Saturday of the Third Week in Lent 2024
Today’s psalm, titled the Miserere in Latin, is about one-third of the way through the number of psalms in that book. I recall that in some religious communities, it is the last prayer of the day, sung or recited after Compline as the monks or nuns retire for the night. It’s a good idea each day to recall that we are all sinners. We can’t be redeemed by any other means than the grace of God won for us by Our Lord, Jesus Christ, so recalling our sin and the gift of our redemption at the end of each day is an excellent habit to get into. It is clearly the attitude and practice used by the tax-collector/publican who occupied the back pew in the Temple, as Jesus saw it. His prayer, to a God he believed in but could not see, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” The proud man standing in the front of that worship space seems to be praying to himself and patting himself on the back for his many good deeds. Since he was a Pharisee, he spent inordinate amounts of time obeying the tiniest prescription of the Mosaic Law, so suggesting that he pray to God as a sinner would probably have horrified him. But did he actually love God above all things, and his neighbor as himself? Unlikely, was it not, since he spent most of his prayer time here cataloguing the many sins of everybody else–extortion, adultery, injustice, or tax-farming?
Jesus was warning us about the sin of pride, which many of us have caught as a kind of endemic virus, and suffer under daily. I’ll tell you that from an only-child perspective, told from the cradle how wonderful I am, the difficulty of acquiring and practicing the virtue of humility is itself a good argument for parents having as large a family as they could. Let’s put it like this–whatever we have accomplished, as the psalm says, we’ve been able to do by the grace of God.
When a whole culture acts out of pride, abusing the poor and helpless, promoting a system of theft, and that is particularly obvious in government officials, then that culture is very close to imploding. It cannot survive for long with corruption at the highest levels. That was the reality in the northern kingdom of Israel at the time of the prophet Hosea. And within a hundred years, it had so weakened them that the whole people was swept away and deported by Assyrian conquest. We all need to heed this warning from God. He desires steadfast love and knowledge of Himself. He doesn’t want any other gift from us.
