Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity
“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.
