Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 22, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
October 22, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, in which Jesus will speak to us about the importance of prayer in general and praying for mercy in particular. He does so by means of a famous parable in which he describes 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 deem today a 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 could. 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 items, he tithed 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 about him, “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 the prayer to himself, not to God, that his prayer, like his life, had himself in the center. The man thanked God that he was not like so many others, whom he said were thieves, rogues, adulterers and publicans. He rejoiced in what he saw was his virtue, but he failed to recognize that he was proud, judgmental, vain, boastful and uncharitable. He failed to see his own sinfulness. He didn’t 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.
• Jesus contrasts this man’s prayer with that of the other man, a tax collector, who went up to the temple to pray that day. Tax collectors or publicans were hated by their fellow Jews not just because they were collaborating with the Romans who were subjugating the Jewish people, but because in carrying out their duty, they 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 to an ancient mafia class that the authorities with whom they were conspiring would do nothing to stop. One would think that someone in such circumstances who had given his life over to this type of betrayal of his nation and of so many people who lived around him, wouldn’t pray at all. For him to pray, some might argue, was hypocritical. But he knew that even if others might never forgive him, God might, and he knew he needed God’s forgiveness. With no arrogance at all, no self-importance, and great humility, he stayed in the back of the temple, beat his breast and cried, “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” 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 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 despicable 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 — and it was the publican! We’ve heard the parable so many times that we can miss the absolute shock that Jesus’ first listeners would have had in response to it. To understand their surprise, it would as if Jesus substituted one of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity for the Pharisee and a drug pusher for the publican and said that when the two left the Church only the drug pusher was justified, on good terms with God. Or as if he said a pope and a prostitute went to St. Peter’s Basilica to pray but the only one who left justified was the prostitute. Such a comment was obviously not about the type of life they were leading until then, but about the type of prayer they made. The take-away is that no matter what type of life we have been leading until now, we are called to pray well, which means to pray humbly with a deep recognition of our need for God’s mercy. This parable points to what Jesus taught elsewhere, “I have come not to call the self-righteous, but sinners!” If we wish to go to Church on Sunday and leave on good terms with the Lord, we need to recognize that we’re sinners in need of his mercy, ask for it and seek to live by it. Only those who pray for mercy will receive it. Only the truly humble will be exalted.
• This has great practical consequences in the way we come before the Lord in prayer, especially in the Mass. At the beginning of Mass, as you know, we all confess, “I have greatlysinned … through my most grievous fault,” but do we really mean those words? Do we beat our breasts with sincere repentance? Do we pour ourselves into singing, “Lord, have mercy! Christ, have mercy! Lord, have mercy!,” or do we just go through the motions? Later in the Mass, when we pray the “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,” do we passionately cry out, “Have mercy on us, have mercy on us, and grant us peace”? And perhaps most poignantly, when that Lamb of God is elevated and we behold him, do we pray with great conviction the words, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed?”
• There’s a powerful story about Frederick the Great, King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, who one day was visiting a prison. The prisoners knew that he had the ability to pardon them and so unsurprisingly many asked for that favor. Each of the prisoners the King spoke with claimed to be innocent: the victim of misunderstanding, prejudice, or simple injustice. Eventually 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!” The lesson is pretty clear: do we go before the King of Kings as someone who pretends to be immaculately conceived and sinless or do we go before him truthfully, asking for his mercy because we know how much we need it?
• Self-righteousness remains a problem. There are some in the Church who, when they look at themselves in the mirror, deem that, even though they may have their weaknesses and problems, at least they’re not like those who have “really sinned,” by having, for example, conceived children out of wedlock or gone to jail. They might admit that they, sure, they need a “little” of God’s mercy, but nothing near what others need. Jesus gives this parable as a wake-up call, because such an attitude can incapacitate our prayer. But such 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, something that’s popular today in our culture and even in some places in the Church. Those who are clearly violating the Lord’s commandments left and right — by engaging in lifestyles totally incompatible with the Gospel, by never praying, by feeling justified failing to love the neighbors they don’t like — rather than repenting for their sins and coming to beg for God’s forgiveness, sometimes can glory in their shame and attack the Church or those who are seeking to call them to conversion. 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, who worry about going to confession, but who in real life are worse than I am!” 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,” and so Jesus is proclaiming it to everyone who is convinced of his or her own righteousness, whether the person has been religiously observant up until now or not.
• What’s the Lord want from us? He wants us first to recognize we humbly need God’s mercy and come to ask for it, like we Catholics do humbly in the Sacrament of Confession. Second, rather than focusing on others’ sins, he wants us 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 and others are breaking, rather than the ones we’re breaking and the saints are keeping. 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.
• On Sunday we will all go to Church to pray. Whether we might initially be prone to go like the Pharisee or like the publican — or like a little bit of both — all of us want to leave justified with our prayers heard. The only way to do so is to pray humbly for mercy and pray for it insistently like the importune woman before the unjust judge we met last week. The Church helps us by the prayers it puts on our lips, in which, with others and for them, we pray that God will be merciful to us, take away our sins, and make us worthy to receive him. If we pray sincerely in this way, then not only will we leave Church this Sunday with our prayers heard, but we will be prepared to meet the Lord whenever he comes for us at the end of our life, so that we may leave this life justified and be admitted with him into the Temple of the eternal Jerusalem, for only the one who humbles himself in this way will be so exalted. God bless you all!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download