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Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Two weeks ago, we heard the Gospel relating the story of the blind man, Bartimaeus (St Luke XVIII :35-43), and last week that of Zacchaeus (St Luke XIX: l-10).
Bartimaeus had been blind, perhaps all his life, or perhaps at a certain moment he had lost sight of all the beauty of the world, of human faces, of everything that related him directly through the created world to God who made all things. He was a blind man. One day a crowd passed by him, a strange crowd - not just a noisy crowd of passers-by, but a crowd that had a center, and the center was the Lord Jesus Christ. Bartimaeus perceived the uniqueness of this crowd and asked who it was that made it into a whole; and then he began to cry for help, to be freed from his blindness.
How many times have we been blind, or how many years have we all lived blind? Blind to that revelation of God which the created world is offering us; blind to beauty, not to its external quality but to the shining of the divine wisdom and the divine beauty through it. How often have we looked at faces and never seen that they are icons of God that should relate us to God and not stand between God and us as a temptation. How often has Christ passed quite close to us and we have never noticed His presence and His passing?
Let us reflect on ourselves and ask ourselves not only how often we were blind in the past, but how blind we are at this present hour. Christ is in our midst. Are we aware of it? Christ meets us in every person. Are we aware of that? One of the Desert Fathers said: "He who has seen his neighbor has seen his God". Yes, an image of God, a real image. Damaged indeed like so many icons, desecrated or damaged; damaged to the point, at times, of being unrecognizable, and yet, a divine image.
Last week we heard about Zacchaeus.
Zacchaeus overcame another temptation which is very familiar to us, that of vanity; vanity that consists in attaching ourselves to things of no value and trying to derive through them the admiration of other people who have no right to judge, because they also are prisoners of the same smallness of mind and smallness of heart. Vanity, in the words of St John Climacus, is arrogance before God and cowardice before men; a desire not to be judged, not to be condemned, but to be admired, to be praised, to be approved of, even for things that are not worthy of approval, just to be approved.
I suggested last week that we must concentrate our attention on that particular sin of ours and ask ourselves how dependent am I on the judgement of men, how indifferent am I to the judgement of my own conscience and beyond it, through it, of God Himself? How much do I look for approval and admiration of things that are unworthy of me, not only to speak of God?
Today we are confronted with a third image; we are confronted with the story of the Pharisee and of the Publican (St Luke XVIII: 10-14). The Publican was aware of his unworthiness, he was aware that he was unworthy of presenting himself before the face of God, but also of being admitted into the company of respectable people, people of whom God would approve. He came to the door of the Temple and could not cross the threshold because he knew that in this world, soiled, polluted, desecrated by human sin, by blood and evil in all its forms, the Temple was a place which was devoted to God alone. All the rest of the world, to use a phrase of Satan tempting Christ, all the rest of the world "has been betrayed into my hands by man". But the Temple is a space which men of faith, frail indeed but believing in God, cut out of this realm of horror to be a vision of divine beauty, a dwelling place for the One who has nowhere to rest His Head in a world that was stolen from Him and betrayed into the hands of the adversary.
As the Publican stood on the threshold, he knew that he belonged to the realm of evil and had no access into the realm of God; and yet, he felt the difference, he felt horror at himself and a sense of worship, of adoration regarding the Divine Realm. He beat his chest and asked for mercy because there was nothing else, he could hope for and count on.
And the Pharisee stood right in the middle of the Church; he had walked in and taken his stand there as one who had the right to be there. Why? Not because he was a man of pure heart, but because he was faithful to every one of the formal rules established by the Synagogue, as a number of us are faithful to the outer, external rules of life that do not penetrate even through our skin, which do not reach our heart, which do not give a new shape and meaning to our thoughts.
So, again, we are confronted by two men and asked by Christ: who are you? Are you one who is so deeply aware of the sanctity of God that he knows that, apart from a God who would step down to us to heal and save, there is no access to Him. Or are we like the Pharisee who would say to God, throw it in His face: I have done all that is prescribed. You have nothing to ask of me! We are not that arrogant because we have not even the courage of being arrogant as the Pharisee was, neither have we got the constancy of courage to be as faithful as he was to the full of the life of the law.
Let us ask ourselves then: do we emulate the Pharisee in deed, outwardly faithful to all the tenets of our Christian Faith? And beyond this, do we allow our faith to transform our heart, to rule our will, to enlighten our mind?
This is the task which the Gospel offers us. Think about it. It will be one more step to pronouncing upon ourselves a judgement so that we are not condemned. Amen.
BAPTISM OF CHRIST
In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
When a human enters into the world, he enters from nowhere, of total, radical absence enters through the gates of time in order to grow into eternity. He enters an ephemeral world in order to become citizen of God’s Kingdom. When Christ was born, the Eternal entered into the narrow limits of time; He Who was immensity itself was limited by space and became a man in the flesh although the fullness of the Godhead abided, dwelt in this human frame. He entered into a world of sin in order to overcome sin, and in a world of suffering to endure it all together with us.
But on the day of His Incarnation God delivered unto us in the frailty of the child of Bethlehem the fullness of His love, and love is always defenseless and frail, abandoned and surrendered. It was an act of God by which He gave Himself to us and in which the humanity of the Incarnate Son of God was helplessly delivered into the history of mankind.
When we are baptized, we are plugged into waters that cleanse us from sin. When Christ came unto Jordan, He came sinless, but this time in the maturity of manhood, at a point at which His human will, identified with the will of God, made Him a self-offering; He brought Himself there to begin, to start the way to the Cross. Thousands were baptised in the Jordan, and each of them proclaimed his sins and these waters of Jordan were heavy with the murderous sins of men. Christ had no sin to proclaim and to confess, and when He entered into these waters of Jordan, He entered, to use an image of a contemporary divine, as one plunges, walks into a dye — He was dyed with the darkness of our sins. He came out of it carrying all the sins of the world. He came out of the waters of Jordan loaded with the condemnations that lay upon the world. And this is the time when He begins His ascent to the Cross.
We are now keeping the feast of the Baptism of Christ, a dread event, an event that should keep us spellbound, in awe: Him Who is pure shares the impurity of human sin so that He may save us. We will bless the waters, the natural waters that surround us. Let us pray the Lord to send upon these waters grace and blessing for them to become pure and holy, endowed with the power to cleanse and to renew, to make us and all the objects and all the places where they will be sprinkled, partakers of this purity of the waters of Jordan which had touched the holy and pure body of the Incarnation, of The One Who had taken upon Himself all the evil of world. Let us pray that the grace of the Spirit of God may come upon these waters and that they may be truly blessing and salvation by the power of Christ, by the power and dwelling of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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