“By the grace of God, I am what I am”
“I am the
least of the Apostles”, St. Paul declares and then goes on to say that
“by the grace of God, I am what I am”. The phrase complements,
it seems, the prayer of the humble publican, “God be merciful to me a
sinner”.
What can it
mean? Is it by the grace of God that Paul is a sinner? No.
But it is by the grace of God that Paul can in all honesty know that he is a
sinner. Why is he the least of the Apostles? In his eyes and in
his words, “because I persecuted the Church of God”.
But do you and
I do much better or any less when in our pride and arrogance, in our folly
and deceit, we deny the very truth of God upon whom we so utterly depend?
Are we not persecutors, too, when like the proud Pharisee, we do nothing
more than pray with ourselves, giving mere lip service to the presence of
God?
It is the
quintessential picture of pride. Jesus in the parable names it ever so
clearly. “He prayed thus with himself”. Not to God, it seems.
The consequences are wonderfully clear in the content of his prayer.
He claims to be better than everyone else. “Thank God that I am not
like them”. But that is no prayer.
There can be no
prayer when we are not open to the otherness of God and to one another.
There can be no prayer when we are closed in upon ourselves, standing upon
the ground of our own self-righteousness. There can be no prayer
without the humility which alone is the counter to all pride.
The great poet
Dante, in the Divine Comedy, prescribes as the antidote and
corrective to pride the prayer which is at the heart of all Christian
prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. The prayer, he suggests, is to be prayed
while bent down towards the dust of our common humanity, contemplating the
great examples of humility, not the least of which is Mary herself who is
defined by the grace of God; “Be it unto me according to thy word”,
as if to say, what Jesus himself will say, “not my will, but thine be
done”. And in turn, is it not what we are given to pray, “thy
will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”?
Prayer is
precisely not about talking with ourselves. “Our Father” is not
a mere set of words to be rattled off indifferently and mindlessly.
Prayer is altogether about our engagement with God. It is the
pre-condition of our honest engagement with one another.
The publican in
the parable is a public person, a public official engaged in the res
publicae, the public things of our political and moral life in
community, in our ordered life together with one another. A publican
is not just a keeper of taverns and pubs!
The publican in
the parable is the picture of humility. His humility is his honesty
which leaves him open to the truth of God and so to every one else.
Without that we are simply closed in upon ourselves, wrapped up in our own
worlds; in short, like the Pharisee.
There is the
greatest danger in the pilgrimage of our spiritual lives. It is to put
ourselves in the place of God. It is to be in the temple, the holy
place of God, and to be completely unaware of his truth and presence, so
full of ourselves are we. We forget so easily that it is only by the
grace of God that we walk, stand, run and move in the motions of God’s love.
It is most especially by the grace of God that we can face the remarkable
follies and foolish wickednesses in our own hearts and in our lives.
Paul has found
and named what he has done. It belongs to our freedom to do nothing
less. The prayer of the publican reverberates throughout the whole of
our liturgy: “Kyrie eleison” – “Lord, have mercy upon us”; “O Lamb of
god, that takest away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us”.
Unlike the Pharisee, what is wanted is that we should “not presume to
come to this thy table....trusting in our own righteousness”, Rather,
like the publican, we should come trusting in “thy manifold and great
mercies”. Only so shall we find ourselves in the presence of God.
Only so may we be freed from the prison of our own selves.
This is not
about grovelling in the dust and wallowing in self-pity and piteous
self-recriminations. Paradoxically, there is nothing so magnanimous,
so great-souled, as the exemplar of humility, Mary, the virgin mother of our
Lord. No. Humility belongs to our freedom and our ultimate
dignity. We are the dust which God has shaped and into which he has
breathed his spirit. It belongs to the dignified dust of our humanity
to offer prayers and praises together to Almighty God. We are raised
up only because we can acknowledge what we are by the grace of God. We
acknowledge his mercy. Sinners, yes, so we are, you and I, but in such
an acknowledgement we are something more. We are in the company of
Christ and we are with one another in the purpose of his good will for us.
You see, “his grace was not bestowed in vain”.
In ourselves we
are vain and empty - our prayers but the meaningless prattle of our own
self-affirmations. In Christ we are alive and fully ourselves.
“By the grace of God, I am what I am”
