May God open our minds our lips and hearts to the Word. Amen
“Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.”
Why did these two men go up to the Temple? My daughter’s answer would be, “To pray, Dad….Duh.”
But let’s step back for a moment. What drew them to the Temple to pray? After all, then and now there is wide spread agreement that you can pray anywhere. God does not seem to be limited by whether or not we pray in a building. It certainly did not impede Moses’ conversation with God through the Burning Bush. The Prophets did not seem to need the Temple in order to discover what God wanted to say through them. Nor did Jesus – according to the Gospels, he often went off by himself to pray.
So why did these two men, the Pharisee and the tax collector, go up to the Temple to pray?
My guess is that the reason the Pharisee was there is fairly easy to discern: he was following pharisaical customs. There is, to my knowledge, no mention in the Law, in the Torah, that one need go to the Temple to do the best praying. But the Pharisees arose as a Jewish sect after the people of Judah returned from Babylon and rebuilt the Temple. In their quest to follow the Law and to be pure, it was a very, very, very good thing to do one’s praying in the Temple. And, please note: as in so many of the parables that we have heard in Luke’s gospel recently, the Pharisee does nothing wrong. -- He observes the Law -- he fasts twice a week; he tithes; and he comes to the Temple to pray. He is a “good” person; a church-going person; one who keeps the Sabbath. So he is in the Temple to pray, as is the custom of his particular “denomination” of Jews.
Why did the tax collector go up to the Temple to pray? This may be more difficult to discern. I don’t think he was following any particular required rituals. After all, here is a man who is despised by his fellow Jews (and he knows it) because he works with and for the Romans, the foreign intruder, the defilers of all things sacred. In the Jewish society of Jesus’ time, tax collectors were seen to be as bad, if not worse, than say, the drug dealers or human traffickers of today. They collected money, not for Israel, but for the Gentile occupiers of the sacred land! Many of them charged more in taxes than the Romans demanded so that they could get their cut. If their fellow Jews could not or would not pay the assessed tax, the tax collector might beat and torture them. They would, in the words of the movie “The God Father,” “make you an offer you could not refuse.” So, why does this tax collector even DARE come to the Temple to pray?
We don’t know.
I am going to guess that he may have felt drawn there out of an awakening, a realization of how much his actions were harming his fellow Jews. Maybe an awareness that he needed to radically change his life was flowing over him. Perhaps he found hope in today’s psalm: “Our sins are stronger than we are, but you [O God] will block them out.” He stands far off from anyone else in the Temple. He does not even dare to look up to heaven, the usual stance for those praying in the Temple. He truly represents those among us who are desperately seeking help and guidance from the Divine….or from wherever or whomever it may come.
In my own life I have experienced times of being like the Pharisee. In fact, as I heard today’s Gospel, I realized that I was there once again. “Thank you God that I am not like that Pharisee!” (Oops) And I have experienced times of feeling entirely unworthy; times of knowing that the only way for me to recover from the wretched place in which I find myself is to throw myself on the mercy of God….in prayer and in humbly seeking assistance from other people…because, if anything will make me humble, it is the realization that I need help from someone!
We are called to constantly fight the temptation to compare ourselves with others, or worse yet, to trust that we are righteous and to regard others with contempt. We may be righteous; we may be justified. But that is not the issue, because during this life we will never be quite sure if we are justified by God.
The issue is how do we stand in relation to our fellow human beings. Does a perspective of self-righteousness block us from seeing the person who is hurting? Does it prevent us from reaching out to offer a hand to one who may need it, whether we know it or not. And, just as importantly, if we stand and say, “God thank you that I am not like these other people!” does that attitude block us from realizing our own fragileness.
We all need help at one time or another. It is a good thing – it keeps us humble; and, didn’t you hear?… the humble shall be exalted! It is a good thing because, through our need, we can gain the ability to be sensitive to a person whom we may meet, and we will be able to offer the gift of God that is in us. We may not know whom among us this morning or whom among those we meet in our day-to-day lives needs us, not to stand by ourselves, but to be God’s presence with them.
So…..we can come up to the Church to pray in thanksgiving to God that we are on the right path; or we can come up to the Church to pray for our own salvation and for the salvation of our fellow human beings; to pray that God will use us as instruments of his peace. Much of it depends on attitude: Do we come here and pray by ourselves? Or do we come here, humbled in the sight of God, and pray by reaching out to each other – as we feel that we are standing “afar off,” so that our prayers become prayers of mutual support and love? In our answer, we will not know if we are justified but we will know that we are loved.