Saturday – 3rd Week of Lent – A

In fact, my brothers and sisters, if we look at all the sins that we commit, lurking deep beneath, if we really do a good examination of conscience, we’ll always find a little bit of pride. And so our Lenten season is about embracing more and more those opportunities that God sends us to exercise humility. Humility is the virtue that breaks down walls in our midst. Pride raises those walls, and it hardens our hearts towards each other. It makes us impatient with one another. It makes us lacking in flexibility in order to be able to forgive and be able to compromise with our brothers and sisters.

And so Jesus addresses this parable to those “who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else” (Luke 18:9). Imagine I’m a person who despises people, and yet I think I’m righteous in the eyes of God. Well, how can that be? That is such a contradiction, obviously. But some of us have become so blinded to our own sinfulness, our own fragility, that we turn into presumptuous sinners, blind to the movements of the grace of God in our hearts.

Now the two men that go to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. So one is labelled righteous by society and even assumes that he is indeed so; the other, a tax collector, branded a sinner, a traitor of the people by society, and he assumes that role as well. But the Pharisee, we’re told, “took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself” (Luke 18:11), to himself. Listen to the language. Not really to God: “O God, I thank you 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” (Luke 18:11–12).

But the tax collector “stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven” (Luke 18:13). Notice the deep respect for the presence of God, the deep acknowledgement of his existence, the focus that this tax collector puts not on himself but on God. He doesn’t even raise his eyes to heaven, and he beats his breast and prays to God, not to himself: “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13).

And then Jesus concludes: “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 18:14). During this Lent, let us embrace these beautiful and marvellous opportunities to really work on ourselves, to not only be aware of our shortcomings, but to do something about it by embracing humility more and more in our lives. Amen.