Prayer for Mercy, 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), October 24, 2010

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Anthony of Padua Church, New Bedford
Thirtieth Sunday in OT, Year C
October 24, 2010
Sir 35:12-14,16-18; 2 Tim 4:6-8,16-18; Lk 18:9-14

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that there are four different “forms” of prayer, for different general things about which we’re supposed to pray to God.
  • Two weeks ago, on 10/10/10 we had the Gospel of the ten lepers and focused on what we all need to learn from the one leper who returned to give praise and thanks to God for the gift of his healing. We discussed how praising God for who he is and thanking God for all he’s done for us are the two most important aspects of our prayer.
  • Last week, we had the parable of the importune woman who continued to implore the unjust judge to render a fair judgment against her adversary. Jesus used this Gospel as an illustration of the necessity to pray always without ever losing heart. The precise type of prayer shown by the woman was intercessory prayer, or prayer of petition, when one prays for what one or others’ need.
  • Today we turn to the last of the forms of prayer, one that is often the easiest for many of us to overlook: prayer begging God’s mercy and forgiveness.
• Jesus gives us the parable of the two men who went up to the temple to pray.
  • The first man was a Pharisee. He prayed, “Thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity — greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.” The man was what most people would call today a good religious man. He was going up to Jerusalem to the temple to pray. He, like his fellow Pharisees, never sought to do the minimum in the practice of the faith but as much as they can. Whereas Jews were required to fast only once a year on the Day of Atonement, the Pharisees fasted twice a week. Whereas Jews needed to tithe only certain things, he tithed on his whole income. He was outwardly a role model. But there was something drastically wrong in his conception of God, his conception of the faith, and his conception of others. The first clue is that Jesus said, “He spoke this prayer to himself.” That doesn’t mean that he simply said it quietly so that he alone could hear, but, in a sense, he was praying that prayer to himself, that he was something special. He thanked God that he was not like so many others, who were thieves, rogues, adulterers and publicans. He rejoiced in what he saw was his virtue, but what he failed to recognize was that he was proud, judgmental, vain, boastful and uncharitable. He failed to see his own sinfulness. He failed to ask God for mercy, because he didn’t think he needed it. Compared to so many around him, and the other person praying in the temple, he considered himself a saint among sinners.
  • We’ll come back to him and to his attitude, but it’s important for us to note the contrast Jesus makes with the other man who went up to the temple to pray that day. The tax collector was hated by his fellow Jews not because he was collaborating with the Romans who were subjugating the Jewish people, but because in the carrying out of his duty, tax collectors would routinely rip off their people for greed. They were assessed a certain amount that needed to be collected; whatever they could get beyond that was theirs to keep, and many of the tax collectors were ripping off the poor precisely in order to live well. They were in general corrupt, similar, in some ways, to an ancient mafia class that the authorities would do nothing about. One would think that someone in this circumstance, who had given his life over to this type of betrayal of his nation and betrayal of so many people who lived around him, wouldn’t pray at all. For him to pray, some might say, was hypocritical. But he knew that even if others might never forgive him, God could, and he knew he needed God’s forgiveness. With no arrogance whatsoever, no self-importance, and great humility, he stayed in the back, beat his breast and say, “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” As the first reading from Sirach says, “The prayer of the humble pierces the clouds!” and his prayer did. He was totally conscious that he didn’t deserve forgiveness, but knew that the Lord was kind and merciful, that the Lord’s mercy endures forever, and with great repentance he prayed for that gift.
  • Jesus gave a startling conclusion to the parable. He told his listeners that of the two, the good man who fasts, tithes and lives outwardly by the mosaic law, and the detested one who rips off his own people and conspires with the pagan authorities, only one of them had their prayer heard and left the temple in a right relationship with God. It was the publican! To understand the surprise, it would have been like Jesus substituted a Missionary of Charity for a Pharisee and a drug pusher for the publican and said that when the two left the Church only the drug pusher was justified, was truly on good terms with God. It would be like he said a pope and a prostitute went to Church to pray but the only one who left justified was the prostitute. Such a comment was not about the type of life they were leading, but about the type of humble prayer they made. No matter what type of life we lead, we need to pray well, which means to pray humbly with a recognition for God’s mercy.
• This whole parable points to what Jesus had said elsewhere, “I have come not to call the self-righteous, but sinners!” If we wish to come to Church and leave on good terms with the Lord, we need first to recognize that we’re sinners, that we need his mercy, ask for it and seek to live by it. Only sinners need a savior. Only those who pray for mercy will receive it. Only the truly humble will be exalted. St. Luke tells us that Jesus addressed the parable in today’s Gospel to “those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else.”
• There’s a story about Frederick the Great, King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, who visited a prison one day. Each of the prisoners he spoke with claimed to be innocent: the victim of misunderstanding, prejudice, or simple injustice. Finally the king stopped at the cell of an inmate who remained silent. “I suppose you’re innocent too,” Frederick remarked. “No, sir,” the man replied. “I’m guilty. I deserve to be here.” Turning to the warden, the king said: “Warden, release this scoundrel at once before he corrupts all these fine, innocent people in here.” What better example could we have of the words in our first reading: “The prayer of the lowly pierces the clouds”? What better witness we could have to how we’re called to recognize that we’re sinners.
• The message of the parable Jesus gives us today is ever urgent for us to grasp.
  • There are of course still self-righteous people in the Church, who when they look at themselves in the mirror, think that they’re something special, that they’re better than other people, that, sure, they may have their weaknesses and problems, but at least they’re not like those who have “really sinned,” by having conceived children out of wedlock or gone to jail. They focus mainly on what they have done right rather than what they have done wrong. They might admit that, sure, they need a “little” of God’s mercy, but nothing near what other’s need.
  • But this self-righteousness isn’t just a problem for those who, like the Pharisees, actually do try to live religiously. It can also afflict those who live like the publican. That’s very popular today in our culture and even in the Church. Those who are clearly violating the Lord’s commandments left and right — by never coming to Church, or living with someone out of wedlock or by engaging in a gay lifestyle — rather than repenting for their sins and coming to beg for God’s forgiveness, actually attack the Church or those who are seeking to call them to conversion for being “intolerant” or “judgmental.” They can pray like this, “I thank you Lord, because I am not one of those hypocritical and intolerant modern Pharisees, who worry about fasting, who worry about coming to Church and praying, who worry about tithing, but who in real life am worse than I am!”
• What’s the Lord want from us?
  • He wants us
    • First to recognize that, whether we have been religiously observant or not, in order to have our prayer heard, we humbly need God’s mercy and need to ask for it.
    • Second, rather than focusing on others’ sins, we need to concentrate on our own. The problem with the Pharisee in the Gospel was that he preferred to focus on what he was doing right, rather than what he was doing wrong. That’s a perennial temptation. We focus on the commandments we’re keeping, rather than the ones we’re breaking. And many of us, including many of us who pray, leave unjustified, because we haven’t been humble enough to beat our breasts and acknowledge our need for God’s help.
  • Last week with the confirmation class I did an extended explanation of all the parts of the Mass. I’ll be doing an abbreviated form of this at the 8:30 am Mass next week.
    • I focused on the introductory rites to the Mass with them. In order for us to pray the Mass well, we first need publicly to confess our sins in thought, words, deeds and omissions. We beat our breasts and ask for God’s help through the prayers of Mary, the angels and saints and each other. Then we continue, like the publican in the parable, to beg “Lord, have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” Then we pray the “Glory to God in the Highest,” but during it not only do we ask Jesus, the only Son of the Father, to have mercy on us, but thank him for receiving our prayer begging for mercy. The issue for us is how sincerely we make that prayer. Are we just saying words and doing empty gestures, or do we mean it? Do we get annoyed that we always start Mass remembering that we’re sinners?
    • I also talked to them about the purpose of a homily. I asked them what the purpose of a homily is. They came up with the standard insufficient or outright wrong answers: that it’s supposed to explain the Gospel and the other readings; that it’s supposed to give us something to think about; that it’s supposed to lift us up and make us feel good about the Christian lives we’re living and inspire us to continue doing the same. The Second Vatican Council said that the point of a homily is “conversion and holiness,” in that order. In other words, my first goal in a homily is to make you (and myself) feel bad! One of the teachers last week said that I do a good job at this! A homily is meant to bring you to recognize your need for conversion, that you haven’t lived the life God has wanted you to live. Once I do that, then the second point of a homily is to announce how God wants to lift you up, to forgive you, to help you live a holy life by taking advantage of the means he has given us to do so, like prayer, the Sacraments, life according to the Holy Spirit, the intercession and example of Mary and the saints and much more.
    • Later on in the Mass, we talked about the Our Father and how we then again ask God to forgive us our sins. How we beg the Lamb of God to have mercy on us and to grant us peace through the forgiveness of our sins. And we profess how unworthy we are to receive the Lord.
    • This is all part of the way we’re called to pray like the publican in the Gospel!
  • There’s also a clear application here to the Sacrament of Confession as well. If we genuinely recognize our need for God’s mercy, we’ll be so grateful for his having instituted a Sacrament on Easter Sunday evening whereby, through the ministrations of the same priests through whom he gives us his body and blood, he takes away our sins for real. Those who don’t examine their consciences and come to receive the sacrament of reconciliation are most likely like the Pharisee in today’s Gospel parable.
  • So we’ve all come here today to pray. Some of us are like the Pharisee. Some like the Publican. Most of us, a little bit of both. All of us, however, want to leave justified. The only way to do so is to pray for mercy. We need to pray for it insistently like the importune woman before the unjust judge last week. We must come back to thank the Lord for the gift of his mercy, like the grateful leper. We need to receive that mercy — which is both forgiveness and a help for us to convert and turn our lives around — and leave from this temple today intent on living with that help.
  • We finish with the second reading. St. Paul used to kill Christians for a living, but he converted. Even though he was a great apostle, he openly confessed that he was worst and least of all, because he had persecuted God’s Church. But he discovered that God was rich in mercy, so rich that out of his abundant mercy, he called Paul to be an ambassador of that mercy, calling people throughout the whole world to be reconciled to God. All Saint Paul did he did by the mercy of God, the Lord who stood by him and gave him strength. At the end of his life, he was able to say that he had fought the good fight, finished the race and kept the faith. Through the mercy of God, and through his intercession, may we do the same. Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were: