The parables of Jesus, as I have said to you many times over the years, are mirrors in which we are invited to see a reflection of ourselves. The parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, however, is a veritable hall of mirrors in which it is difficult sometimes to know what exactly we are looking at. As soon as we see ourselves as the Pharisee we are on the way to becoming the tax collector, and no sooner have we begun to think of ourselves as the Tax Collector than we are back to being the Pharisee again. It’s really quite subtle, difficult to pin down, and the reason is not hard to find. This parable is not about good or bad actions. It has nothing to do with what is visible and external. It’s about what motivates us, why we do things rather than what we do, and at that level we are very complex creatures indeed. It’s virtually impossible, for example, for a human being to act out of one pure motive. There are always hidden levels of motivation and these can lie undetected or unacknowledged, sometimes for years, and sometimes for a lifetime. The most generous looking actions on the outside can come from a deeply selfish and manipulative place inside us and many an apparently pious and holy exterior hides a bitter, frustrated and hard-hearted interior. And so Jesus warns us never to judge. This is because we can never see into any person’s heart and so can never be sure why they do what they do. God, on the other hand, is described sometimes as the one who, because he understands all, forgives all. God sees into the heart and so is not misled, as we are, into harsh judgements based on mere actions or on what is happening on the outside.
Which brings us to the the most basic and fundamental theme of all our reflections together, the difference between religion and faith, a difference which itself has its roots, not in actions, but in what motivates them. It’s not about what we do. It is about why we do it, and the Pharisee and the Tax Collector represent the extremes of this. On the one hand we have the Pharisee, the religious man. He’s not a bad person by human standards; far from it. Everything he says about himself is true. But he has a fatal flaw. As people have done since primitive times, and as religious people, including ourselves perhaps, if we were to examine closely what motivates us even to be here today, still do, he performs religious actions to please God and so gain salvation by his own efforts. The Tax Collector simply cries out for mercy, and so, without necessarily understanding why – there is a sense, even, in which, if he did understand it and so were doing it in a manipulative way, he would be back to being the Pharisee - finds himself at rights with God, a phrase which simply means that the relationship between the two reflects reality; God is in his proper place and the creature is in his. And if you are struggling to follow the logic of this, maybe its because of that hall of mirrors we enter when we read this parable.
In the end, of course, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector are each one of us. The journey from the front of the temple, where we are doing something for God, to the back, where God is doing something for us, is one we are all engaged in. It is that journey from religion to faith, and, like people on one of those great medieval pilgrimages to Rome or Compostela, we are stretched out at various stages all along the way. But whether we are near the beginning or near the end, central to the whole journey is the experience of weakness and failure which brought to tax collector to the Temple that day. They come to us in all shapes and forms and are rarely welcome at the time. But, in reality, they are our best friends as they slowly but surely strip us of illusions about ourselves and force us to confront the ultimate truth about who we are, the truth of our creatureliness and our utter dependence on God. In a word, they teach us humility, the key thing lacking in the Pharisee and the thing which rendered his prayer meaningless. ‘The humble man’s prayer,’ however, as the first reading put it, ‘pierces the clouds.’
Many of you, of course, will have been exploring aspects of this journey in recent days during the Week of Prayer, and, even if you were not involved in the week, you will have your own struggle with it. And so I want to end by drawing to your attention a thought that was triggered in me by a poster someone left in the porch during the week. It reminded me of a journey I made to the now non-existant Smith’s book shop in St Vincent Street in June 1963. I had just learned I was going to Spain in three months time, in September of that year, and so was delighted to find a book entitled ‘Spanish in Three Months.’ Perfect, I thought in my naivete, I can learn Spanish over the summer. Needless to say, it didn’t happen. I got stuck at page one with the polite form of you, Usted in Spanish, written as Vd. I could not make head nor tale of it and and arrived in Spain that autumn without a word of the language. And I recalled that experience because of what it said on the poster. It was announcing an eight week course of meditation for everyone. For a mere £45, it promised to bring a window of calm into your life, improve your health, build inner confidence, set you free to be yourself, sleep better and improve your relationships – to mention just a few. It was like all those books you see piled up nowadays in the Mind, Spirit, Body section of Waterstones or Borders which promise to maximise your potential, unlock your creative mind or do a thousand other wonderful things to your inner self. And all you have to do is buy the book and maybe send away for the tapes.
But it’s all an illusion. The really important changes in us do not happen in six weeks. It’s not possible to buy them. The journey from religion to faith is a life-long journey. It means struggling with our basic weaknesses on a daily basis over years. There is no quick solution, no magic formula, no silver bullet. There is only death and resurrection.
But if, like St Paul in the second reading, we fight the good fight to the end, it will be well worth it.
BIDDING PRAYERS
By far the harshest words spoken by Jesus were addressed to the Pharisees. He called them whited sepulchres, all clean and tidy on the outside and filled with dead men’s bones in the inside. He clearly saw that, unless he could open their minds to deeper ways of relating to God, they would remain forever stuck in their traditional, shallow and totally inadequate ways of thinking. And so we pray for the insight we need to recognize any signs of the Pharisee in ourselves………………………....Lord hear us
Today’s parable, St Luke tells us, was addressed to some people who prided themselves on being virtuous and despised everyone else. In telling this story, Jesus is drawing attention to a temptation faced by religious people in every age; people like ourselves who go to church and yet, without even recognizing it sometimes, look down our noses at others. And so we pray that, as a community, we will be open to all who come here regardless of their position in society………………...Lord hear us
Throughout his life, Jesus was criticised by the polite, religious people of his day for mixing with prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners. And yet he was completely at home in their company, explaining that it was not the healthy who needed the doctor but the sick. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see that, in every Eucharist we celebrate here, Jesus continues to be present among sinners………….Lord hear us
One of the reasons many people no longer go to Mass is that the sense of obligation which went with doing so no longer has the power it once had. And so, never having had any other reason for doing so except the keeping of a rule, they have drifted away. And so we pray that we will all discover new and deeper reasons for being here. We pray that our weekly celebration of the Word and the Eucharist will, in time, take the central place in our lives it deserves…………………….....Lord hear us
The modern explosion of books and courses promising to do all kinds of wonderful things for our inner selves shows that there is a deep need in us for genuine spirituality. And yet, lost and with little idea of where genuine truth lies, millions today are wide open to exploitation by those who sell all kinds of promises which can never possibly be fulfilled. And so we pray that the world will rediscover the great christian spiritual tradition we have temporarily lost touch with…………Lord hear us
And we pray for all those who have just completed the Nineteenth Annual Week of Prayer in the parish. God will have worked in a unique way in every individual. For some it will have been a happy experience and for others it will have been a struggle. But we pray that each one of them will be faithful to the experience and never doubt the presence and movement of God in whatever happened………………Lord hear us
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