What Prayer Is and What It's Not
Last Sunday, Zacchaeus showed us the way through the “desert” of the Great Fast. We call it a desert because the Great Fast is forty days, which itself is a “parable” for the forty years of the Israelites in their desert pilgrimage from slavery in Egypt to righteous freedom in the Promised Land.
Our Promised Land is the eternal life of Pascha and Pentecost.
The Way of Zacchaeus is humility and repentance, the “pre-requisites” of Prayer.
Recall that Prayer is the best word we have for our relationship with the Father. This is hardly surprising, because the same word, “Prayer,” is the only word we have to describe the relationship of the Son and the Spirit to the Father — even in Heaven itself.
And that is quite the mystery.
The Son and the Spirit pour out Themselves in kenosis to the Father. That is the only way that true prayer can proceed. Only in humility. Only in the bowing of heads. Only in awed recognition of the Father’s overwhelming greatness and beauty, of His everlastingness and matchless power, of His infinite goodness and love.
Only in humble perception of our own small stature and limitedness.
And, after the Fall, prayer must own up to our own sinfulness, our own enslaving fear of death. Our anxiety and lack of trust.
Today, in the Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee, we stand in the Temple to learn about what Prayer is, and what Prayer is not. The Lord shows us two men who appear to be praying.
The first one looks and acts the part. He bears all the trappings of religiosity. He wears the ultra-religious garb of the Pharisee sect, which is meant to call public attention to the fact that “Here is a reverend and holy personage to whom you must give respect and preference. Give him the best seat at the banquet. Make way for him. Be very impressed.”
This man’s identity was so appealing that it impressed even himself.
Too much, it turns out.
“God, I thank you that I am not like other men, greedy, unrighteous, adulterous, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.”
Pharisees were known for their “advanced devotion.” Since they were of a “higher spirituality” than the normal crowd, their superiority demanded a superior rigor.
So he was obviously bucked up by his obvious differentiation from “other men” — “Even that contemptible tax-collector over there,” he said.
He went on, checking off his bulleted list of “righteous” achievements. “I fast twice a week”: the Pharisees fasted on Tuesdays and Thursdays (this, by the way, was one of the reasons why Apostolic Christians elected to fast on Wednesdays and Fridays instead).
He also made sure that God knew that he gave tithes (10 percent) not just on the things that were listed in the Law to tithe on, but he gave tithes “of all that I get.”
Everything had to be much better than the norm. He was special.
So. Given what we know of true prayer, how does the Pharisee rate?
Is there a recognition of God’s awesome love, goodness, power, and greatness? Is there humility, a sense of one’s own smallness, like Zacchaeus?
For heaven’s sake, is there even the tiniest hint of asking for mercy?
There is none of that, for one simple reason. This self-righteous, self-important, egotistical Pharisee was not even praying.
The Lord gave away the clue right from the start: “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself” (Luke 18.11).
His religion was a pseudo-religion. It was a performance.
The Evangelist Luke said as much when he introduced this Parable: “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others” (Luke 18.9).
Yes, you read that right: Jesus told this story about a self-righteous professional-pray-er performance artist Pharisee to a bunch of Pharisees.
He later came right out and called this Pharisaical enterprise of self-righteousness as hypocrisy. On one hand, you have that odious “trusting in themselves that they were righteous.”
But righteousness — even in the Old Testament Law — is essentially Love, a love that reflected and participated in God’s own Nature.
So how can it be that a righteousness could ever be something that “despised others”? If Pharisees really wanted to be “super-righteous,” then they would have been Lovers, not Haters.
True Prayer can not permit any kind of Hate. If you hate, you cannot pray. If you don’t forgive others, God won’t forgive you (Matthew 6.15).
Prayer and hatred are mutually exclusive. Because prayer rises up only on the wings of Love.
Speaking of true prayer, we see it exercised in the unlikeliest of sources.
It was a lowly amateur in the practice of religion, even someone who most would have written off as completely disqualified.
It was (horrors) the worst of the worst of unrighteousness: a tax collector. It was the very tax collector that the Pharisee had mentioned in his “Un-Prayer.”
The tax collector wasn’t doing a very good job. He obviously did not know how to dress religiously. He hadn’t gone to religion school on the art of public piety. One could safely surmise that he was not one of the "tithing kind."
And the idea of him fasting must have been a complete joke.
But yet …
Even though he stood “far off” (that is, in the back pews) and wouldn’t even lift his eyes toward heaven … even though he just did that honest, humble beating-of-one’s-own-breast remorse thing and simply said, “God be merciful to me a sinner” …
… the Lord said “I tell you, this man went to his house justified” (Luke 18.14).
In other words, this man’s prayer for mercy was received, and mercy was given. This man’s religion was real.
This man succeeded, because he really prayed. He prayed what prayer really is, unlike the Pharisee who prayed what prayer is not.
Prayer can only be an act of humility. In humility, we look with compassion and sympathy upon everyone and anyone. We recognize that everyone is immortal, and everything in Creation is imbued with the beauty and wisdom of the Loving Father.
In prayer, we want nothing else and nothing less than to open our hearts completely to the Father. We accept the painful fact that we can only “come as we are.” We ask for mercy from the Only One Who can give mercy, from the Only One Who is Love.
We certainly do not exalt ourselves. We do not check off our list of spiritual accomplishments.
We do not even call ourselves or think of ourselves as “Saved” or “Holy” or better than anyone else.
In fact, we call ourselves “sinners.”
“Every one who exalts himself will be humbled,” like this Pharisee. “But he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 18.14).