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Most of the great parables of Jesus have slipped from our tongues and into our ears so often that they cease to bite and tease and pierce us as they are meant to do.
The parable of the Pharisee and the publican, for instance, Luke tells us, was spoken to some people who prided themselves on being virtuous and despised everyone else (Lk 18:9 ff).
Yet how many of us identify with the Pharisee? Don’t we see ourselves instead in the sinful, but humble tax collector, beating his breast in the back of the church? That may speak well for our honesty, but it does not necessarily mean that we have listened well to what the Master is saying to us.
Is it possible, in fact, that our “honest” sensitivity to our failings might mask a different sort of pharisaic smugness?
Could we possibly be praying, not with our lips, but in the depths of our hearts, “Thank you, God, that I am not like that Pharisee up there, constantly parading his piety and boasting of his virtue.
Thank you for the honesty and the sincerity that enable me to admit that I deserve to be standing back here, as I wait for you to give me the place you have reserved for the—well, maybe not the humble, but those who are at least authentic.”
It may be obvious that this sort of prayer is not what Saint Paul had in mind when he suggested that we glory in our weakness.
We miss what the Lord found truly beautiful in the tax-collectors, especially since they were very likely accomplished sinners—gougers like Zaccheus, collaborators with the enemy who had conquered and exploited Israel.
There is another story, however, whose strangeness may reveal the hidden meaning of the Lord’s parable.
It is a story taken from the sayings of the desert Fathers, those passionate lovers of Christ whose desire to live the Gospel without compromise drove them into solitude, sowed the seeds for all future monastic life, and bore fruit that still abides, even after 1,600 years, for us whose lives are so different from theirs.
One day Father Lot went to Father Joseph and told him, “As far as I can, I keep my rule. I eat little, I pray and am silent, I work with my hands and share my bread with the poor. As best as I can, I strive to purify my heart. What else should I do?”
Then Father Joseph stood up and stretched out his arms, and from his fingers shot tongues of fires. “If you want,” he said, “you can become a living flame.”*
To become a living flame: that is the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus the Master. That is what he himself is, the blazing sun who lights the whole world.
That is what Saint Paul became—a libation poured out, a runner who never gave up, a weak man charged with the power of Christ, a genius whose whole mind and heart burned with the utterly foolish glory of his Lord.
A living flame: what else but that is a woman like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose eyes are alight with the same fire whether she looks at a scrawny, abandoned baby or at the Blessed Sacrament?
There is no secret about the nature of that fire. It is simply love. Love is the fire the Son of God came to cast on the earth, and not some weak, sentimental parody of love, but the burning passion for his Father and for us that bore him to the cross and through it to his resurrection.
Love is the fire the risen Lord pours into the hearts of all those who follow him, those who hear his voice today as well as his first friends.
This love is more than a human word or metaphor. It is the living Spirit of the living God, alive in us. It is the Holy Spirit who pours God’s love into us and makes us living flames.
If we want, then, we can become living flames of love because, as Jesus has promised, his Father does not refuse the Spirit to anyone who asks. If we ask, we shall receive, abundantly.
How simple it all is, just as Father Joseph said. Yet, like Father Lot, we are not on fire. Why not?
I think that there are two reasons. The first is that we are uncertain that such extravagance is either possible or desirable. The second reason is that we are honestly not sure how to ask for the Spirit, even if we do sometimes see clearly that we can have no real joy outside the fire of his love.
In the story of the Pharisee and the publican, the Master is responding to this bewilderment of ours. He is telling us how to ask for the Holy Spirit.
He is revealing to us the only fuel for the fire that he wants to set in our hearts. That fuel is humility.
That is the clear lesson of this parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector, but Jesus has told this story because it is much less clear how humility joins together simplicity and infinite depth.
Most of our notions of humility are loaded with the baggage of self-hatred.
The Master wants us to see that humility has nothing to do with self-hatred, partly because our sinfulness is so unsurprising, but above all because the Father’s goodness is so endlessly, spectacularly surprising.
The Lord wants to teach us how to be humble, by telling us the truth about our own wretchedness as he reveals to us the greatest truth—the truth enfolding and encompassing every other truth—that is the mercy of his Father.
The Pharisee stands before God secure in his own right-acting and right-thinking, and does not meet God at all. The tax-collector stands before God in utter poverty, with empty hands, and he meets the God whose deepest name is mercy and tenderness, who delights to call himself our Father.
The Pharisee thinks that he sees God’s face in the good order of his life, but he sees only his own narrow heart.
The tax-collector sees only his own poverty, and in that emptiness, God shows the beautiful face of his mercy.
Father Lot led a life of true justice, yet he knew something was lacking.
Father Joseph stretched out his arms to heaven and showed him that, beyond the careful country of Father Lot’s rule, lay the bright, clear air of the Kingdom, the boundlessly open space of God’s passion to clothe us with his own splendor and to fill us with joy of his own freedom.
Thus the Master is teaching us that humility carries us into the kingdom of love because humility is the living knowledge that the mercy of God is our true environment.
We always want to live somewhere else—in the security of wealth or power, in the safety of our own intelligence, in the false peace of our own ego-strength, behind the walls of our good works and right opinions, in the house built by the esteem and approval of others.
But Jesus is teaching us that we have no home except in the mercy of God, that outside this home we are fish flopping on dry land, birds trying to fly in water, children trying to learn the language of love without parents to teach them.
Everyone who tries to build his own life will see it collapse, but whoever dives into the mercy of God will be lifted into glory.
There are good arguments against a life lived like that: it is too risky; it is too childish, not risky enough; it is too difficult to be that simple; it is too demeaning; it is all too likely to end in a false peace that ignores the injustice of the world and the pain of the poor.
However, the overwhelming argument on behalf of a life lived in total dependence on the tender love of the Father is Jesus himself. In him there was no sin, yet he became sin that we might become God’s goodness” (2 Cor 5:21).
He was equal to the Father, yet became poor that we might become rich, and now his poverty and his Lordship are one.
He is the wholly meek one, yet who has ever been more free? He is God’s own fool, yet who has ever been so wise? He is completely the Father’s Son, the eternal Child, yet who has ever been more adult?
He refused the chance to become an earthly king or a political revolutionary, yet he built with his own body a kingdom of justice and love for all the poor.
In the end, we must simply decide if this way of Jesus is opium or the very bread of life.
This is a question addressed every bit as much to those who consider themselves conservative as it is to liberals or radicals, for it is not just some sort of political styles or social structures that the humility of the Master reveals to be inadequate, but all of them.
The pattern of order as well as the wellspring of freedom, the source of human justice as well as the origin of humane social processes—all begin in the act of truth that accepts God’s mercy as home and asks his Spirit to consume us as Jesus was consumed for us and is consumed by us in every Eucharist.
Our Lord and Master has made himself our food and drink as he has made himself our fire and light. If we remain inconsolable until our own prayer pierces the clouds and the Father makes us also living flames, the reason is that our burning is ultimately for others.
Everywhere our sisters and brothers are dying of hunger, cold, and disbelief. If we refuse the humility of Christ and the fire of his love, who will feed them or warm them or light their way home to the tenderness of their Father.
*See The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward, SLG (London: A.R. Mowbray & Co., 1975), P-103.
From Circling the Sun, (1986), pp. 121 – 124, The Pastoral Press, out-of-print.
