(Luke 18, 9-14)

For everybody who believes in a higher being like what we call God, prayer is not only optional but is essential to be able to make a relationship and to ask God’s assistance, to be able to survive in this violent world of ours. As we are human beings who recognised God’s existence, we have acknowledged that God has a hand in events that we can’t control and we believe that in praying to him, we will be able to muster the strength to cope with what life throws at us.

The gospel for today tells us of two lessons not only about how these two people pray but how they have interpreted what they perceive as efforts to come closer to God.

First, let us analyse the obvious, the content of the prayers of these two men. The Pharisee took up his position. Most probably, he would position himself where he could be seen by everybody inside the temple praying and also he must have positioned his head and his hands upwards so as to say to everybody, “Look at me, I’m praying to God”. Then we go to the content. At first he is thanking God, which is a good thing in itself. However, he is thanking God not for what he has done but for who he is, a Pharisee. Then he compared himself as somebody who is more righteous than “the rest of humanity”. He then made a litany of the things of what he has not done like being greedy, being dishonest and being adulterous. And also he took a swipe at the tax collector at the back of the temple, being thankful that he is not like him. Then if that is not enough, he made another litany of the things that he is doing like fasting twice a week and giving tithes. Now this is in stark contrast with the tax collector. The fact that the tax collector is even in the temple is no mean feat. He must have raised quite a lot of eyebrows while he was walking towards the temple area to pray. For the whole time, he must have bowed his head all the way, trying not to attract attention to himself while he is making his way towards the temple. Then as he prayed, he wouldn’t raise his eyes towards heaven but instead beat his breast as a sign of sorrow and asked for forgiveness.

Then, let us analyse who they are. First question, what is a Pharisee? Pharisees are actually a lay movement within Judaism where they believe that they are called to be pure by the meticulous observance of the ritual requirements of the Levitical code. And one requirement to be pure is to separate themselves from the “impure” and that is the common people. That is why in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Pharisee avoided the half-dead man on the road for fear of becoming impure once he touched his body. So Pharisees had great disdain towards everybody else who couldn’t do the meticulous observance of the Levitical code as they could.

What is a tax collector? Of course, the tax collector during the time of Christ is very different from the tax collector of today. Tax collectors during those times were considered traitors because they were serving the Roman colonisers by being agents of the Romans so that they could collect money from the people to given to the Roman Empire. At the same time, being agents of the Romans, they were allowed to get a commission from the taxes that they collected as long as they reached a certain quota. However, many tax collectors abused this by collecting much more than the required quota so that they could enrich themselves. That is why tax collectors were treated like other public sinners like prostitutes and lepers.

So after those analyses, the question is, how do we pray? Do we trumpet our achievements to God as if he doesn’t know about them or maybe he must have forgotten them? Do we rejoice because we consider ourselves “less sinful” than the person next to me at church? Or even worse, do we separate ourselves from everybody else because have to maintain our “purity” so that we may not be contaminated by sin as if it were a disease?

Jesus came to this world not to separate himself from sinners but rather he reached out to us all in order to save us. Even if Jesus didn’t need repentance he humbly went to John the Baptist to be baptised in the River Jordan not because he needed it but in order to show obedience to his Father in heaven.

We also must be like the tax collector, humble in the sight of God, for we are all sinners. But at the same time we are not only to ask for forgiveness but also to promise to reform our lives and with this we could come out more justified because of our prayer.