came to Jesus by night and who was present at the burial of Jesus, was a Pharisee.
So when Jesus in the Gospel attacks ‘Pharisees’ he is not only thinking of a group of people in Jewish society in his time but his words – as far as the evangelists are concerned – are even more directed to the ‘Pharisees’ in the Christian community. And, whenever we hear a passage of the Gospel attacking the Pharisees, instead of ‘tut-tutting’ and saying to ourselves, ‘What awful people!’, we should rather be looking into our own selves and seeing how much of the Pharisee is in us.
For instance, do you ever find yourself sitting in judgement on other people? Have you ever found yourself comparing others unfavourably with yourself? How much time do you spend with friends or family gossiping about the presumed weaknesses of others? If the answer to these questions is a reluctant ‘Yes’, then we might read today’s Gospel with some fruit.
We are told that Jesus spoke a parable to some people “who prided themselves on being virtuous and despised everyone else”. Of course, none of us actually say we are proud of our virtues (especially of our humility!) and we would probably deny that we despise other people but, in fact, that is not what our words sound like at times.
In the parable, two men went up to the Temple in Jerusalem to pray. One was a Pharisee. The other was a tax collector. Tax collectors were among the most despised group of people in the time of Jesus. It was not just because they had to do an awful job. (Even nowadays people do not exactly warm to the idea of tax collectors and many people go to extraordinary measures to keep out of their clutches.)
Their reputation was more connected with the system under which they worked. The Romans – like all governments – imposed taxes in order to fund public works and other expenses. But, as far as possible, they made their subject peoples rather than their own citizens pay the money required. And they did not collect the money themselves. Instead, they farmed out the tax collecting to various individuals. These people paid up a large amount of money for the right to collect taxes and then it was their job to get it back – with interest (what we would now call ‘commission’). So, on two accounts the tax collectors were highly unpopular: they extorted as much money as they could from the people assigned to them and they were working for the hated colonial power. Because of their connections with the hated Romans, they were looked down on by most of their fellow-Jews as traitors and renegades and enemies of their own people.
So here we have two very different kind of people going to the Temple to pray. The prayer of the Pharisee consists partly of telling God how wonderful a Jew he is and partly of thanking God that he is not like the rest of mankind, ‘grasping, unjust and adulterous’. In addition to that, he performs religious duties above and beyond what the Law requires. In general, you are given the impression that God should be grateful that there is at least one person who gives him some attention.
On the other hand, the tax collector has no illusions about himself. He knows and admits that everything the Pharisee says about him is true. As he prays, he does not even dare to lift his eyes upwards but beats his breast in true repentance for the kind of life he has been leading. Unlike the Pharisee, he has nothing to give to God except his sinfulness so he prays: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” And Jesus concludes by saying: “This man, I tell you, went home again at rights with God; the other did not.”
Does that seem a little harsh? After all, everything the Pharisee said about himself was true. He had kept the Law perfectly and had even done more than was expected. The tax collector, on the other hand, had done many sinful things.
The answer to this is in the final sentence of the Gospel: “All those who exalt themselves will be humbled, but those who humble themselves will be exalted.” In other words, the fault of the Pharisee was not in his behaviour, but in his motivations – in his claimed self-sufficiency. He saw himself as the origin of all his goodness. If he had prayed properly, he, too, would have been on his knees and thanking God for having protected him from falling into evil ways. As the great St Augustine once said: “There go I, but for the grace of God.”
It is put very nicely in one of Prefaces for weekday Mass: “You [God] have no need of our praise, yet our desire to thank you is itself your gift. Our prayer of thanksgiving adds nothing to your greatness but makes us grow in your grace.” There is absolutely nothing we can give to God. Whatever we do for him, we are simply giving back something he has already given us. The trouble with the Pharisee in the parable is that he felt that God should be grateful to him, that he was bestowing compliments on God by being such a ‘good’ person. Quite the opposite was the case.
So we have this paradox in the Gospel that it is better to be a repentant sinner than a self-satisfied prig. So much of Jesus’ teaching and works are with sinful people. It was for this he was severely criticised by the Pharisees. “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:1). But, how was Jesus to bring them back to God, unless he reached out to them? In the pharisaical mind (and that sometimes includes you and me!), they are just written off and, above all, their company is to be avoided completely.
The attitude of Jesus is well expressed in the First Reading, from the Book of Sirach (or Ecclesiasticus). “God shows no respect of personages to the detriment of a poor man, he listens to the plea of the injured party. He does not ignore the orphan’s supplication, nor the widow’s as she pours out her story… The humble man’s prayer pierces the clouds… And the Lord will not be slow, nor will he be dilatory on their behalf.”
God never sees the status of the person or their rank in society or their past behaviour. God – and Jesus – only sees the person who is before him here and now. That is the way he acted towards the prostitute woman who broke into the house of Simon the Pharisee and began crying at his feet. It was the way he acted with the man beside him on the cross, a man who had committed serious crime and may even have committed murder. To the Pharisee (be he a Jew, Christian, another religion or none) this attitude is inexplicable. But God’s ways are far beyond ours and in the Gospel we are constantly being invited to have the mind of God, a God who did not spare his own Son so that sinners (like you and me) might live.
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Paul, a Pharisee, in the 2nd reading seems to be – or at least justify – boasting. But, remember there is also a kind of false humility to not recognize our good points or the good things we have done for others. False humility is also prideful.
Sunday of Week 30 of Ordinary Time (C)
Commentary on Sirach 35:12-14,16-19; 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18; Luke 18:9-14
One of the lessons of today’s readings is that God listens especially to the sinner and to the poor. The attitude of Jesus is well expressed in the First Reading, from the Book of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus):
[God] will not show partiality to the poor,
but he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged.
He will not ignore the supplication of the orphan
or the widow when she pours out her complaint.
The writer continues:
The prayer of the humble pierces the clouds….Indeed, the Lord will not delay… (Sir 35:21-22)
Perhaps we find that rather strange. Should he not be listening more to the ‘good’ people who are trying to keep his laws? That was certainly the attitude of the Pharisee in today’s Gospel. When someone offends us, how do we feel? Often we are likely to feel angry and hurt. Do we want to take some kind of revenge, to punish that person? At the very least, we want to make sure that he or she does not behave towards us in that way again.
It is not surprising, then, that many feel, after doing some wrong, God has been ‘offended’. His reaction should be like ours and with greater reason—he is the Boss. After doing something we know is quite wrong, we might wonder how God could continue to love us. Yet, if that is the way we think, we are quite wrong.
But how can God be said to love a sinner? It is precisely as a sinner that a person most needs the love of God, most needs his help. God, unlike us, does not see a sin as an ‘offence’ against himself. Rather, he sees the sinner as a person who has made a bad mistake and needs to be healed and restored. It is the sinner who is hurt, not God. This is the meaning of the parables of the Good Shepherd and the Prodigal Son.
Strange scene
So in today’s Gospel, we have the strange scene between a Pharisee and a tax collector. The Pharisee—and he clearly believes he has evidence to prove it—is the ‘good’ person. He carefully keeps the Law of the Jews and the Commandments of God. He faithfully observes the obligations of a good Jew: he prays, he fasts and he gives alms. And yet, God is not happy with him. Why? Because he is a totally self-centred person. He says, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people…like this tax collector.”
What he really is saying is: “God, you should be deeply grateful that you have someone like me (and there are not many of us!), someone who is so faithful in following your commands.”
When he prays, fasts or give alms, it is not because he loves God (or the poor) and wants to serve God. It is because he loves himself; he is the centre of his whole existence. Even God is on the fringe. God should be so happy to have such a rare example like him. Especially when so many are like the tax collector.
Jesus criticises the Pharisee for not being aware that all these good things he claims to do have God as their source. Without God, he could do nothing, he would be nothing.
Getting his ‘come-uppance’
We can readily go along with the idea that the snob gets his ‘come-uppance’ and the modest person is praised. That is valued in our society, and in theory at least, generally accepted. Yet, if we were more honest, we might find that there is a lot of the Pharisee in ourselves.
Let us, by way of experiment, update the prayer to that of a ‘good’ Catholic. It might go something like this:
“Thank you, God, that I am a Catholic and not like those deluded Protestants and materialistic pagans. I go faithfully to Mass every Sunday and I usually receive Communion and now and again I go to Confession. I am generous with the church collections, my children are all baptised and they go to good Catholic schools. I am faithful to my wife (well, maybe there is the odd peccadillo) and, thank you, God, I am successful in my business. It is not always easy, but I try to keep on the right side of the law. I want to see all my children do as well as I have or even better. Once year I do a retreat. I, of course, do not claim to be a saint, but I am an average, maybe above average, church-going Catholic, which is more than can be said of the many so-called Catholics and non-Catholics I know. Thank you, God, that I have not become like any of them.”
We might compare this attitude with what seems like boasting on Paul’s—another Pharisee—part in today’s Second Reading. Paul says, with apparent satisfaction:
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
Yet his attitude is so different from that of the Pharisee or ‘good’ Catholic. First, all that he achieved he attributes to his Lord and, second, his whole life had been lived as a “libation”, all his energies poured out, not for himself, but so that others might come to know, as he did, the power of Christ’s love in their lives.
A sinner
On the other hand, the tax collector is certainly a sinner. He surely does not observe the Jewish law. If he is like the average tax collector, he is a swindler and extortionist. He collects tax money from his own oppressed people and hands (some of) it to the hated Romans. He really is a sinner. He really behaves abominably before God and neighbour. And God loves him!
For Jesus says that when the tax collector left the Temple, he did so as a friend of God, while the Pharisee was rejected. How can this be? Is this God’s justice? The reason is that, although the tax collector is undoubtedly a sinner, he admits his sin. He knows that by himself he cannot do anything, that he cannot change, unless God comes to his help. He implores:
God, be merciful to me, a sinner!
God will come immediately to the help of a sinner who, in humility and truth, recognises his sin. On the other hand, how can God come to help a proud man, who thinks he can take care of himself?
A special gift
One of the greatest gifts is for us to know our sinfulness. In the First Letter of John it says:
If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true….If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:6,8)
This was the problem of the Pharisee. He thought he had fellowship with God, but he walked in darkness; he was blind. But this is not so for the tax collector. It would be true to say that, in recent years, while we have gained much in our understanding of a Gospel-centred life, we have lost a sensitivity about sin in our lives.
One indication of this is that, while many, many more people go to Communion at Mass now, far less are using the Sacrament of Reconciliation. No one should regret the passing of the old “since this is Saturday, I must go to confession” mentality, or worse, “I can’t go to Communion because I have not been to confession” conviction. But in its place, many have not learnt the place of the Sacrament of Reconciliation as an important element, not only in our individual lives, but in our lives as community.
Sin can too easily be seen as a personal failure to meet certain behavioural standards: “I was impatient”, “I was jealous, I got angry”, “I was not at Sunday Mass” and so forth. Sin is much more fundamentally a failure in relationships—with God, with other people, with oneself. We can sin against ourselves, with our family members, with our colleagues, with our friends, with total strangers, with people we never see, but who have been affected by our love or our selfishness.
Sin is a failure to love, a failure to work for the well-being of others. Many of our worst sins—seldom heard in the confessional—are the things we don’t do at all. At the judgement the Lord will say, “I was hungry, thirsty, lonely, struggling to get along, obviously in trouble—and you did not abuse me, attack me, get angry at me or hurt me. No, you did absolutely nothing at all! I was in desperate need and you walked by, away from me!”
Sin and God
A deep awareness of sin does not separate us from God. On the contrary, it is a sign that God is very much part of our lives and that we wish to partake of that love he is reaching out to us. The most tragic people are those who:
- think that they do not need God in their lives (like the Pharisee or some ex-Catholics);
- when asked, cannot think of anything sinful in their lives, present or past;
- think that God does not, cannot love them because of some terrible or shameful things they may have done.
The Easter Vigil (Holy Saturday) liturgy speaks of the felix culpa, the “happy fault” when we human beings crucified the Son of God. Many of our sins, too, can be seen as a happy fault, if they help us to realise how weak we are, how much we depend on God’s help and the help of other people.
An awareness of our sins, too, can help us in our lives to be far more compassionate and understanding towards others in their sinfulness and weakness. In the depths of our sinfulness we must never lose sight of the God who is always standing by ready to come at our merest signal. Again, as Sirach tells us:
The prayer of the humble pierces the clouds,
and it will not rest until it reaches its goal….
Indeed, the Lord will not delay… (Sir 35:21-22)