33rd Sunday, The Publican (Tax collector) and The Pharisee
2 Timothy 3:10-15; Luke 18:10-14

The Lord said, “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."
(Luke 18:14)

The Pharisee was exalted before God; and before men, he boasted of his of his good deeds, piety, and condemnation of other people, and he was humbled.

The tax collector remembered his sinfulness before God and asked God for forgiveness,

"God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" (Luke 18:13)

Perhaps the tax collector could have possessed some good deeds and merits, yet he did not boast before God, but remembered only his sinfulness. In so doing, he was humbling himself, and God’s will was to justify him; Jesus Christ set the tax collector's prayer of repentance as a model for us to follow, and thus elevated the tax collector.

The Prayer of the Publican became a prayer of Christian humility and confession of sins. Before receiving Holy Communion (and the priest also before the celebration of the Divine Liturgy), we recite the prayer of the tax collector three times: "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!"

Personal pride is one of the sins that destroys the human soul. Because of pride, a person loses the grace and mercy of God. The Apostle James testifies:

"God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble." (James 4:6)

The Apostle Peter affirms the same thing. (1 Peter 5:5).

Pride, self-love, and a high opinion of oneself not only distance a person from God, but also lower and condemn a person before God, and destroy Christ's communities and the Church of Christ.

Our shortcoming is that many of us have a very high opinion of our own dignity and merits, and a very low opinion of our neighbour’s. A clever man suggests that we should lower the measure of our own dignity by 50%, because we fail to see half of our sins and shortcomings, and raise the dignity and merits of other people by 50%, because we fail to see their positive aspects. It is very likely that we would then come closer to impartiality.

It is also one of the flaws of human character, a human weakness, to blame someone else for all failures and troubles, not oneself. Anything unpleasant that happens is someone else’s fault.... We are accustomed to covering up our guilt by pointing the finger at someone else. If the "daughter-in-law" is not in the house, then the neighbour, the government..., the head of the parish..., the priest, anyone is to blame - just not us. If our child does not do well at school, the blame lies with the teacher, the principal, the government, or those who wrote the textbooks and program curricula... Psychologists have found that when a person complains, accuses, and criticizes others all the time, that person wants to cover up his or her own shortcomings, blunders, sins, and faults. Here, I’m tempted to recall a Ukrainian proverb about a thief who shouted: "Catch that thief!"  

Often people pay great attention to the external or internal decoration of a church: the domes, the iconostasis, the way the church is painted. But we Ukrainians have a proverb: "A house is beautiful not because of its corners, but because of its pies." The temple-church is similar: the main thing in that temple is not artistic ornamentation, but, rather, the faith and love that prevail among the visitors of that temple.

The most valuable treasure is precisely the common faith and mutual Christian love that unite those people who pray together, work together, and live in peace and love with each other. However, even when there are many people in church, if they have different beliefs and they do not treat each other with love, they will not create a church among themselves, but only a collection of people.

The tax collector and the Pharisee were in the same temple, but they believed and confessed God differently and addressed God with opposite requests, so they could not form one community of faith. Such an association of people cannot be a Church. This was the case not only between the tax collector and the Pharisee mentioned in the parable, but it was obviously the case among the Jews in general during the time of Jesus' stay on earth.

During the celebration of the Liturgy, the priest says:

"Let us love one another so that we may confess with one accord!"

The greatest Sacrament requires a community of faith that is united in love. If we do not have this, then a Church cannot exist among us.

For some time now we have had artistic choirs in our churches. For a long time in St. Peter's Church in Rome, they even practised keeping a choir of castrated men (from childhood) to have pleasant "angelic" song.

A good choir in a Christian church singing to the glory of God is certainly a good thing, but we should always care most about the existence of a community of faith, so that there is a unanimous confession of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ in love, so that our churches do not remain spiritually empty.

Therefore, let us most of all eradicate the Pharisaic way of thinking in our souls, in our minds, and cultivate in ourselves the true confession of God, imitating the tax collector who repented before God for his sins and transgressions and asked God for forgiveness.
Amen.

Very Rev. Fr. Taras Slavchenko

Taras Slavchenko was born on March 8, 1918 in Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine. After graduating from school and the Pedagogical College, he entered the language and literature faculty of the Scientific Pedagogical Institute. Having successfully completed it in 1938, he served as a teacher in a secondary school.

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