We might well pray every
day: Lord, teach us to pray. The practices are many. We learn about prayer as silence,
movement, art, and words, as contrition and thanksgiving, as praise and begging.
And Luke’s Gospel story of the Pharisee and the tax collector sets the goal as the
same whichever mode of prayer we engage. It is humility.
Luke 18:9-14
The Pharisee and tax collector of this parable represent two
stereotypical polar opposites of character-types familiar to a first-century
Jewish-Christian audience. The Pharisee is described as prayerful, faithful,
generous, devout, and ascetic. . . in short, a religious person held in high
esteem. The tax collector, on the other hand, represents the worst kind of
person, the most hated to a first-century audience. The stereotypical tax
collector collaborated with foreigners to extort from his own people. To Jesus'
listeners, the tax collector would be the one to be ignored by God. . .
To the surprise of Jesus' listeners, however, it is the tax collector,
not the goody-goody religious hero, whom Jesus says is “made right” before God,
simply because of the taxman's heartfelt contrition. In contrast, the pious yet
smug religious person leaves his prayer without having been right in God's eyes
at all (v 14, dedikaiōmenos). His
religious practices, for all their praiseworthiness, only end in isolating him
from his neighbor.
There is a warning here: if we isolate ourselves from our neighbor, we
isolate ourselves from God as well. Hence, Jesus insists that prayer, if it is
to be genuine, must bring about a transformation of our hearts. It is much more
than pious practice or religious duty. On the contrary, without genuine
conversion, even the most admirable pious practice and prayer risk becoming
empty and meaningless. – Lisa Marie Belz
Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22
Taken in its larger context of
Jeremiah's condemnations of his people's arrogance (13:9,17) and rampant
injustice on the eve of the Babylonian invasion (13:17), the drought described
in this passage is symbolic of something equally as grave as a lack of adequate
rainfall. Although the people of Jeremiah's time are deeply religious, engaging
in various religious practices (13:10), their religiosity nonetheless leaves
something to be desired. It is based on a lie (13:25, sheqer, “deception,” “lie,” “falsehood”). They do not worship as
God intends, and so their society is rife with violence and injustice (v 7).
God is in their midst—they even bear the name of God (v 9)—but God “does not
accept them” (v 10) and will not do for them what they will not do for themselves
(v 19). Only authentic worship, that which combines religious observance with
the construction of a truly just society, can remedy the spiritual drought and
dryness which afflicts them. – Lisa
Marie Belz
2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18
Here Paul is, facing certain death, yet he knows himself to be
delivered from “every work of evil” (v 18). No one can harm him now, not even
death, since he lives in Christ and for Christ. In so giving himself repeatedly
over the years, he has become like Christ: reduced to nothing (v 6/Philippians
2:7), forgiving his enemies (v 16/Luke 23:34), yet all the while encouraging,
exhorting, consoling. The life of the Risen Christ has long been at work in
him; now all that remains is its fullest consummation. – Lisa Marie Belz
Lisa Marie Belz, an Ursuline Sister from Cleveland, Ohio, is assistant professor of
religious studies and graduate ministry at Ursuline College, Pepper Pike, Ohio.
Homily
Service 40, no. 11 (2007): 43-52.
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