One characteristic of we humans is that we have lots of feelings – about ourselves and about other people. Some of us are more in touch with these feelings than others, and some of us are better – or worse – at expressing these feelings in appropriate ways.
Ways to explore these feelings might include sharing your thoughts with a trusted friend (or counsellor), writing them down in a journal or talking to God about them in prayer. This last option may seem odd, but God is both a very good and patient listener and a person who can point us towards a better understanding of ourselves and others.
In this week’s Gospel reading, two quite different people share their personal thoughts with God through prayer. The first person, a Pharisee, would have been considered a respectable and upright citizen who took their religious faith quite seriously. Their prayer is rather self-focused – reminding God of their virtuous habits and comparing themselves – favourably – to other more dubious people like tax collectors and robbers. In this prayer, the Pharisee appears to do most of the talking – a bit like us often when we pray. As in the image, this person also puts themselves above other people.
The second person is one of the afore-mentioned tax collectors, who were despised by most people as traitors to Israel (since they collected taxes on behalf of the occupying Romans) and as greedy bastards (as they tended to overcharge people and pocket the difference). This person’s prayer is short and simple – they recognise how their life falls short of God’s ways – a harsh but probably true assessment of their practices – and they seek God’s mercy. The sting in the tail of this parable is that it is the second person, the tax collector, who goes home in right relationship with God, rather than the Pharisee. The moral of the story is that God wants us to come to a realistic and honest perspective of ourselves first and foremost and to be humble enough to seek God’s forgiveness. Only then can we hope to come to a realistic view of another person that avoids stereotypes and arrogance. Too often we are quick to judge another without knowing their full story.
