“God Resists the Proud, But Gives Grace to the Humble”: Homily for the Sunday of the Pharisee and the Publican in the Orthodox Church

 

2 Timothy 3:10-15; Luke 18:10-14

 

Today we begin the Lenten Triodion, the three-week period of preparation for the spiritual journey that prepares us to follow Christ to His Cross and victory over death at Pascha. The first step in our preparation is to remember that “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” (Jas. 4:6) Today the Church reminds us of how easy it is to distort the spiritual disciplines of Lent in a fashion that makes them nothing but hindrances to the healing of our souls.  Today we are warned that it is entirely possible to distort prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and other spiritual disciplines according to our own pride such that these tools of salvation become nothing but instruments for rejecting the healing mercy of the Savior. 

 Contrary to what we would like to believe, embracing these practices with integrity is not a way to impress God, ourselves, or our neighbors.  It is not a way of accomplishing anything at all by conventional human standards.  Pursuing spiritual disciplines does not in any way justify us in having any negative opinion whatsoever about anyone else.  Far from exalting ourselves, our most feeble attempts at purifying the desires of our hearts will quickly reveal the weakness of our souls. At the very least, they will bring to the surface how disinclined we are to be fully present to God, how addicted we are to satisfying our various appetites, and how much more we care for our own possessions and comfort than for the wellbeing of our neighbors.  We will then face the choice of how to respond to these challenging revelations.  If we want to pursue Lent for the healing of our souls, we must refuse to fall prey to the common temptation to turn our disciplines into ways of blinding ourselves from the truth about where stand before the Lord, as did the Pharisee in today’s gospel reading. 

 The Pharisees were experts in the Old Testament law, which they interpreted very strictly in terms of outward behavior.  The Pharisee was correct to fast, tithe, pray, and live a morally upright life.  The problem is that he did so in ways that served his pride to the point of grave spiritual blindness. Instead of pursuing these disciplines in humility so that he would gain the spiritual clarity to see himself truthfully before God, he used them as justification to condemn a neighbor.  Doing so revealed only his own sinfulness.  We can easily fall into the same trap this Lent, for there is a strong temptation to ignore the brokenness of our own souls as we obsess about the apparent failings of others.  As those who confess that we are each “the chief of sinners” before receiving Communion, we must focus on our own need for the Lord’s healing mercy and refuse to become the self-appointed judges of our neighbors. When we embrace such proud delusions, it becomes impossible for us to follow our Lord to His Passion in a true spiritual sense. Doing so amounts to refusing to receive His grace, for we will then be so full of pride that we will imagine we have already reached the heights of holiness by our own accomplishments.   Even as we think that we are models of righteousness, we will worship only ourselves as we deny our need for the Savior’s victory over death.  Like the Pharisee, we will use the word “God,” but in reality we will pray only to ourselves as we wander ever deeper into spiritual blindness. 

 The more we devote ourselves to spiritual disciplines, the greater the temptation will likely be to focus on the apparent failings of others in order to distract ourselves from the struggle to become fully present to God, stripped naked of all our pretensions and usual efforts of self-justification.  We need profound humility to become fully present to the One Who is “Holy, Holy, Holy” as we “lay aside all earthly cares” to focus on the one thing needful.  When even a glimmer of the brilliant light of the Divine Glory begins to shine through the eyes of our souls, the darkness within us becomes obvious. The temptation is strong to shift our attention to whatever we think will hide us from that kind of spiritual vulnerability. 

 The Publican was an easy target for the Pharisee, for tax collectors were Jews who collected money from their own people to fund the Roman army of occupation.  Like Zacchaeus, they collected more than was required and lived off the difference. The Pharisee believed that he was justified in looking down on someone who was both a traitor and a thief, even as we typically think that we are justified in condemning those we love to hate.   Ironically, this tax collector would not have denied the charge. He knew he was a wretched sinner, and his only apparent virtue was that he knew he had none.  Standing off by himself in the temple, the man would “not even lift up his eyes to Heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner.’”

            Despite his miserable way of life, the tax collector somehow mustered the spiritual strength to do something the Pharisee could not:  He exposed his soul to the blinding light of God from the depths of his heart without trying to distract himself from the truth.  Christ said that the Publican, not the Pharisee, went home justified that day.  That was not because he had done more good deeds, obeyed more laws, or been more conventionally religious or moral, but because he had the humility to encounter God honestly as the sinner that he was.  Such humility is absolutely essential for opening our souls to the healing mercy of Christ.   Without it, pride will destroy the virtue of everything that we do and plunge us into even greater spiritual darkness and delusion.  But with it, there is hope for us all to receive the healing mercy of the Lord.

There is surely no greater sign of the folly of exalting ourselves and condemning others in the name of religion than the Passion of Christ.  Highly religious people like Pharisees and chief priests rejected Him and called for His crucifixion because they had blinded themselves spiritually with their pride and lust for power.  It was not the tax collectors and other public sinners who wanted Him dead, but those who were so self-righteous that they could accept only a Messiah who confirmed that they were deserving of glory and praise.  They defined themselves as holy over against “the sinners,” even though they were the guiltiest of all due to their pride.  Had they come to recognize that and cry out to the Lord from the depths of their hearts for mercy like the publican, they surely would have received it.

There is no clearer warning to us about the dangers of pride corrupting our Lenten disciplines than today’s gospel reading.  The point is not, of course, that we should all become public criminals, but that we must use our ascetical practices to grow in our humility as those who know only our need for the healing mercy of the One Who offered Himself fully on the Cross and rose in glory for our salvation.  Whenever we catch ourselves thinking that at least we are better than that person or group of people, we must focus our minds on the words of the Jesus Prayer or otherwise call out to the Lord from our hearts “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”  If we have identified some earthly agenda with God’s Kingdom such that we exalt ourselves in our own minds over adherents of competing agendas, we must likewise fall on our faces in humility. We must embrace such spiritual clarity not only with our rational minds, but also with our hearts this Lent. As the Savior said, “He who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”  Now is the time to prepare for a spiritually beneficial Lent that will help us grow in the humility necessary to see ourselves clearly as we reorient our lives toward the great joy of Pascha, for “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”