“His grace …was not in vain.”
“I am the least of the Apostles,” St. Paul famously declares, and goes on to say, just as famously, that “by the grace of God, I am what I am.” The phrase complements, I suggest, the prayer of the humble Publican, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” It is the very opposite of our culture of self-obsession which is endlessly self-referential; the culture of ‘look at me looking at you looking at me;’ all rather like the proud Pharisee.
But what does Paul mean? Is it by the grace of God that Paul is a sinner? No. But by the grace of God Paul knows that he is a sinner. Why is he the least of the Apostles? In his eyes and in his words, “because I persecuted the Church of God,” he confesses.
Do we do much better or any less when in our pride and arrogance, in our folly and deceit, we deny the very truth of God upon whom our life depends? Are we not also persecutors, when like the proud Pharisee, we do nothing more than pray with ourselves in despising the real prayers of others, giving mere lip service to the presence of God by calling attention to ourselves? The empty words of our empty selves?
Jesus names the quintessential nature of pride in the figure of the Pharisee. “He prayed thus with himself,” not to God. What that means is made clear in the content of his ‘prayer.’ He claims to be better than everyone else. “I thank God that I am not like them.” Who? “Other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers,” and if that was not enough, “or even as this Publican.” He goes on to boast of his good works. None of this is prayer. It is really all about calling attention to oneself in stark contrast to others.
There can be no prayer when we are not open to the omnipresence of God and so to one another. There can be no prayer when we are closed in upon ourselves, standing upon the ground of our own self-righteousness. There can be no prayer without humility which alone is the counter to all pride.
Dante prescribes the antidote to pride. It is the prayer at the heart of all prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. On the cornice of the proud in his Purgatorio are engraved “the image[s] of the great humilities”: Mary’s Annunciation, King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant, and, strikingly, the Emperor Trajan in the story of his promise of justice to a grieving mother – understood as an act of mercy; power not as domination but as “mercy and pity,” as the Collect puts it. The images are visibile parlare, visible speech; things seen and heard. But most significantly, the proud whose heads were held high in the world are here bent down towards the dust of our common humanity. They pray the Lord’s Prayer while contemplating the examples of humility, not the least of which is Mary. She is defined not by self-assertion but by God’s grace. “Be it unto me according to thy word,” saying in effect what Jesus himself prays in Gethsemane to the Father, “not my will but thine be done.” Is this not in turn what we are given to pray, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? Significantly, the petitions, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” are prayed not for themselves but importantly and symbolically for others, for all of us.
Prayer is precisely not about talking with ourselves. “Our Father” is not a mere set of words to be rattled off indifferently and mindlessly. Prayer is altogether about our engagement with God. It is the pre-condition of our honest engagement with one another.
The Publican in the parable is a public figure, an official engaged in the res publicae, the public things of our political and moral life in our ordered life together with one another; in this case, a tax-collector. A Publican is not just a keeper of taverns and pubs!
The Publican in the parable is the picture of humility. His humility is his honesty which leaves him open to the truth of God and so to everyone else. He stands “afar off” and “would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven.” Instead of boasting about himself, he “smote upon his breast, saying God be merciful to me a sinner.” As such he is closer to God because he is not simply closed in upon himself, wrapped up in his own words; “the proud” as Mary’s Magnificat makes clear are “scattered in the imagination of their hearts;” just like the Pharisee.
The greatest danger in the pilgrimage of our spiritual lives is to put ourselves in the place of God. It is to be physically in the temple, the holy place of God, yet completely and spiritually unaware of his truth and presence, because we are full of ourselves. We forget that it is only by the grace of God that we walk, stand, run and move. Only by the grace of God can we face the remarkable follies and foolish wickednesses in our own hearts and in our lives, and not be destroyed by them.
Paul has found and named what he has done as a sinner and redeemed. It belongs to our freedom to do nothing less. The prayer of the Publican reverberates throughout the whole of our liturgy: “Kyrie eleison” – “Lord, have mercy upon us”; “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us.” Unlike the Pharisee, what is wanted is that we should “not presume to come to this thy table trusting in our own righteousness.” Rather, like the Publican, we come trusting in “thy manifold and great mercies.” Only so shall we find ourselves in the presence of God whose power is shown most chiefly in mercy and pity. Freed from the prison of our own selves.
This is not about grovelling in the dust and wallowing in self-pity and piteous self-recriminations which is really about calling attention to ourselves. Paradoxically, there is nothing so magnanimous, so great-souled, as the exemplar of humility, Mary, the virgin mother of our Lord. “My spirit,” she says, “hath rejoiced in God my Saviour, for he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.” Humility belongs to our freedom and our ultimate dignity. We are the dust which God has shaped and into which he has breathed his spirit. It belongs to the dignified dust of our humanity to offer prayers and praises together to Almighty God. We are raised up only because we can acknowledge who we are by the grace of God. We acknowledge his mercy. Sinners, yes, so we are, but in such an acknowledgement we are something more. We are in the company of Christ and with one another in the purpose of his good will for us. “His grace was not bestowed in vain.”
In ourselves we are vain and empty, hence pride as vainglory; our prayers but the meaningless prattle of our own self-affirmations. In Christ we are alive and fully ourselves.
“By the grace of God, I am what I am:
and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XI, 2025