The famous actor Gregory Peck was once standing in line with a friend, waiting for a table in a crowded Los Angeles restaurant. They had been waiting for some time, the diners seemed to be taking their time eating and new tables weren't opening up very fast. They weren't even that close to the front of the line. Peck's friend became impatient, and he said to Gregory Peck, "Why don't you tell the maitre d' who you are?" Gregory Peck responded with great wisdom. "No," he said, "if you have to tell them who you are, then you aren't."
That's a lesson that the Pharisee in our gospel reading apparently had never learned. His prayer, if it can be called that, is largely an advertisement for himself. He's selling himself to God. Little wonder that Luke describes him in the way he does, "The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself." That's a very apt description, isn't it -- he prayed with himself. He would have done better had he had Gregory Peck there to whisper in his ear that if he had to remind God who he was, then he wasn't.
The tax collector, on the other hand, didn't have to tell God who he was. He knew who he was and he knew that God knew who he was. His prayer is not an exercise in self-promotion, but a confession and a plea for mercy. He is not selling himself, but opening himself. And Jesus says, "It is this man who went home justified." To be justified means to be declared "not guilty." It means to be declared right. The tax collector is declared to be in the right relationship to God while the Pharisee, who is so certain of his own righteousness, is shown to be in the wrong relationship with God. He is not justified before the bar of God's justice which is the court of ultimate consequence.
I heard about a fifth grader that came home from school so excited. She had been voted "prettiest girl in the class." The next day she was even more excited when she came home, for the class had voted her "the most likely to succeed." The next day she came home and told her mother she had won a third contest, being voted "the most popular."
But the next day she came home extremely upset. The mother said, "What happened, did you lose this time?" She said, "Oh no, I won the vote again." The mother said, "What were you voted this time?" She said, "most stuck up."
Well this Pharisee would have won that contest hands down. He had an "i" problem. Five times you will read the little pronoun "i" in these two verses. He was stoned on the drug of self. He suffered from two problems: inflation and deflation. He had an inflated view of who he was, and a deflated view of who God was.
We are very much in the era of the “I” generation – iPhone, iPad, and of course the famous or infamous “selfies” – you don’t need anyone else now, you can just be you. In a sense we are at war and in the middle of a battle that has been raging over many years. The promotion of the “I am” over any notion of community or acknowledging the presence of God anywhere has gained a great grip. Without a moral compass of any kind, atheism has a triumph. Look back at the reaction of Virginia Woolf when her friend TS Eliot converted in 1927.
She wrote: "I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God." (Hitchens, Peter, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith, p. 24)
This attitude has continued to gain ground where those who have faith of any kind, or rather, Christian faith, are denigrated as deluded, and not able to think for themselves, something obscene. This same reasoning is not applied to those who follow the Islamic faith, Buddhists and Jews. Which leads to a fear and maybe an expressed reality that the “I” generation is not about taking away “a” faith but to taking away a belief in the Christian God – for our belief is that the Christian faith is the one true faith and that there is no other. For God sent his only Son, who is the door, the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but through me. So we are in the midst of a battle for the world in which God created, the need to stand in contrast to the “I” generation, the need to acknowledge the Creator of our World, the belief in a triune God, a belief that He hears our prayers and that we do not as the Pharisee in the story is portrayed, pray to ourselves. We have a race to run and the prize is eternal life – St Paul knew that we would have this fight ahead and its getting harder as we find that those often charged with the proclamation of the “faith”, have let us down, they have softened the message in order to be all things to all people, they have not provided the moral compass that is sorely needed in a world of change – Churches, Bishops speak out that proclaiming – not the faith of Christ – but that same sex marriage is a good thing, euthanasia is an important right of the individual to be respected among many more frightening proclamations that have weakened the Christian Churches stand in this day and age. For some, we feel very much betrayed and lost, frustrated, annoyed and frightened. What we believe and what we do not believe is important, it says something about who we are, where we acknowledge we come from and where at the end, we will return. As indeed the pride of the Pharisee had made him too big for his spiritual britches. C. S. Lewis once said, "A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and of course, as long as you are looking down, you can't see something that's above you." We who remain true to running the race that we are called to run, are assured of the crown at the end and are asked never to give up. All we need to do is remind the world to look up and see what we know to be true – the love of God that is so great that we cannot ever understand how much love there is. Never give up! Run the race to the finish and keep the faith!
