30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Sunday 23rd October 2016)
Stay firm on the ground of humility – Luke 18:9-14
In the Gospel this Sunday Our Blessed Lord tells us the Parable of the Tax collector and the Pharisee, one who thanks God that he is not like others and the other who falls before his God in humble repentance and beseeching mercy. This is the parable of humility.
C.S. Lewis once wrote “Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.” When we come before the Lord in prayer we must be aware firstly of his presence and secondly of our presence before him. Many of us when we come to pray are not prepared for that encounter with God. We can be rushing and fussing, and wanting to catch a few moments with God, ticking the box of our prayer life. Before ever a prayer is uttered we should pause, and not immediately rush into our favourite prayer, and during that pause, to allow ourselves to recognise him whom we kneel before. When we meet a friend on a street, we first recognise them coming along, we notice how they are dressed, we notice if they are they smiling, or sad, do they look busy and thus rushing or gently walking along. How we communicate with that person depends on how we have seen them from afar. If they look sad or angry we may want to say a quick hello, and keep going. If they are smiling and seem happy to recognise us, we will be happy to slow down and meet them, perhaps embrace and enjoy their company for those moments.
The same is with prayer; we must prepare ourselves before ever we utter a word. We must recognise the Lord in our presence and then praise and bless him. Like the Gospel this Sunday we must approach him like the tax collector. We must approach him in prayer through humility. To sit before the Lord means we must remove our masks, the artificial masks we cover our real selves with. Our Lord does not want to see you cover your life with an artificial mask. He wants to see you as you are, infact he does see you for he knows you better than yourself. He desires for you to see yourself as you are, all your weakness and sins, your joys and sorrows. We must always put before him what is truly inside us and not what we think he wants to see in us. Our pride, our masks make us artificial, our humility and self-honesty makes us real! It is in this honest self-reflection, the removal of the artificial mask, that we discover our sinfulness and our need for the Lord. Here is the moment of encounter with mercy. When we humbly place ourselves before the Lord, we discover his love for us, and find ourselves in the depths of his mercy. God permits us to fall to save us from pride which separates us from his love and the recognising of our need for him. Humility according to Thomas Aquinas draws down his mercy on us, in fact pulls down that divine mercy. The Lord this Sunday wants to see you as you are, to recognise your need for him, and see in him the passionate lover who wishes to draw you closer and closer to himself. He loves you as you are and nothing can change that love. Humility allows us to be dependent on him as a child resting in its mother’s arms. Stay on the firm ground of humility; it gives us the grace to stand in the light of Christ.