In this week’s Gospel reading,* Jesus tells a parable about two men who had gone to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, whose prayer reminded God that he wasn’t like other people, but someone who conscientiously followed demanding spiritual practices. The other was a tax collector, slumped in a dark corner not daring to look up, who prayed to God to have mercy on a sinner like him. Jesus tells his listeners that it was the tax collector who went home right with God, not the Pharisee, “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
This Pharisee isn’t someone I’d want to be married to. But I have a soft spot in my heart for him. In a spiritual worldview that too reliant on rules, one comes away knowing that there are thousands of ways to mess up in God’s eyes. It can be exhausting living everyday with the sense you need to prove you are good enough to be saved, to be loved by God.
There’s a motto The Washington Post used for many years: “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.” The Pharisees “got” that the people of God needed a religious renewal. They got that the community needed practices to support a spiritual exodus from the world of Roman domination, and from the political collusion of the Temple-centered religious establishment.
But they didn’t get that a hyper-focus on keeping the particularities of Jewish law would not lead to the change of heart that they wanted. Their attempts also created Religious Insiders and Outsiders, based on who could keep the purity laws. On this point, they never “got it.”
I have had the great good fortune of having lived parts of my life as a Pharisee, and parts as the Tax Collector, as well. And, really, I’ve quite often been a Pharisee on the outside, but a Tax Collector on the inside. I keep wandering off the path, thinking I can make my life work through my own efforts, thank you very much.
But then of course, I mess up again, find myself back in disconnection, confusion and anxiety—and ravenous and parched for real life, love, and forgiveness.
Jean Vanier, Catholic theologian and founder of the L’Arche communities, tells us that the spiritual simplicity we seek is nothing more than knowing that we are loved and accepted—with all our attributes and all our flaws—just as we truly are.
Father Gregory Boyle, the pastor in the Los Angeles neighborhood with the highest rates of murderous gang activity, and the founder Homeboy Industries to provide jobs for the gang-related youth of the area, agrees. Here’s one way he puts it:
God is just too busy loving us to have any time left for disappointment…Where we stand, in all our mistakes and imperfection, is holy ground. It is where God has chosen to be intimate with us, and not in any way other than this.
Thank God! I went through too much of my life really not getting it. But if the Holy One loves me this strongly just the way I am, I don’t have to bamboozle or hoodwink either myself or anyone else; I can just be my generous/selfish, courageous/cowardly, joyous/depressed self! Praise God!
—Jeanne Marcus, Bread of Life Church
From Jeanne: As this Liturgical Year comes to a close, I will be stepping back from contributing regular Gospel Reflections to Inward/Outward. I have been so enriched by this level of engagement with Gospel texts, and grateful to those who have shared their responses with me. Blessings—may the God of Jesus be with each of us, and among us all.
