Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity
Link to the Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for the 11th Sunday after Trinity
The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself
We live in a world awash in hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement, a world ethically challenged and endlessly divided. This Gospel concentrates the ethical problem and its solution rather wonderfully. “Two men went up into the temple to pray,” Jesus tells us in a parable. Luke’s introduction provides the key interpretation. Jesus says “this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous.” The whole point of the parable is to highlight our self-delusions about our sense of our own self-righteousness and thus to point us to the wisdom which is humility.
The key lies, I think, in the attitude of the Pharisee which, quite apart from the Pharisees, a strict and devout religious sect within Judaism which Jesus elsewhere commends, illumines the whole problem, a problem which is very much part of our age and world. He “prayed thus with himself”. To be blunt, that is not prayer. Prayer is not simply with ourselves. That is the problem, the problem of the narcissism of our age, the problem of our endless preoccupations with ourselves and our denials of one another and of God. No parable illustrates this problem more fully than this and no parable points us as a result to the much more radical and freeing nature of prayer.
The paradox is that when we are like the Publican, who “standing afar off, and wouldest not lift up his eyes so much unto heaven, and smote his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner,” then we are more truly ourselves and nearer God. Prayer, simply put, is not with ourselves but with God in whom we are with one another and with ourselves. Only as broken can we be made whole. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise,” as the gradual psalm reminds us (Ps. 51.17). It serves as the mantra for Lent from the great penitential Psalm 51; there it belongs to our turning back to God in repentance, here it is about our being with God in prayer, in humility, the ground of wisdom.
The illustration is heightened by the arrogant self-absorption of the Pharisee’s prayer. He calls attention to himself at the expense of another whom he puts down. In his self-absorption and braggadocio, he despises the Publican. Nothing reveals more profoundly the problem of being closed off to God and to his mercy and grace. Nothing reveals more profoundly the utter vanity and emptiness of ourselves when we are turned in upon ourselves. It is the definition of sin; incurvatus in se, turned in upon ourselves to the exclusion of God and one another, and even more to the putting down of others. Total self-delusion is the point which Jesus is making.
