Saturday, Third Week of Lent

How we pray can be very revealing of our relationship with God and with others. The prayer of the Pharisee revealed that he took his obligations to God seriously. He paid tithes and fasted beyond what was necessary. However, his prayer also revealed a judgmental attitude towards many, including the tax collector who was praying close by, ‘particularly that I am not like this tax collector here’. His prayer revealed a prideful contempt for a fellow worshipper. He failed to recognize that what God wants, in the words of the first reading, ‘is love, not sacrifice; knowledge of God, not holocausts’. The prayer of the tax collector revealed his awareness that he stood before God in his poverty. He had nothing to bring before God, apart from his sinfulness. However, because he had nothing to bring before God, he had everything to receive from God. Knowing his spiritual poverty, he asked God for mercy; the Pharisee asked God for nothing. The heartfelt prayer of petition of the tax collector was a prayer that God could respond to. Here was a prayer that created a space for God to give generously. As a result the tax collector went home at rights with God. He asked and it was given to him; he sought and he found; he knocked and the door was opened to him. The Pharisee left the Temple as he arrived, sure of his standing before God and others, pleasing to God and the moral better of many. In his own prayer Jesus once thanked God ‘because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants’. It is in becoming like children, by acknowledging our need and poverty before the Lord, that we will receive from his fullness, the fullness of his love and mercy.