prayer

Have Mercy On Me, A Sinner

Homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deacon Douglas McManaman

My ministry as a deacon is to the sick, especially those who suffer from mental illness. I remember visiting a patient many years ago in the mental health unit of a hospital, and I recall very clearly that he was telling me that he “feels” horrible about himself. He also has thoughts running through his head that he cannot control or get rid of, and these thoughts cause him to feel horrible about himself, that he is twisted, unclean and tainted. At that moment, something occurred to me. I said: “I was talking to my students about Aristotle today, something he said in his Nicomachean Ethics: You are not what you feel, and you are not what you think. In other words, the opinions you hold do not define your character. Rather, you are what you will. Your character is determined by what you will to be. So you may feel that you are a horrible person, and you may have all sorts of thoughts running through your head that you cannot control, thoughts that suggest you are a terrible human being, but you are what you will. So, what do you want to be? The answer to that question will tell you who you really are. 

Well, I did not expect those words to have had an impact on him, but his eyes opened wide. He was delighted to hear that. God sees right into the heart, that is, he knows what constitutes your deepest desire, and so he knows who you really are, even if the rest of us do not. And since this patient desperately wants to be something completely other than what he feels himself to be and what he thinks himself to be, then he is profoundly good.

I never saw him again after that, but a couple of months later I received a card, a thank you note. It was from this patient; that was the first and last time I ever received a thank you note from a hospital patient. That simple ancient insight made all the difference in the world to him.

The tax collector in today’s gospel reminded me of this patient of mine. He felt horrible about himself, but his deepest desire was revealed in his prayer: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner”.

When the sun comes out and its rays penetrate through a window, we see how dirty the window really is, the spots, the grime and dirt, etc., but at night time, we don’t see those spots, for they are not visible. At night, the window looks clean. But of course it isn’t; it’s dirty, which we can only see during the day when the rays of light penetrate through the window. So too, God is light from light, as we say in the creed, and when God draws us close to himself, we see our spots, the grime and dirt. If we are not close to God, then we are in the dark, and the result is we cannot see our own dirt, grime and spots. Instead, we believe that we are clean, and we feel good about ourselves, and then it is much easier to look with contempt upon another. 

The Pharisee saw himself as okay; he was very pleased with himself. He had no shame in the presence of God, no sense of having fallen short in any way, because for the Pharisee, holiness is about religious works: “I fast twice a week and give a tenth of my income”, he said. But we are not saved by the works of the law, as Paul says. He writes: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.” (Eph 2, 8) The tax collector, on the other hand, saw nothing but his own sins: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner”. And that’s why the tax collector went down to his home justified. It was the light of divine grace that allowed him to recognize his own sinfulness. He had no contempt for others, only contempt for himself. 

Holiness is charity. Holiness is love. What we see in the Pharisees is sanctimony, which is a false holiness. In the Parable of the Last Judgment, the Son of Man does not say to us: “You did not genuflect properly; you didn’t dress properly for Mass; you weren’t reverent enough”, etc.,. No, he’s going to say “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, thirsty and you gave me something to drink, lonely and you visited me”, and so on. That’s reverence. Jesus berated the Pharisees for desiring seats of honor and delighting in titles and having people fawn all over them. We are going to be judged on how we serve those who are forgotten, those who have no importance, no social standing. That’s holiness; that’s genuine religion. The reason is that this is precisely where Jesus hides himself, as Mother Teresa would always say. Jesus disguises himself in the poor and the neglected. But century after century, Christians like to forget this and instead busy themselves with all sorts of piety. But piety, if it is genuine, will allow us to see and recognize Jesus in his various disguises. And if we truly love him, we will develop the ability to notice him in those who are forgotten and neglected, and we will love him in those who do not love themselves, who do not delight in themselves, but who doubt themselves and would never think to compare themselves to others. 

The Good News that Our God is an Unjust Judge

Deacon Douglas McManaman

The gospel reading for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary time is the Parable of the Widow and the Unrighteous Judge (Lk 18, 1-8). The figure for God the Father in this parable is, interestingly enough, an unjust judge, that is, one who has no fear of God and no respect for any human being. And he refuses to listen to a widow who is pleading for a just judgment, a woman who has lost her protection (her husband) and who has lost her social standing. He simply refuses to consider the merits of her case. So why is this kind of a judge a figure for God in this parable?

I contend that this is a very subtle proclamation of the good news of the gospel; for the unjust judge ends up granting her justice (ekdikeso), but not on the merits of her case, but merely for self-centered reasons: “so that she may not wear me out by continually coming”. In other words, “to get her off my back”.  

The same root root word is employed by Paul in his letter to the Romans: “There is none righteous (dikaios)” (3, 10), and “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified (dikaioumenoi) freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (3, 23). The verb is dikaioun, to justify, to render favorable. The same word is used in 2 Corinthians when Paul says: “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (dikaiosune theou). In other words, we are the ones who were given a favorable judgement, made righteous, justified, not on the merits of our lives, but purely on the basis of God’s good pleasure. We could even say “for self-centered reasons”, like the unjust judge. In other words, the reason for our justification is nothing more than that “he wanted to”, “he felt like it”, for he is not beholden to anything above himself–there is nothing above God–nor is he beholden to any human tribunal. 

To be the righteousness of God is to be justified, because to justify is to “make right” (jus). It means to stand in right relationship with God. We can’t do that; we have no power to justify ourselves, to redeem ourselves, to buy ourselves back from the slavery of sin. We cannot make up for sin. Only God can do that, and he does so in Christ, in his death, as a sheer gift, not as a result of anything we might have done, nor by virtue of any disposition or prior goodness on our part. All of us stand before God in need of redemption, in need of salvation, completely dependent upon one who can and does redeem us.

So why does Jesus hold up the unjust judge as a figure for God? The reason is that from our point of view, God is often seen as unjust. Think of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. The landowner hires laborers at different times of the day, but at the end of the day he pays the one who worked one hour the same wage as the one who worked a full day. They grumbled and saw that as a violation of justice. Consider the parable of the lost son (apollumai:  ‘being destroyed’), the son who “destroys himself” by his own choices, and the older son’s anger towards his father for his unjust royal treatment upon his return. In other words, God is like an unjust judge who pays no attention to the requirements of justice, but does what he pleases, and what pleases him above all else is raising the dead to life. If one is dead, one cannot do anything to earn that resurrection or help in the process, for one is dead. Jesus raised a 12 year old girl (the daughter of Jairus), and he raised the son of the widow of Nain, and he raised Lazarus from the dead. And he raises us from the dead as well: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our sins, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with him,…” (Eph 2, 4-5). 

God can control his anger, but he cannot control his mercy, said a long time priest friend of mine. That’s the God we worship. It would be terrible news if our justification depended upon the merits of our life, that is, terrible news if our God was a “Just Judge” who rendered judgements on the basis of how much our lives measure up to the standards of justice. 

When a defendant awaiting a verdict stands before a court judge, he or she is typically nervous, filled with fear, a servile fear. But God calls us to grow out of servile fear and into filial fear, which is not the fear of punishment, but a profound reverence for God that is so deep that sin loses all attraction. What human judge can cause us to lose all attraction to sin and self-seeking? If we stand before God with servile fear, we haven’t learned what we should have learned in this life; we have not embraced the good news of the gospel, and that may be in part because the good news was not proclaimed to us; for what is often proclaimed is a false gospel, a gospel reduced to a transaction: “If you do this, you will get that; if you don’t do this, you will not get that”. It’s the false gospel of salvation through works, the semi-Pelagian heresy that we have to do something to earn that initial grace. But we’ve earned nothing. It’s all grace, including the grace of our cooperation.

Jesus ends by asking: “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?” If we project our own limits onto God, if we see God as a God who judges us on the merits of our case, on the basis of what we actually deserve, then we won’t pray much, at least not with a great deal of hope. But if we truly believe the good news of the divine mercy–which is not easy to believe–, then we will pray with great confidence, and when we pray with confidence, we begin to see miracles, especially when interceding for others. 

St. Paul says that it is the Holy Spirit who prays through us, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, so the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words (Rom 8, 26). When we pray for others, it is the Holy Spirit who prays through us, and God loves our children and all those for whom we pray infinitely more than we do, so whatever love we have for our children, it is merely a limited sharing in that love of his for them, and so we can pray for them without anxiety and uncertainty. Our God is an unjust judge. In other words, his mercy goes far beyond the demands of justice. He hears our prayers because he inspires them. And that is indeed hard to believe, which is why this reading ends with Christ saying: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”, specifically, the faith that we have nothing to fear in the servile sense, faith that we will get not what we deserve, but what he wants for us, which is a never ending sharing in his own happiness, which not only lasts forever, but which expands without end, an eternal life of unimaginable surprises. And God always gets what he wants in the end.