The following homily was given by Dcn. Michael Schlaack on the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee.
Due to the celebration of the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord last Sunday, we did not have the opportunity to hear again the account of Zacchaeus the tax collector and his encounter with Christ. For us, Zacchaeus Sunday marks the beginning of the race known as “Great Lent” that we are about to experience. We are in the “On Your Mark” phase of the race, where we set our feet in the starting blocks. Then three weeks later we hear “Get Set,” that point when the Church asks us to give meat and cheese. Finally, the starter’s gun is fired, the Church says “Go!” and we leave the starting blocks on our annual 40-day race toward the finish line, which is the celebration of the Pascha of our Lord. And just as with any race, how we start has a big effect on how well we finish. If we stumble and fail to regain our footing, then we fall behind. If we are not attentive and do not react quickly to the starter’s gun, then the rest of the runners are out of the blocks before we even realize that the race has started. So even though we did not read the account of Zacchaeus last Sunday, I encourage everyone take a few minutes and read the 19th chapter St. Luke’s Gospel to learn about Zacchaeus’ life-changing experience when he encountered the Son of God.
Today, however, is the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee and in today’s Gospel reading Jesus tells the parable of another tax collector, who in today’s account remains nameless. Maybe Jesus was foretelling the future by this parable, and maybe the tax collector could be none other than Zacchaeus himself, who was praying in the Temple. This would make sense since the tax collector in our Gospel account today must have had some life changing encounter that brought him to the Temple to beg for God’s mercy. Maybe this is the “rest of the story” of Zacchaeus.
In any case, Jesus uses His typical form of extremes to illustrate a simple but stark lesson that has an impact on our start of the journey of Great Lent. In Jesus’ parable, we see on one side the Pharisee who represents what appears on the outside to be the exemplar of piety. So pious is this man that he even spends time in prayer to inform God of these attributes: But not without some measure of humility, the Pharisee does remember to thank God for the fact that He has shown mercy on the Pharisee by not making him like all those undesirables in society: extortioners, unjust, adulterers and worse of all, the tax collector (v. 11). The Pharisee then informs God of all the pious things that he does: he fasts twice a week and tithes of everything he has (v. 12). In his own mind, he is doing everything right and certainly God must be pleased.
But the Pharisee in our Gospel account missed the most important thing that God is looking for from His people: humility. It is not what is on the outside—those things that others can see, like fasting and tithing—that demonstrate our love for God and thus for His people. Psalm 51 teaches us what is truly pleasing to God:
“For You do not desire scarifice, or else I would give it; You do not delight in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart—these, O God, You will not dispise”
No amount of the external things we do, no matter how pious looking they may appear, will ever bring us closer to God until we can change what is on the inside. The things that the Pharisee thought were important—fasting and tithing—were intended for our benefit, not for God’s. These ascetical activities that we undertake during Great Lent are designed by the Church to help draw us closer to God, to change our focus from this world to that world; to teach us to pray moreand judge less. They should help to draw our attention to our own faults and not to judge our brothers, as the Lenten prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian teaches us: “Grant that I might see my own transgressions and not to judge my brother.” This is intended to help us develop that same humility we see in the tax collector, where we know the only plea we have before a righteous God is to simply say, “Have mercy on me.”
Last Sunday’s theme was Desire; the deep, driving need to be with Christ. That desire was not so much demonstrated by climbing a tree but rather in Zacchaeus’ decision to change his life and repent of his past sins. It is likewise the same with the Publican in today’s lesson. His humility was not simply the act of praying, but rather the reason why he was praying—to beg God’s forgiveness. True humility makes us look to the inside of ourselves, revealing our shortcomings and then causing us to do something about it. The Pharisee was able to recognize sin when he saw it in others, whereas the Publican was able to recognize sin when he saw it in himself.
So, what is the take-away from today’s Gospel for us? Yes, we should not judge others, and yes, we should pray for forgiveness. But the most important lesson in the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee is the understanding that it is our humility that will justify us before God. That is what Great Lent is all about. It is not intended to be an annual ritual of 40 days of punishment for the sins we committed the previous year, but rather as a time for intensified personal reflection with the objective of bringing us closer to God through humility. The additional services, prayers, prostrations, tithing and fasting are all “work aids” that help us to get closer to our goal of unity with God.
So, is the tax collector in today’s Gospel lesson Zacchaeus? I guess it really doesn’t matter. The real question we need to ask is whether the tax collector is us? Are we constantly seeking God’s mercy and forgiveness, or are we too busy justifying ourselves and acting as the judge of others? Which of these two characters most closely resembles our own Christian faith? I pray we all hear and take to heart the words that were sung in observance of the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, because these words should be guide to help direct us throughout our entire lives: “Brethren, let us not pray as the Pharisee: for he who exalts himself shall be humbled. Let us humble ourselves before God, and with fasting cry aloud as the Publican: God be merciful to us sinners.”