Our holiness comes from God alone

So often in St. Luke's gospel two people are juxtaposed to teach us some truth—the two men who built their house on different foundations [Luke 6:46-49], the two sisters Martha and Mary [Luke 10:38-42], the rich man and Lazarus [Luke 16:19-31], two criminals at the crucifixion [Luke 23:32-55], and in the parable I reflected on today about the Pharisee and the tax-collector [Luke 18:9-14].  “Two people went up to the temple area to pray; one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector.  The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous—or even like this tax collector.’”

Jesus gives credit to the prayer of the tax collector and spurns the self-righteousness and contempt of the Pharisee but doesn’t simply see the two in complete and radical opposition.

What Jesus cherishes in the tax collector is the recognition of his sin and his simple trusting stance before God's love and mercy in spite of that sin.  What Jesus doesn’t make clear, at the risk of subverting the importance of this principal message, is that God loves the Pharisee as well and takes note of the fact that he also is making an effort to follow the Law and is praying, even if it’s in a manner that’s blind and even harmful to his spiritual life.  The Pharisee might be a lost sheep, but he remains one of the flock, and one of those whom Jesus is trying to reach.

But how does this touch us personally in our prayer, our actions, and in our growth in God?  In one sense we float between these two positions, sometimes close to one in our feelings and the ways that we act and sometimes closer to the other, yet in another sense we’re always both.  Like the Pharisee we’re yearning to be justified before God, and especially justified by our own efforts, and at the same time we recognize that even such a yearning is at root ungodly: our holiness comes from God alone, as the tax collector realizes.

In this situation, about the only thing that we can do is to be attentive to the problem, to concentrate on our desire for God (responding to His great desire for us), and to pray like the dickens that He has mercy on us and lifts us out of our spiritual poverty.  And that He helps us realize that it’s precisely in that poverty, and only there, that we can be open to receive His forgiveness, healing, and life.