Meister Eckhart, one of
the church's great mystics, famously wrote that if you only had a single prayer
to pray, "Thank you" would suffice.
This week, we continue
with the general theme of prayer with the righteous Pharisee as an exemplar of
how not to pray and the sinful "publican," or tax collector, as an
exemplar of how to pray. As usual, the unexpected is central to this
parable.
Jesus famously told his disciples what to pray for with the gift
of the Our Father; however, he didn't answer the question directly as to how to pray.
Today’s gospel is all about how to pray.
The
Pharisee's prayer was more horizontal than vertical; his prayer was self-congratulatory
for not being like his sinful neighbors. His prayer was from an island of self-righteousness.
O God, I thank you that
I am not like the rest of humanity --
greedy, dishonest, adulterous -- or even like this tax collector.
I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.
His gratitude springs
from "not being like the rest of humanity," it begins in
separation, focusing on his side-view of a sinner. And the tax
collector was a sinner. Let's not make him into some
noble hero. Tax collectors were famous sellouts in Jesus' time.
They were Jews who profited from their association with the occupying Romans and were
allowed to keep whatever they could collect above what was required from their fellow
Jews. They even had the power to have non-compliant Jews arrested. As with most
people invested with such power, the power was abused, and these folks were
famously despised.
The Pharisees were a group of religious scholars trying to bring the average person hope by helping them live righteous lives by putting the Law into practice. The Pharisee's pride grew from
being socially, educationally, and religiously set apart from the people he was
called to lead. There is a lesson in it for me as a priest and anyone
with temporal authority within the Church. I can imagine such pride was
incremental and crept in as he appropriated each compliment and praise received
from the people he helped, growing like a wildfire until it consumed him in the
deception that what they adored was him rather than God's gift to him.
The tax collector had no such delusions.
The tax collector's prayer was vertical; off at a distance and prostrated, he
couldn't even see or hear the Pharisee. The tax collector's sins were too
painful for him to list. He simply prays, "Have mercy on me, a
sinner!" Scripture says he went away justified; God forgave his sins not
because he was righteous but because he prayed from his poverty of spirit.
The Pharisee prayed from what he considered his great possessions: his
righteousness. Like the widow only putting in a mite for the Temple collection,
she gives all she has. She isn't donating a small portion of her wealth;
Jesus observes in that parable that "she gave from her poverty."
We must pray from our poverty because this is our state in relation to
God. We have nothing to stand on but clay feet, but it is the same clay
God formed; it is human clay, and it is the source of true humility and genuine
gratitude because God has redeemed it in Christ.
When
we pray from our poverty, we tap into the riches that God has given us.
Time and time again, God's grace seeks out the humble, the lowly, and the
dispossessed. Throughout salvation history, God visits the least regarded
and comes to visit and give great comfort. There is something in the
nature of God that desires such intimacy as that of a mother caring for her
sick child. We don't need to be great and notorious sinners to attract God's
love; it is there before we ask. God is in love with humanity, and the less we
stand human before God, the more distorted our understanding of the image of
God within us.
The Oscar Wilde quotation, "We are all in the gutter,
but some of us are looking at the stars," comes to mind. Our prayer is
always a cry for mercy when we begin with being grateful for having the vision
of the stars from the gutter.
