God, have pity on me ...

Jesus told this parable to people who were sure of their own goodness and despised everybody else. “Once there were two men who went up to the Temple to pray: one was a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood apart, by himself, and prayed, ‘I thank you, God, that I am not greedy, dishonest, or an adulterer, like everybody else. I thank you that I am not like that tax collector over there. I fast two days a week, and I give you a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance and would not even raise his face to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have pity on me, a sinner!’ “I tell you” said Jesus, “the tax collector, and not the Pharisee, was in the right with God when he went home. For all who make themselves great will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be made great” (Luke 18:9-14)

The Pharisees get a great deal of bad press throughout the New Testament. They must have wondered what had hit them when Jesus came onto the scene because, before then, they were the top dogs, the people at right with God, at the top of the spiritual tree and whose authority was not to be questioned. In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples to, by all means if they wish, listen to the Pharisees but under no circumstances to emulate their behaviour. “They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but will they lift a finger to move them? Not they! Everything they do is done to attract attention, like wearing broader phylacteries and longer tassels, like wanting to take the place of honour at banquets and the front seats in the synagogues, being greeting obsequiously in the market squares” (Matt 23:1-12)

Jesus, as we know, came amongst humanity to heal us and to restore us to God the Father. But there appears to be just one very particular section of society which regularly attracted his criticism and which remained stubbornly untouched by his ministry: the Pharisees. The only fault of the Pharisees was to have become blind to their faults and therefore self-satisfied. All faiths and churches need laws and leaders otherwise there is chaos. But the Pharisees had become so very sure of their worth and of their goodness, that they were completely blinded to the natural flawedness of their own humanity and to the possibility that they, too, were sinners and in need of God’s mercy. Such was their blindness that they were incapable of seeing anything but the faults in others, such as the tax collector who, for sure, would have had a reputation for dishonesty and embezzlement at a time when tax collectors were guilty of these things.

In this Gospel passage we are presented with two very distinct people: the self-satisfied Pharisee and the humble tax collector. I wouldn’t mind hazarding a guess that we can probably relate to both.

We are all vulnerable to becoming a little like the Pharisee when we lose sight of the ways in which we stand in need of God’s mercy. How easy it is to think that, because I am not a terrorist, a murderer or a thief that I am somehow more worthy of God’s kingdom than those who are so sincerely damaged as to have apparently put themselves outside of the love of God.

The Pharisee had lost his sense of reality - he could not see himself as God or others saw him. To see ourselves in the stark light of God's Truth is terribly important, for without the Truth we too are blind. We cannot learn the truth about ourselves without looking long and hard at God who is perfect beyond all our wildest imaginings. He is perfect Love. He is perfect Truth. He is perfect Kindness. He is perfect Generosity. He is perfect Compassion. Of course, when we hold ourselves up against such a person as God, we are bound to be humbled and ashamed by the truth about ourselves.

In comparing myself to God I will see the thousand ways in which, like the Pharisee, I am greedy and self-satisfied and in which I judge others; my eyes will be opened to the times without number when I have thought, said or acted in ways which were contrary to the perfect and unconditional love of God.

I am therefore a sinner – it doesn’t matter to what degree I am a sinner … the fact remains that I AM A SINNER. Indeed, if I were to imagine myself to be standing shoulder to shoulder with, say, a murderer, I cannot say that I am in any more or less need of God’s healing mercy because I am quite simply in need of his mercy. It could even be said that I am no closer to or further from God than anyone else for we are ALL close to God by dint of the fact that He is close to us.

This passage is a warning to us to make sure that we try to align ourselves more closely with the tax collector, the sinner. This is the man who should draw us into this passage, for this is the man who is inviting us to be more aware of the areas of our life which stand in need of God’s healing mercy. He tells us not only to be aware of our shortcomings but actively and sincerely sorry for them. We are to stand with him, and humbly present ourselves before God and ask for his merciful love and forgiveness and healing in our lives. What can we do except to turn to the words of the psalmist and say, from the bottom of our hearts …

Have mercy on me, God, in your kindness.
In your compassion blot out my offence.
O wash me more and more from my guilt
and cleanse me from my sin.

My offences, truly, I know them;
my sin is always before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned;
what is evil in your sight I have done …..
(Ps 50/51)

The tax collector ‘stood at a distance’ such was his sense of personal sin and shame. Well, we may too, in our own sense of sin and shame, find ourselves standing at a distance, too ashamed to even look into our Saviour’s face, and that is no bad thing: that is an important moment for us. However, it is not perhaps as important as the moment in which we move on, called as we are to trust in the Lord’s love for us and in his desire that we should have a greater intimacy with him, and Jesus gives us the opportunity for that greater intimacy in the sacrament of the Eucharist in which he makes himself fully present to us. Jesus, our healer, our great lover; Jesus who sees right into our hearts and who knows us and understands us better than we know or understand ourselves. Jesus, who, the minute we recognise our need of him and are able to sincerely confess our guilt and our shame, will pour his grace into our hearts so that we, like the tax collector, can head for home at rights with God.