Saturday of the Third Week of Lent Year 1 and 2 2024

Title

To Know God is to be Humble

Outline

There is a danger in being a faithful Catholic or Religious

This is true of lay faithful and all religious including clerics, especially priests

The danger is that of thinking we can “buy God off” by keeping the rules, my making the proper sacrifices, by being religious. But God wants “knowledge of God” and “loyalty” to his person. He does not need our sacrifices and offerings - we do, for they should humble us before God.

As so the Church has suffered from a decrease in social standing and especially from a decrease in attendance, parishes closing or merging, dioceses in bankruptcy, and a serious lack of vocations. (The same is true in Protestant communities across the board and also in Orthodox communities.)

Keeping the rules and making the sacrifices seemed to work well before the 60’s, although even long before God raised up multiple reform movements in his Church to act as prophets, but there has been a decline (offset in the Catholic Church by immigration) in the face of the spiritual assault since the 1960’s - doing the prescribed things does not work.

We have to know God and give our total loyalty to him so that we become one with him and realize how much we need his mercy.

And that is the point of Jesus’ parable.

It is addressed to people who are convinced of their own righteousness and therefore judge or despise everyone else.

The Pharisee had an orthodox theology. He could thank God that he kept the rules, first the outward moral rules - not extortion from others, following the rules of justice, not committing physical adultery. There is nothing inward about this morality. And so, thinking he measures up, he takes God’s place and judges the tax collector, whom, without knowing his heart, he assumes does not measure up. He is God’s representative in his own eyes but far from God’s heart and does not really know God.

The tax collector does not even seem to see the Pharisee, but he knows God, for he knows that God is merciful, and he knows that he needs God’s mercy, and his loyalty is to God, for he is not seeking mercy elsewhere. And therefore his humble demeanor for it matches his humble exterior. To know God is to know one is a sinner and yet to know that “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

And that is the danger and the opportunity of our commitment.

The danger is that we will learn the practices, moral do’s and don’ts, sacrifices, and the like of our faith (and as a convert I note that there is both an attractiveness and a challenge in doing so) and not realize that this does not mean love and loyalty or even truly knowing God. And because it is outward it always results in judgement, for that is how I convince myself that I am OK. We can even do this with virtues, i.e. use them to judge others.

Instead, while doing all the practices, like eating a healthy diet or clothing oneself properly to express and protect inward health, our pursuit should be beyond the first stages of spiritual growth to those of knowing God in which we will know experientially that we are, perhaps not the worse of sinners for that is a comparison, but sinners before God, and that God is mercy in person, and so we will hold onto the true God with desperate loyalty, covenant faithfulness, resulting in our transformation into his likeness.