Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke. Glory to you, O Lord Jesus addressed this parable to those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else.
Two people went up to the temple area to pray.
One was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector.
The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself.
Oh 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.
But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast and prayed, O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.
I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former.
For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted. The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
Here is an example of my typical morning prayer.
Dear God, I thank you for not making me like these goofy, sinful people I have to minister to.
Thank you for making me perfect in virtually every way.
And of course, for making me so handsome.
Now, of course, that is not my prayer, although I bet you 10 bucks somebody is going to quote me on that, acting like it is, and say it to somebody else.
But what Jesus is addressing here is actually the kind of pitfall that we can all fall into once in a while, because it is easy to convince ourselves that if only things worked the way I think they ought to work, how perfect our world would be.
And our reality is that is usually far from the truth.
What makes any society healthy is when ideas from different people come together, and through honest and healthy debate, conclusions are made that lift up all people.
None of us have all the truth, and none of us live a truly saintly life.
Now, there's a detail in this gospel that I like to hold on to because I think it gives us the best understanding.
And that is notice Jesus says the Pharisees spoke this prayer to himself, and that's pretty darn accurate.
Because what happens when we think we have all the answers? When we are perfect, we have absolutely, positively no need for God.
We become our own God.
And it's only in recognizing that we are oftentimes far from perfection.
That we also recognize that we are each utterly dependent upon God's grace and mercy.
And the only way we will ever be justified is by that truth. That grace, that love.
It makes us change when we can recognize that dependence because we recognize that we have been gifted with more than we would ever deserve by a God who loves us more than we will ever know.
And when we recognize that, then we have the possibility of changing.
We have the possibility of being closer to that ideal.
Because we recognize we're not doing it on our own, we're doing it with God's help.
