Thank God We’re Better Than The Rest

Thank God we’re not like other people.  Thank God we’re not like the arrogant publican in today’s gospel!   Like him, it’s so very easy to look around us, especially in today’s morally bereft world, and say to ourselves, or even openly to others, these words that our Lord rejects as being unworthy of the kingdom of heaven.  In fact, it’s so easy to fall into this trap that our Lord emphasizes the importance of today’s gospel story for our benefit, portraying the two men in the temple almost as cartoon characters, grotesquely exaggerated in order to demonstrate the enormous gulf between pride and true humility that they represent.

Look at the graces we have been given.  In a world that has almost universally apostasized from the faith, we here today have been given the grace of keeping it.  In a world that seems to be falling further every day into a spiral of moral depravity, we at least have maintained the spirit of the Ten Commandments, in principle at least, if not always in practice.   And in a world that has lost its devotion to the true holy Mass passed down by the apostles and their successors since the Last Supper, we here today have been given the grace of preserving it, valid and unsullied by any of the reforms introduced by the modernists since the early 1950s.  Such graces we have been given.  We have kept the faith of our fathers, we obey God’s laws, we have the true Mass—surely, we are the elect of God, the new chosen people, the holy ones who alone stand out in an otherwise blackened world.  Surely, we should thank God that we are not like other men.

And thus we fall.  It is a snare of the devil that can entrap us very easily.  We are bombarded by so many examples of bad behavior every day that it seems almost impossible not to look down on the sins of others and condemn and despise these other men who do not match up to our own values.  The trap is always there to drag us down to the level of today’s Pharisee. The way the trap works is to turn us into him.  And we end up saying, “Thank God we’re not like that Pharisee!”  You see what I mean?

Because of the behavior of the Pharisee in the temple, and of the many other Pharisees that our Lord encounters during his ministry, the word Pharisee has become synonymous with “hypocrite.”  For us to claim that we are holier than other men is nothing other than hypocrisy.  We must remember that in fact, we are not holier than other men.  On the contrary, in many ways we are worse.  Certainly, we have been given the graces to keep the faith, hold to our true moral values, attend the true Mass and receive a valid Holy Communion.  But like all graces, all privileges, they have a corresponding responsibility to use them properly.  And do we?  We have been given the grace of knowing the true faith.  But do the truths of our faith make a difference to the way we live our lives?  Do we uphold those truths with more fervor and charity than those who are ignorant?  God has given us the graces of the true Mass here at St. Margaret Mary’s.  But do we really look forward with eagerness to every opportunity we have to attend that Mass and receive our Lord in the most Blessed Sacrament?  And sure, we know the Ten Commandments.  But do we obey them more carefully than our Protestant and Jewish friends?

The responsibilities that come with the graces God has given us must make us truly better people.  And if we are to be better people we must thank God for those graces.  We must never thank God that those graces have made us better than other people—people who, without the moral compass of the Catholic Church to guide them, wallow in ignorance, devoid of the knowledge of the faith and of God, oblivious to God’s law and their duty to obey it, completely unaware of the beauty of the Holy Eucharist and its role in preparing us for our eternal union with God in heaven.  For these people, we must pray, earnestly and without condescension, that they may share in any graces our good God has chosen to share with us, his unworthy children.

Let’s close today by refocusing all our attention to the publican who kneels at the back of the temple and strikes his breast in horror at his own sinfulness.  This is who we truly are—sinners who are not worthy to approach the Holy of Holies, who dare to receive Holy Communion only because we are commanded to do so by our Lord himself.  Let us strike our breasts too as we mutter our triple Domine, non sum dignus, remembering our multiple, diverse and manifold offences against God in thought, word and deed.  If we do so in all humility, we will receive pardon for those sins, and our souls shall be healed.