Saturday of the Third Week of Lent
-
March 21, 2020
In the Gospel today, the Pharisee was coming to God and wanting to be seen and he was celebrating his arrogance.
How do we come to God?
He wanted God to praise him for being a leader in the Church, a leader in the Faith, and decisions, and people depend on him. He even judges and compares his outward appearance with that of others. He states that he is not greedy, dishonest, adulterous or even like this tax collector. He states that he fasts twice a week and pays tithes on his whole income.
By the looks of it, this is true, because he was a leader and teacher of the Church and Faith, and the actions he did, fasting and paying tithes were of course expected to be observed.
If we dissect his life and actions, we see a different truth. He was greedy, not in the way he is speaking of with stealing money or wanting more money, but greedy because he wanted praise for himself.
Pharisees were known to flaunt their tassels, which was a practice to bring attention to his fasting and tithes for others to see.
He was greedy for human praise.
He was dishonest. Well, per se, he was not dishonest. He could not afford to be, because people were watching him, he was in the public eye. He was dishonest along with the other Pharisees.
Remember, Jesus accusing them of making a huge amount of laws out of the 10 commandments and it being a huge burden people could not carry? Jesus also points out that they, the Pharisees did not keep these laws themselves.
Behind closed doors, so to say, they were dishonest by inflating the 10 Commandments to 660 laws to make the people look bad, while they looked good and in reality, behind the scenes, they did not follow them themselves.
He was greedy, and dishonest to win the praise of others and he came to God that same way. Look at what I don’t do and what I do. The thing he forgot was God sees interiorly not exterior. The exterior is only important to God when the interior matches.
The tax collector simply comes to God and says, “I do these things wrong. Exteriorly I am a sinner but have mercy on me because in my heart I want to be focused on you.” This is why he was justified.
The question we must ask is: Which of the two are we? Do we do things for credit, for praise, or to look good? Do we do good things all the time or only when need to be seen? - Or - Do we come to God for God alone, not worrying about what people see in us or think of us?
Do we come to Him knowing and admitting that we do not do a lot of things perfectly, yet come to him because our heart is focused on him.
The Pharisee’s heart was focused on peoples praise and thoughts of him. The tax collectors’ heart was focused on God even though he was a public sinner.
Where is our heart focused?