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.

 

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: 2 Kings 5:14-17; 2 Timothy 2:8-13; Luke 17:11-19

VIDEO

I like religion.
So when people tell me 
that they are spiritual but not religious
I am often tempted, in my annoyance, 
to reply that I myself am religious 
but not spiritual.
I don’t actually say it,
because I am from the South,
where our mothers teach us manners,
and to say “bless their hearts”
rather than what we are really thinking.
But, still, I am tempted.

The serious point behind this snarky remark
that I am tempted to say
is that things people often dismiss
as “religious” and seemingly therefore “unspiritual”—
things like rituals and creeds and institutions—
in fact have a vital role to play in our spiritual lives.
We human beings are embodied, social animals
who only flourish when we share our lives with each other,
but who need habits and rules and boundaries
in order to do this.
And this is no less true of the common life
that we live in the presence of God.
When we need to pray in times of crisis
a spontaneous prayer may not come to our lips,
but an Our Father or a Hail Mary might.
When we are lost in spiritual confusion
and do not know exactly what we believe,
we can draw comfort in words that express
the faith professed by the saints down through the ages.
When we find ourselves in times 
of cultural transition or upheaval
we can look to the Church 
for a sense of stability
and a source of guidance.
I like religion 

because it answers to a deep human need 
for structure and stability,
even—especially—as we seek to stand 
before the face of the living God.

And Jesus, 
contrary to what some will tell you,
also likes religion.
He lived his life immersed
in the rituals, creeds, and institutions of Israel.
He was a devout Jew who embraced
the traditions and Law of his people
as the God-given means by which 
one could live in God’s presence.
He was circumcised on the eighth day,
he visited the temple in Jerusalem as a boy,
he read Scripture in the synagogue as a man.
And we can see Jesus’ pro-religion views 
on display in today’s Gospel,
for in healing the ten lepers
he instructs them to do 
what the Jewish Law requires:
to show themselves to the priests
and to have themselves declared “clean.” 

So Jesus liked religion
and entered fully into the practice of Judaism.
But as much as he liked religion,
as much as he recognized its necessity,
he also recognized that it was not enough.
He recognized that religious practice itself
can so occupy us that we miss its whole point,
which is to sustain our relationship with the living God.
Nine of the ten lepers in today’s Gospel
are so focused on fulfilling the demands of the Law
that they fail to recognize in Jesus
the God who gave the Law 
and who has healed them.
It is notably the Samaritan, 
the foreigner who is an outsider,
the one who believes in God
but does not worship in the Jerusalem Temple,
who recognizes what Jesus has done for him
and returns to give him thanks.
As important as proper religious practice is,
its presence did not guarantee that the nine 
would recognize how the power of God 
was at work among them,
and its absence did not prevent the Samaritan
from glorifying God,
from falling at the feet of Jesus, 
from giving him thanks for his healing.

It is really no different among us Christians.
St. Augustine wrote: 
“Some people may indeed, 
through membership of the Church 
and acceptance of all her doctrine, 
be free from spiritual leprosy: 
but they fail to recognize 
the one who cleansed them, 
and become inflated with pride” 
(Questions on the Gospels, 2.40).
We can behave as if our religion
and its rituals and creeds and institutions
are all we need.
We receive our sacraments at the appropriate moments
and we go to Mass on Sunday, at least most of the time,
and perhaps we even pray before meals
and in moments of crisis.
And all of these are good things, holy things.
But they are the floor, not the ceiling.
They make possible an encounter with the living God,
but they are not a guarantee that we will recognize him
or even notice his healing touch.
And, at their worst, they can become, 
as Augustine noted,
a source of pride.
They can tempt us to think
that we have the God-thing 
managed and under control,
that we know where to find God when we need him
and how to obtain from him what we want.

But, as the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar noted,
“If we treat God as a sort of religious vending machine, 
he will show us that he is anything but that—
that he is a free, living God” (Light of the World, 355-356).
Religious practice is not a prison
in which we lock God up,
so that he is ready to be at our beck and call. 
As St. Paul put it in writing to Timothy,
“the word of God is not chained.”
And if we think our religion 
contains God in this way,
then perhaps we need outsiders,
maybe even those who claim 
to be “spiritual but not religious”
(bless their hearts),
to remind us of the unchained Word of God
who took flesh among us in Jesus Christ,
who scandalized the pious
and died on a Roman cross 
accused of blasphemy.

It is right and just that I like religion.
But while I like religion,
I should love Jesus,
for in the end it is Jesus who will heal me and save me,
not my adherence to rituals and creeds and institutions.
So let us practice our religion with joy and humility
for God has given it to us in freedom
so that we might recognize Jesus,
and let us pray that all of us,
insiders and outsider,
religious and spiritual,
might come to know the mercy of God.