Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 27 October 2013

30th Sunday of the Year

As the British summer time ends and we yet again change time the season seems to take on a slight tinge of melancholy. There are beautiful sunny days and wonderful experiences of frost touched trees and fields ahead but the falling leaves and the irascible weather with its gusts of rainy wind does make one think about life in a different way. Perhaps that’s a good thing; we need the changes. as the proverb says: 'there is a season for everything’. The great spiritual teachers knew this, and in guiding people on their search for God, help us discover that one of the keys to understanding who we are and how to make sense of the seasons of life, is the virtue of humility.

I suppose that those of us who have either been educated by religious orders or been in a religious community will have heard all about humility but it’s a very quixotic virtue isn’t it? For as soon as we think we have managed to grasp what it’s all about and put it into practice then we find that we haven’t got there at all and in fact might even be in danger of becoming arrogant or proud. That’s what seems to happen to the poor old Pharisee praying in the Temple today!

Jesus' short parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector is interesting because he hits the nail right on the head about true humility. It seems to me that what Jesus tells us is that one of the difficulties about being a faith person is the tendency, if not checked somehow, of starting to compare ones faith with others or to make big assumptions about people depending on their attitude towards religion If you read religious blogs you will see a lot of this type of judgmental comments.

Jesus tells us not to do this, not to judge and not to make faulty comparisons. The reason the tax collector goes home again ‘at right with God’ is because he cannot hide behind any form of false respectability or indulge in religious platitudes, he truly knows himself. Yes, the Pharisee was doing exactly as he should have done, being open with God in prayer, but he lacked that self understanding of a true relationship with God which goes right to the heart of things, and he judged somebody else.

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.