Luke 18:9-14

Humility and Truth: Opening to Grace

As has been noted elsewhere in the commentary, Luke was not interested in providing detail about the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. He was concerned about the development of pharisaical attitudes among the members of his own community.

Luke 18:9-14  -  Parable: A Pharisee and a Tax Collector

In many ways Pharisees were exemplary in their ascetic behaviour. Fasting and almsgiving were certainly normal practice for members of the sect.

While sin was narrowly defined in the general consciousness and looked more to ritual failings, the normal activities of tax collectors provided ample opportunity for the unscrupulous to grow rich. The powerless Galilean peasants were often the helpless victims of their extortions. Besides, they were direct or indirect collaborators with the oppressive Roman regime, whose taxes served to remove mercilessly the cream of the country.

The assessment given by Jesus would have been virtually incomprehensible to the common mind. The whole society was built on the giving and receiving of honour and praise. What mattered was to be judged honourably by one’s peers. Honour reflected an outer veneer, rather than an inner strength. The Pharisees were honoured generally because of their strict publicly noticed asceticism. 

The outcome of the different pray-ers exemplified the challenge to accepted wisdom and the reversal of expectations encountered elsewhere in Luke. The use of the passive voice indicated the action of God: God humbled; God exalted. However, God’s humbling simply means God takes no account of people’s self-exaltation: it does not work with God. Humility cannot be grown; it can only be allowed to happen. God gives the opportunity and the invitation, and in and through Jesus has shown the way.

To seek to humble oneself can also be problematic. The would-be humble could well finish up proud of their humility, as did the Pharisee of the story! Humility is the fruit of self-knowledge. It comes from facing and accepting one’s own emptiness and guilts. The tax collector did not endeavour to cultivate humility. He simply faced the truth of himself, and called on the truth of God.

The problem with the pharisaical attitude was that it focussed on virtues. Jesus was concerned that in certain cases the acquiring of virtues could itself be vice, the vice in question being the ubiquitous vice of pride.

In addition, consciousness of virtues stifled the sense of inner emptiness. Yet awareness of such inner emptiness was the starting point of discipleship. It was the originating ground of the deepest heart desires, which in their turn were the source and motivation of action for change and for justice.

Humility or Perfection?

Shame. When children are much loved by parents, they begin to develop a sound sense of their value as persons, that they are loved and valued simply for themselves. This experience founds a healthy sense of security. However, no parents are perfect parents. Their love can be inconsistent. Moreover, their young can misread their actions at times and interpret them as unloving. This experience gives rise to a sense of being unloved, without personal worth. As well, some children, unfortunately, grow up in quite abusive families. Given children’s smallness, lack of understanding and vulnerability, the negative influences can easily outweigh and overpower the positive ones. The sense of personal inadequacy, of inner emptiness, can be too much for the young, immature person to face. It can be spontaneously pushed out of consciousness deep into the psyche, to become embedded there, unrecognised and only vaguely felt. This is an almost universal experience, obviously of different intensity for different individuals. (It is sometimes technically referred to as “shame”, and it can have a quite poisonous effect.)

Reactions. Under the influence of this “shame”, people unconsciously seem to try to compensate for their vague sense of inadequacy by the deliberate attitudes they adopt towards life. They can experience a compulsive need to control their sense of personal worth by any of a variety of approaches; by seeking to be loved, noticed, praised or “honoured”; by seeking power over others, or becoming perfect themselves; or by withdrawing, merging into the crowd, or denying whatever seems unpleasant. They can become addicted to achievement, competition, control, pleasure, popularity, honour, security, etc., that of themselves never satisfy the deeper inner longing for unconditional love.

Their addictions are fed and confirmed by people’s interacting with others who are likewise driven by the same compulsions.

The compulsive need to find substitutes for the sense of being loved is based on an untruth. It is simply not true that people have no worth or dignity of themselves. This untruth, developed through relationships and confirmed by the surrounding culture, is ultimately the source of the power of sin. The compulsion that it generates becomes translated into pride - the triumph of the ego, of the self-made, self-reliant and independent person.

The religious drive for perfection is usually fed by this radical sin within.

Choice. People’s deliberate responses to life situations bring them into the realm of choice - and of morality. True personal growth happens when people choose to respond to others with love, i.e. unconditionally accepting them and ready to serve them. To do so they need to be open to acknowledging their own true dignity, the equal dignity of others, and the priority of God.  To be able to accept that, they need a clear sense of being loved - by others and particularly by God. They need to believe in that love consciously and deliberately (unlike shame - which is felt or sensed). God’s love particularly is not so much sensed as deliberately believed and trusted.

Guilt. Self-centred and self-interested choices, involving the compromise of true personal dignity and the destructive use, exploitation, violence or disregard of others, give rise to guilt. Genuine guilt is not so much felt as rationally recognised. 

Most people, already burdened by shame, find difficulty in genuinely accepting true guilt. Self-interest is such a conditioned experience that most people are not even aware of it; and even when partly aware of it, they still tend instinctively to rationalise their behaviour. True guilt is recognised and accepted only in the light of God’s unconditional love.

Humility. Genuine humility consists in recognising the truth of self. God loves people unconditionally, and so they have an infinite worth. Christians have been incorporated into Christ through Baptism, and through Christ share in the love life of the Trinity. All this is pure gift. It is reason for joy but not for self-congratulation.

Under the influence of the power of sin, all people are guilty. They make productive choices, but they also make quite destructive choices. They are often somewhat unaware of their guilt, and tend to excuse what they are aware of

Truly humble persons know themselves to be sinners, but also know that they are unconditionally loved and forgiven by God. They do not deny the good they have done, nor do they deny the reality or seriousness of their sin. They trust not themselves but God.

Growth. In Jesus’ mind the essence of the spiritual life is not striving after perfection. His parable undermined that approach. That was precisely the aim of the Pharisee. The tax collector who went home justified had not aimed at perfection at all, but recognised his guilt and trusted the merciful forgiveness of God. 

The dynamic of true growth would seem to be the rediscovery of the original stance of the infant child, already commended by Jesus: an acceptance of total powerlessness and of total reliance in relation to God, leading to total trust within the context of unconditional love. The consistent problem is dealing with the instinctive thrust to escape the need to trust and to assume personal control. That thrust takes shape either in the infant’s manipulative tantrums or smiles, or the various shapes taken by adults’ compulsive drives to power. Only by unmasking and surrendering these drives can true human freedom develop and transparent, supportive community be born and flourish.

From this perspective the rich can relate to the poor without patronising, and the poor to the rich without envy. True community can grow.

The tax collector’s starting point was the recognition of his powerlessness before God occasioned by his readiness and freedom to own the reality of his sin. All Christians could well start from there.

Next >> Luke 18:15-30