30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Sirach 35:12-14, 16-18; 2 Timothy4:6-8, 16-18; Luke 18:9-14

VIDEO

This parable should come with a warning label.
On the face of it, it seems pretty clear.
There’s a bad guy and a good guy—
a Pharisee and a tax collector.
The one is bad 
because he exalts himself
and the other is good 
because he humbles himself.
You should aspire to be
like the tax collector, 
not the Pharisee.

Things get a little less clear, however,
once you recall that Pharisees 
were not notorious hypocrites
but were largely thought by their fellow Jews
to be sincerely pious people,
and that tax collectors 
collaborated with the Roman oppressors
and often cheated people to enrich themselves.
So perhaps the Pharisee is right to thank God
for all the good God has enabled him to do.
After all, he doesn’t sound any more boastful
than Paul in our second reading:
“I have competed well; 
I have finished the race;
I have kept the faith….
the crown of righteousness awaits me.”
And even if he seems a bit snooty
in thanking God 
that he is not like the tax collector…
well, even the tax collector 
doesn’t want to be like himself.
Can we really blame the Pharisee?
So things are a little complicated.

But things get even more complicated
once we place ourselves within the parable
and ask, whose side do we want to take?
With whom do we want to identify?
It seems clear that we are meant to identify 
not with the arrogant Pharisee, 
but with the humble tax collector;
we want to be those 
who humble themselves
so as to be exalted,
not those who exalt themselves
and end up humbled.
The parable almost invites us to say, 
“O God, I thank you that I 
am not like that Pharisee—
arrogant, proud, and self-satisfied.”

Of course, once we say this
we have fallen into the trap: 
we have become the Pharisee.
Even if we adopt 
the outward trapping of humility—
lowering our eyes and beating our breasts
and standing as far from God as we can get—
inwardly we see ourselves as the righteous ones.
We exalt ourselves in our humility,
and are proudly contemptuous 
of those who are proud.
Seeing that we have been caught,
we attempt to extricate ourselves,
and we find ourselves saying something like,
“O God I thank you that I am not like a tax collector,
who thanks you that he is not like that Pharisee,
who thanks you that he is not like that tax collector.”
But no, we are still stuck.
We are ensnared in a trap 
from which we cannot free ourselves.
Like I said: this parable 
should come with a warning label.

Is there any way out of this trap?
Perhaps the way out 
is to return to Paul’s words, 
words that he writes from prison
having suffered beating and abuse and rejection
for the sake of preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Before Paul speaks 
of the crown of righteousness that awaits him,
he writes, “I am already being poured out like a libation,
and the time of my departure is at hand.”
A libation was an ancient form of sacrifice,
in which some valued liquid—
often an alcoholic beverage—
was poured out on the ground.
It is a practice found 
in cultures around the world,
including in ancient Israel.
Among the Romans it was common at burials,
because it was a sacrifice that could be afforded 
by even the poorest person.
Paul, imprisoned and facing death, 
compares his life spent in service to Christ
to the poor man’s funeral offering.
It is, in the words of Sirach,
the prayer of the lowly one,
that pierces the clouds
and does not rest till it reaches its goal.
Whatever good Paul has done 
has been because God’s Spirit
has stood by him and given him strength, 
has filled the empty vessel of his efforts;
the crown of righteousness he hopes to receive
is God’s crowning of his own work in Paul.

In other words, 
Paul does not make it all about him.
He makes it all about Christ.
The gifts with which God has filled Paul
are put to work in Christ’s service,
not turned into precious objects 
admired for their scarcity—
into things that God has given Paul
by denying them to others.

And if we too—
if we turn our eyes away from ourselves
and toward Jesus Christ and his Spirit—
can find a way out of the trap
in which this parable has ensnared us.
If we turn our eyes toward Christ,
if we let our lives be poured out in his service,
then we will no longer need to thank God
that we are not like other people,
we will no longer need to puff ourselves up
by putting others down,
and we will be freed from the vicious circle
of treating God’s love like a limited commodity,
a trophy that we gain and keep 
only by denying it to others.
If we let our lives be poured out in his service,
we will know Christ’s love in its abundance,
an abundance that can fill Pharisee and tax collector
and even we poor sinners who hope in his mercy.
May God have mercy on us all.

 

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Sirach 35:12-14, 16-18; 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18; Luke 18:9-14

In our first reading we hear,
“Though not unduly partial toward the weak,
yet [God] hears the cry of the oppressed.
The Lord is not deaf to the wail of the orphan,
nor to the widow when she pours out her complaint.”
In the Hebrew scriptures, those who are weak and oppressed
are referred to as the anawim or “little ones,”
and they, as our scripture says,
are the special object of God’s concern.
It is from scriptural passages such as this
that the Church today draws her teachings concerning
the need for what Pope John Paul II called
a “preferential but not exclusive love for the poor”;
we, both as individuals and as a Church,
are called to give the poor,
the oppressed,
and the marginalized
a privileged place in our hearts and our concerns.
Concern for the poor is not, for Christians,
simply one concern among others;
concern for God’s little ones is integral
to our identity as God’s people.

This is not a matter of romanticizing the poor,
imagining that every poor person is good and noble;
indeed, poverty is very unromantic,
and often makes those who are poor
less good, less noble, than they might otherwise be.
The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez
writes, “the poor are human beings;
they include very good people,
but there are also some among them who are not good.
We should prefer them not because they are good…
but because first of all God is good
and prefers the forgotten, the oppressed,
the poor, the abandoned.”
Our concern for the poor is not simply a matter of philanthropy
but grows from our convictions concerning who God is
and how God has acted in human history.
Indeed, we believe that when God came to dwell among us in Jesus
he took his stand with the poor and the powerless,
to the point of saying that
what we do for one of God’s little ones, we do for him.
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it,
“Jesus identifies himself with the poor of every kind
and makes active love toward them
the condition for entering his kingdom” (CCC 544).

This is all relevant as we reflect this weekend
on our relationship with
our sister parish in Sepalau Guatemala,
an isolated village, high in the mountains.
Guatemala is an extremely poor country,
with a GDP that is roughly one-half
of the average for Latin America.
Among the indigenous people,
who make up most of the villagers in Sepalau,
73% live below Guatemala’s poverty line –
which, as you might imagine,
is considerably lower than ours.
Guatemala has one of the highest rates
of malnutrition in the world,
with almost half of the children
under the age of five
being malnourished.
Truly, the people of Sepalau
are among the “little ones” of God.

If our relationship with our sister parish
is to be an authentic one
we need to recognize the realities of the poverty
in which the people of Sepalau live.
But I’m not here to give a sociology or economics lecture,
but to preach the word of God.
And today the word of God tells us
that God hears the cries of the poor,
and will answer them
and establish for them justice on earth;
the little ones of this world will be lifted up
and the powerful will be cast down.

This is surely good news to the poor,
but what about the rest of us?
Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel that
“whoever exalts himself will be humbled,
and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Our love for the poor must manifest itself
in a kind of humbling of ourselves,
so that the concerns of the poor become our concerns,
so that their cause becomes our cause,
not because they are good, but because God is good,
because God has heard their cries and will answer them;
God has made their cause his cause
by emptying himself and accepting
the death of a slave,
death on a cross.
You cannot be on the side of God
if you are not on the side of the poor –
this is not politics; it’s simply the gospel.

And this is really what our sister parish relationship is about;
it is about coming to know and entering into friendship
with the people of Sepalau
so that their concerns can become our concerns,
so that is some small way
their struggles can become our struggles.
And we do this because by entering more deeply
into relationship with them
we enter more deeply into relationship with Christ,
who for our sake became poor,
so that we might have spiritual riches.