This parable suggests that how we see ourselves and others is not always how God sees us and others. The Pharisee in today’s gospel reading saw himself as virtuous and saw the tax collector as a sinner. The prayer that he prayed reflected this view of himself and of the tax collector. In his prayer he told God his moral achievements, which he believed put him in a different category to the other man praying some distance away, the tax collector.
How we pray can be very revealing of who we are. There was a great deal of himself in the prayer of the Pharisee; we can’t help but notice the repetition of the little word ‘I’.
The prayer of the tax collector was quite different. It was much shorter and it consisted not in telling God the good he had done but in asking God for God’s help, in the form of God’s mercy. His prayer, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner’, reflects one of the petitions in the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, ‘Forgive us our trespasses’. Without having heard the Lord’s prayer, he prayed in the spirit of that prayer.
The prayer of the Pharisee isolated him from God; it kept him closed in on himself. The prayer of the tax collector opened him up to God. His prayer didn’t just have the appearance of prayer; it was genuine prayer. Authentic prayer is when we come before God as beggars, recognizing our own poverty before God. Both the Pharisee and the tax collector were sinners, in different ways, but it was only the tax collector who recognized himself as a sinner. He recognized his own truth and thereby entered into communion with God, the source of all truth.
This comes from Fr Martin’s Homilies and Reflections – 10th March >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections on Luke 18:9-14 for Saturday, Third Week of Lent: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” – @frmartinshomiliesandreflections on Tumblr
https://www.tumblr.com/frmartinshomiliesandreflections/171697108381/10th-march-fr-martins-gospel-reflections-on