Political election season is often filled with an air of hubris and that holier-than-thou rhetoric that can get very nasty. This time around it seems that the atmosphere around the presidential candidates is more toxic than usual. Each side seems to be shaming the supporters of the opposing candidate and the candidate as well. This leaves all of us in a very difficult situation.
Many people have reported that they have lost a friendship during this election cycle. It seems unnecessary and shallow, but it is the new reality of life.
Our Gospel passage this week has Jesus telling a parable that mirrors some of the rhetoric that we are subjected to on a daily basis. A Pharisee who, standing before God, manages not only to boast of his inflated sense of importance and the great works that he accomplishes with his money and influence, but also shames a tax collector who, kneeling before God, only seeks mercy and forgiveness.
The Pharisee fails to remember what so many of fail to remember as well – that we are indeed all sinners in need of mercy. One of the most serious errors that we make is the result of our own hubris and lack of serious self-reflection. If we look at the world and considering our own sins and the sins of others judge that since we are better than many or most and therefore lower on God’s list of people to be judged than others, we are no better than that Pharisee.
We do not build ourselves up by tearing others down. All of us learned that in the school yard in our youth. Insulting, accusing, name-calling, all tell us as much about the speaker as the one who is being victimized by the verbal assaults. We each stand before God – and indeed really before our peers as well – on our own merits and not on the demerits of others. I am not better than you because I am less-worse than are you. I am responsible to the world and, ultimately, to God not in relationship to anyone else but solely on my own merit. Were it not for God’s mercy none of us would be found worthy of salvation on our own.
Braggadocio before our peers before our peers makes us a tiresome bore. The same uttered before God highlights our hubris and becomes an even more reprehensible sin.
The attitude of the Pharisee towards the tax collector shows our humanity at its worst. Our inability to come to grips with our own sinfulness blocks us from recognizing the authentic desire for forgiveness and mercy in others. We focus solely on the negative about others while only seeing what we perceive to be our own goodness.
We live now in a time when this worldview is popular and celebrated. We revel in the “gotcha” news. We bring down heroes, public officials, celebrities, or anyone who holds a position of authority or prominence and seem to enjoy doing so.
Not one of us is a better person than that tax collector who humbles himself before God and even before the Pharisee. He was not afraid to fall on his knees, even knowing that the Pharisee was in the same room as was he.
There is a great lesson here for all of us. We must purge from ourselves this attitude of moral superiority in condemning the sinfulness of others. As we recognize our sinfulness and propensity to sin, we can and must exercise due caution while leading others to come acknowledge their sins. Fraternal correction has an important place in our faith tradition, but condemning another before God is itself a total rejection of God’s mercy at work in our lives and the lives of others.
Oct. 30 – A tax collector teaches us mercy
Jesus knew well how to do what conventional custom deemed the “wrong thing.” Upon entering Jericho Jesus sees Zacchaeus the tax collector who climbed a tree to see Jesus. The vociferous disgust of the crowd swells as Jesus chooses Zacchaeus as his host while in town. The crowd could only see a despised and corrupt tax collector and nothing more. Jesus could see the interiority of a man who must have already been primed for the encounter with Jesus. He climbed the tree to see Jesus yes, but he was looking, obviously, for some life transforming encounter.
During the meal with Jesus he clearly made a commitment to restitution which might well leave him on the verge of poverty. He promises half of what he owns to the poor and to return any ill-gotten gains four-fold. There probably is little if anything left for himself. A tax collector made his money by defrauding the people and Zacchaeus is a wealthy man.
While we can reflect on the many great examples of saints, like Francis of Assisi or Ignatius of Loyola who through a dramatic conversion experience shed their worldly wealth and power to embrace the poverty of the Gospel, Jesus offers a challenge to us which goes beyond divesting our riches in favor of the poor.
Jesus ate with, embraced and befriended sinners. With Zacchaeus he does so dramatically and very publicly. There is no equivocation on his part, and he left much confusion in his wake. At least one person in that crowd must have expected that Jesus would be dining in his home that evening. No one was more stunned than was Zacchaeus. He was struggling just to catch a glimpse of Jesus, he could have never expected that Jesus even notice him much less come to his home. Anyone one else would have seen Jesus’s visit as a sign of their importance, generosity, and virtuous life, not so Zacchaeus. He recognized his unworthiness evoking the intensity of his gratitude and the authenticity of his conversion. Jesus chose to eat with the most detested person in the crowd. The people knew Zacchaeus on the outside and they knew what he did to them. They thought that in knowing that, that they knew the man. Jesus confronts the crowd with their own prejudices and their haughtiness.
We must be careful not to get ourselves too caught up in the mentality of the crowd. We see with the tax collectors in the last two Gospel passages that it is often the presumed greatest sinners who are most acutely aware of their need for mercy and forgiveness. It is also true that those who presume themselves to be righteous often wish to deny the possibility of forgiveness to these sinners. Like the crowd we can get caught up in a sense of indignation at who dares to enter into the presence of God and even decide whose house Jesus is free to enter.
We know that when we see Zacchaeus in ourselves and step out of the crowd, and when we see in ourselves the penitent tax collector instead of the Pharisee, that we are on the road to reconciliation and eternal life. Hopefully, we are not simply Pharisee’s in tax collector’s clothing.
Father Garry Koch is pastor of St. Benedict Parish, Holmdel.