Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Homily
“Pharisees”
Opening
Sin is all around us. It’s insidious. You find it oozing into the strangest places, like some out-of-control oil spill, fowling everything it touches and smothering the life out of it.
Whether it’s the strangling in that hotel room in Peru or the shooting of that poor girl on Esther Street, or the unnumbered moments in our own houses of impatience, judgment, and selfishness, none of us can escape the fact that we are each a sinner before God and man.
Even David, the anointed of the Lord, the King of Israel can’t escape it. Oh, he thinks he can. In fact, having arranged the death of Uriah the Hittite to cover up his affair with Bathsheba, David’s pretty sure he’s gotten away with it.
Until the Prophet Nathan uncovers his crime and converts the King into a weeping penitent, whose sin will be told down through the ages. Even in the genealogy of Saint Matthew’s Gospel David is identified as “the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife.” The genealogy of the Son of God is replete with such characters. For there’s a strange appropriateness that the incarnation of him who became man to free us from sin should be descended from such a tainted ancestry.
Modern Day Pharisees
And so too with you and me. I fear I am too often one of those modern day Pharisees who are as convinced of their immaculate conception as they are of their ability to save themselves. But despite Pelagius, no one has ever really been able to save anyone, except for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Only Jesus saves. And only he and his Blessed Mother have lived lives entirely free from sin.
I can save no one, including myself, without the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. At the end of the day, when I make my nightly examination of conscience kneeling down by my bed, I can only rely on the unwarranted mercy of a gracious God, who looks upon me in my sinfulness and gives me the grace to live another day in his service.
The confession of my sins and the destructive patterns of sin which are woven into the very fabric of my life, is the second greatest truth I can profess; while the greatest truth is God’s undefeated mercy. Thus, with the Psalmist I can sing: “I confess my faults to the LORD, and you took away the guilt of my sin.”
Our Frailty, God’s Grace
It’s like the Collect, in the forthcoming translation, for this Sunday, which asks God to “graciously hear our pleas,” for “without you, mortal frailty can do nothing...”
Mortal frailty can do nothing.
Did you do good works this week?
Thank God, for he gave you the grace and the strength to accomplish them.
Did you manage to forgive that person who hurt you?
Thank God, for he taught you to look down from the cross they built for you with mercy and even love.
Yet, I sometimes strain the muscles in my right arm by my repeated attempts to pat myself on the back for just how wonderful I have been. I fed the hungry, I clothed the naked, I listened patiently to those who were a pain, I forgave someone who slighted me, I prayed for an extra five minutes. Open the cause for my canonization. God is just so lucky to have me as his servant.
Such self-congratulatory pablum was unknown to Blessed Theresa when she first experienced her calling to serve the poorest of the poor, and wrote this to the Archbishop of Calcutta:
“The thoughts of my unworthiness for all God’s gifts to me and to my children gets deeper and clearer. In my meditations and prayers, which are full of distractions nowadays, there stands one thing very clear: my weakness and his greatness. I fear all things from my weakness...I I trust blindly in his greatness.”
At Simon’s House
That’s what’s going on at the house of Simon the Pharisee when Jesus arrives in today’s Gospel. They eat, they talk, they have a good time. Simon’s the good guy, the friend of the Lord.
Then, in comes this woman, a sinner, who crawls up behind Jesus and clings to his feet, literally washing them with a flood of tears, begging for his mercy.
Meanwhile, Simon the Pharisee is furious. How can Jesus let this happen? Doesn’t he know who she is? This filthy woman disrupting his important supper and groping the Lord’s feet just as Simon is making his reputation as a friend of Jesus?
But Jesus does know who she is. And that’s why he lets her cling to him and weep. But Jesus also knows who Simon is. He knows his ambition, he knows his high self-regard, and his knows his sin of presumption. Simon’s just as sinful as that woman. The only difference between the two is that she accepted the grace to confess what a mess she was with her tears.
So Jesus says to Simon, you did not welcome me to your home with an embrace, but she cannot stop kissing me. You did not offer to wash my feet with water, but she has cleansed them with her tears.
Jesus has turned Simon’s house on its head and reminded Simon and me and you that our solitary boast is in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Without the grave which flowed with blood and water from his side, we can do nothing.
Conclusion
Psalm 22 is a Psalm that may, ionically, have been penned by King David himself. And in the sixth verse we find the truest words ever spoken: I am a worm and no man...I am nothing but a worm without his redeeming love.
Monsgnor James P. Moroney
Rector
