The Eleventh Sunday After Trinity (August 15, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

On the Ninth Sunday after Trinity, we heard the parable of the Prodigal Son, the conclusion to the trilogy of parables that speaks to the love and mercy of God. Our Gospel reading for today carries the same themes forward in St. Luke’s Gospels. The occasion for the parable, much like the mercy trilogy, pertains to the self-righteous. The eighteenth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel begins with a parable told to the disciples so that they would not lose heart: in this parable, we are told of a judge “who neither feared God nor regarded man.” But a certain widow of the city kept coming to him and begging him to vindicate her against someone who had wronged her. While the judge was initially resistant to her effort, he eventually relented, saying “she will wear me out by her continual coming.” The point is that if the unrighteous judge can relent to vindicate this poor widow, how much more will God vindicate those of us who make up his Church? The parable is a way of encouraging his disciples to persevere and to have trust in God’s goodness.

But immediately after this, Jesus tells the parable we heard today “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others”: Two men went to the temple to pray. The first man was a Pharisee and he prays by exalting himself: “I thank thee I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.” The pride of the Pharisee stands in stark juxtaposition against the humility of the tax collector who beat his breast and would not lift his eyes up to heaven, crying out “God be merciful to me a sinner!” While it may be difficult to tell from a human perspective which character is more righteous, Jesus lifts the veil and let’s us see things as they truly are: the tax collector “went down to his house justified rather than the other; for every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

There is a tension in the two parables in St. Luke 18—on the one hand, we’re given a picture of a God who cares for us and who we can be confident in. In the other story, we’re shown the danger of pride and the necessity of humility. The principle is that when we give into self-exaltation, we will be humbled by God, either in this life or the next. But those who humble themselves will be exalted by God—this follows the pattern of our Lord, “who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men…Therefore God has highly exalted him.” The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican then is a warning of self-righteousness, which we can define as relying on oneself without acknowledging the infused grace of God in our lives.

Saint Gregory the Great says that the fictitious Pharisee in the story models for us the contours and various forms of pride. First, pride imagines that any and all goodness in the self is there entirely because of the self—it refuses to credit God or others for good, which is a problem since God himself is the source of all goodness. The second manifestation of pride is when one believes that goodness is received out of merit—an overly karmic way of seeing the world that reduces God to a cosmic book keeper. It also ignores the fact that we can’t deserve his goodness on our own. Third, pride boasts about having what it doesn’t have. We see the Pharisee do this in the story, acting as though he has attained justification from his actions when, in reality, he has not. When the layers are peeled back, we see not righteousness but a putrid heart. The final way pride manifests itself is that it causes the prideful person to despise others. This is egregious because it represents the complete breakdown of the bi-une commandment that we are at the summary of the Law: “Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” St. Augustine provides a concise assessment of the problem with the Pharisee: “If you look into his words, you will find that he asked nothing of God. He goes up indeed to pray, but instead of asking God, praises himself, and even insults him that asked.”

The Pharisee has what Mother Maria of Paris calls “ascetic disdain”—this comes when we only keep in mind the first part of the Summary of the Law. But that’s not possible, we can’t have one without the other. If you want to love God, you will love your neighbor, and if you love your neighbor, you are loving God, as St. John warns: “If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.” We cannot privatize our relationship with God. If we do that, we will always see others as a means to an end, making them disposable. This is not compassion. This is not love. John Cassian provides us an admonition: “When someone has no compassion for another’s transgressions, but pronounces a severe judgment on them, it is an obvious sign of a soul not yet purified of evil passions.”

But then we have the publican who doesn’t lift ups his eyes to heaven, beating his bread and saying “God be merciful to me a sinner.” He turns his attention only inward—he doesn’t compare himself to the Pharisee but instead humbles himself and, in so doing, was exalted by our Lord.

St. Augustine tells us that pride is the root of all sin because it capitulates creature over the Creator, at least in their own mind. When we do that, we can ignore God’s law, insisting on our will, our autonomy over what God commands. Of course, the great irony is that the more we buy into the myth of autonomy, the more enslaved we become to sin. When we elevate ourselves, we place God in a box. He becomes something we can control and weaponize. He supports my political party, my country, my tribe, my desire to make money, or however else we might commit idolatry. This is insidious and causes us to miss something very important: God works in ways we don’t often expect.

“Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine,” St. Paul says in his epistle to the Ephesians. St. Paul knew this first hand as he went from being a major persecutor of the Church to one of its greatest champions. He discusses this in our epistle reading today: “As to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me.” But imagine what would have happened if the early Christians had reacted to St. Paul’s conversion the way that the Pharisee treated the Publican in the parable. Pride is so detrimental because it makes us miss what God is doing because we are blinded by our own self-obsession.

And so we should take to heart the bi-une commandment: love God with all your being and love everyone we come into contact with. These are not two separate commandments but a singular one, intricately connected. One necessitates the other. Humans are created in the image of God. When we encounter them ,we encounter God, and so we humble ourselves, esteeming others higher than ourselves and worthy to approach our Lord. Our parable today teaches us that pride is a complete subversion of the bi-une Law because it means we trust in our abilities and merits instead of God’s and therefore we view other’s with contempt, ignoring that they are bearers of that sacred Image of God. “Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”