30th Sunday OT
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Anthony/OLR, NOLA
The tax collector prays to God. The Pharisee prays to himself. What
difference does this difference make? Self-righteous prayer attempts
to change God, while righteous prayer changes the one praying. In our
desire to gain and maintain control of our lives – lives that do
not belong to us in the first place – we can forget a basic
theological truth: Nothing we can do, say, feel, or think changes
God. We live and move and have our being in Him. He does not live
and move and have His being in us. We are His creatures; He is our
Creator. Prayer is one way that we align our will with His.
Therefore, Christian prayer is not a form of persuasion; a way of
bargaining, or a means of pestering God into giving us what we think
we need or want. Christian prayer is not a magic spell, or a
spiritual recipe, or a religious formula that can bend God to our
will. We cannot trick God with novenas or litanies, nor can we
browbeat Him with adoration or processions. None of these forms of
prayer are designed to change God's mind or influence Him in the
least. Jesus shows us that prayer changes the heart and mind of the
one praying. And that righteous prayer is always prayed in genuine
humility.
The
first step in praying with genuine humility is coming to know and
love God as His creature; that is, acknowledging and accepting that
we are made beings, beings made in His image and likeness and re-made
in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Man was created from dirt with the
breath of God – body and soul. Remembering that we are dirt and
that we will return to dirt, and living out that memory, is what it
means to be humble. Genuine humility makes it possible for us to get
out of our own way and receive all that God has to give us. We set
aside our wants, our perceived needs. We set aside the need to
control our lives and the lives of others. We give up the lie that we
know what's best for us and ours. Above all, we accept that our end –
our target – is not in this world or of this world. We are here
temporarily, and nothing we do, say, think, or feel will last long
after we die. So while we are here, our task is bear witness to the
mercy of God, giving testimony from our own lives how He has made us
His heirs, His children, through Christ Jesus. Our adoption into the
Holy Family is a gift not a reward for good behavior or
right-thinking. But a freely offered gift that we freely receive or
freely reject. Prayer is our means of giving thanks and growing in
humility.
The
second step in praying in humility is coming to know and love all of
God's creation, especially His sons and daughters, our brothers and
sisters in Christ. The self-righteous Pharisee fails to love the
tax-collector, judging him to be “greedy, dishonest, adulterous.”
How does the Pharisee make this judgment? He says, “I fast twice a
week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.” In our
self-righteousness, we might say, “I attend daily Mass. Go to
confession once a week. Pray the rosary twice a day. And serve on the
parish council.” So??? None of this makes you or me righteous. If
we attend Mass, go to confession, pray the rosary, and serve on the
parish council in order to be seen, to be noticed by the greedy,
dishonest, and adulterous sinners who don't deserve God's mercy, then
our humility is suffocated by self-righteousness, and we pray to
ourselves not to God. To know and love all of God's creation,
especially our brothers and sisters in Christ, is not about calling
sin good. It's about seeing in them and ourselves the desperate need
for God's mercy and offering to them (and ourselves) the witness we
all need to come out of sin and to surrender ourselves to Divine
Love. The humble pray knowing they are sinners.
The
last step in praying with humility is coming to know and love
ourselves as redeemed sinners; that is, as loved and saved creatures
of Love Himself. Genuine humility is never about self-degradation.
It's never about torturing ourselves into believing that we are
worthless. Remember: we are made from dirt with the breath of God.
Genuine humility requires that we remember both elements of our
creation: the dirt and
the divine breath. When we forget that we are dirt, we end up
believing ourselves to be god w/o God. That's pride. That's the lie
the Serpent whispered to Eve. But when we forget that we are also of
the divine breath, we end up believing ourselves to be just dirt.
That is also pride. We leave God out of our lives, living as if He
has no part to play in how we came to be or where we need to go. The
balance is struck when we genuinely humble ourselves and exalt God.
God doesn't need our exaltation, but we need to exalt Him in order to
remain humble. This is why Jesus teaches us, “. . .whoever exalts
himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be
exalted.” Pray like the redeemed sinner you are.
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