Scoundrels help us go from good to great!

Homily
30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
24 October 2010

I'm going to start this homily by defending the Pharisee. This is not a bad guy. The tax collector is a bad guy. The tax collector sleeps with the enemy. He steals from his own people. He oppresses his own family. He is a bad dude, not the Pharisee. I like Pharisees. We have come to hate them, because in the Scriptures their hearts are not always in the right place, and because they are religious for the wrong reasons, but really they are good people. They are good guys, as we like to say today. They deserve at least a little bit of defense. Our secular culture insists that the worst thing you can possibly be is a Pharisee, to be outwardly religious. We are all supposed to hide our faith, and to think thats it's better to not be religious at all than to risk becoming a Pharisee. But this is really baloney. Pharisees are not bad people. At least from the outside in, they are good people. Forgive me for liking Pharisees, for they are like devout Catholics, real Catholics, not cafeteria and Christmas and Easter Catholics. Pharisees are like those Catholics who give 10% to support the mission of the Church, who use the sacraments regularly, and who know how to use a Church. I challenge couples I am preparing for marriage all the time to have a devout prayer life, and to meditate on the meaning of the Eucharist, so that when they come into the sanctuary to call down the Holy Spirit on each other, they know what they are doing and can act like they've been there before, instead of looking scared and out of place in the sanctuary. Pharisees know how to use a Church, and they see the incredible benefits of religion and religious practice. They are good people, and their religion helps to make them good.

So why does Jesus always give them a bad time? Why is he always making heroes out of scoundrels, like the tax collector today, and like the despicable little Zaccheus in next week's Gospel? Why is Jesus never satisfied with the good guys being just good guys? It is because the Lord loves us, and because those to whom much is given, much is expected. Jesus desires for his disciples not to be just good guys, but he desires them to be His saints. In fact, for the Christian, the true disciple of Jesus, it should be the greatest insult for people merely to think of you as a good guy. Do we ever say that of Jesus Himself? Do we ever say that Jesus was a good guy? No, we don't, not because Jesus wasn't a good guy, but because Jesus was the best. Of all, He is the best. Those of us his disciples in the same way should have no desire to be good in comparison to other people. If the goal in life is to be a good guy, not a bad guy, then we don't need religion. That is why Jesus is so ready to show us how the bad guy, the tax collector, is really almost as good and the purported good guy, the Pharisee. There is not that much difference between bad and good, the greater difference is between good and great. The harder leap in life is not from bad to good, it is from good to holy.

My friends, that is why you and I need religion. That is why we are devout and religious people, so that we may have a chance not to be merely good, but to be a saint. Our religion practiced well from the inside out is the surest path to sanctity. You can be good without religion. It is no great accomplishment. There are many spiritual people who are very good, better than many of us sitting in these pews this morning. These spiritual people see no need for religion to be good, and they can readily point out the hypocrisy in religion like Jesus does in today's Scriptures. Yet our religion, the devout practices of the Catholic faith, have not only produced hypocrites and those satisfied with merely being good compared to other people. No, the devout practice of the Catholic faith has also produced the saints, the heroes of every time and place who show us truly how to love God with all our heart, and mind and strength, and how to fulfill Jesus' commandment to love one another as I have loved you. The saints have used the crucible of religion, the pious practices of our tradition, to be in deep relationship with God, who in turn through Christ Jesus puts us in the deepest possible relationship with every human person. That's really it. That's why we are here. Because in Christ Jesus, we are in the deepest possible relationship with God and with one another, and these relationships give us the greatest incentive and opportunity to lives lives of heroic love, like the saints.

So Jesus is always going to get after us Pharisees, us good guys who are not yet saints. The goal is not for us to hate the Pharisees, but to emulate the humility of the tax collector, which is the virtue the Pharisee needs to go from good to great. This is what is highlighted today, the virtue of humility, of dependence upon God, which is always lessened when we stop to compare ourselves to other people. I really do think this is a lesson most of us are paying attention to. I hear people confess being judgmental all the time. We do not feel good about judging others, and most of us are trying to stop. Yet there is this fear of being completely dependent upon God, of abandoning ourselves to His mercy, of losing ourselves within an unpredictable mission that describes the life of every saint, that keeps us wanting to pause and to be relieved that we do not need God as much as the scoundrel next to us. Our religion, the devout practice of our faith, is the crucible we need not to make us a good person compared to the person next to us, but to keep me asking the question of myself, am I yet a saint, and do I have the humility to take the next step toward becoming one, always loving my neighbor more than I love myself, and desiring his holiness and happiness more than I desire my own?

There is a current in the Church today that desires a smaller, more devout practice of the faith, rather than the current mess of those who go to Mass everyday, versus those who never go, between those who follow Church teaching in every way, versus those who merely call themselves Catholic. Today's Gospel shows us how such a sentiment can be very dangerous. A desire for a smaller more devout Church is not a movement of the Holy Spirit. If the devout stop learning from the less devout, and feel like they need them less, or that they are any less a part of Jesus' body the Church, we are indeed creating a gnostic club, not the Church that Christ desires. Our goal instead of making lines in the Church, is to be the saints who inspire not a few, but everyone, to love God with all their heart, all their mind, and all their strength, and their neighbor as themselves.