Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Church of St. Bridget of Minneapolis, MN

Sunday, October 26, 2025

If you went home last weekend wondering how to pray, what your prayer should include, when your prayer has gone off-kilter, and seeking to understand the right attitude and approach to God in prayer, Jesus, the Lord and the greatest teacher of all time, addresses these questions in today’s simple parable (Luke 18:9-14).

It is the famous parable of a Pharisee and a Publican (tax collector) who went up to the temple to pray. The Pharisees were the religious establishment and a prominent Jewish sect during Jesus’ time, known for their strict adherence to Mosaic law and traditions. In contrast, tax collectors were the most loathsome and despised people in Israel because they worked for the Romans to transfer money from Jewish communities to Roman authorities. They drain their own people to benefit their hated oppressors. The Romans allowed them to collect as much tax as they could, and any excess beyond the legal amount was kept for themselves. Essentially, they were literally legal thieves. So, the story features two men praying in the temple: one has numerous good deeds to boast about and likely few sins, while the other —the tax collector —has committed many grave sins against justice and charity, against God and his own people. 

What did the Pharisee say in his prayer? “O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity— greedy, dishonest, adulterous— or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithe on my entire income” (Luke 18:11-12). As for the tax collector, he stood at a distance and wouldn’t even lift his eyes to heaven but only beat his breast and prayed, “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). At the end of the story, Jesus drops a spiritual bomb: “I tell you, the latter went home justified (i.e., right with God), not the former; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Why did the man with greater sins go home justified, while the law-keeping one did not? Does this imply that God’s commandments are unimportant? Not at all! The reason is that the greatest of all sins—the one that can send a person to hell—is final impenitence, which is the refusal to repent of one’s sins and accept God’s forgiveness. John states that God is love (1 John 4:8), and that is indeed true. God is kind and merciful. He is willing to forgive all sins as long as we are eager to ask for and receive His forgiveness. St. Augustine said, “God who created us without us, cannot save us without us.”

But what would make someone not accept the gift of God’s mercy and forgiveness? Pride. Arrogance. Self-righteousness. The belief that you are a good person, and that healing and forgiveness are not necessary. Check the Gospels, and you will find no account of anyone who was healed and forgiven without coming to Jesus, without expressing faith in him, or with no one interceding for them. Everyone in the Gospels who was healed and forgiven by Jesus either came to him or someone came on their behalf. Jesus himself said to the Pharisees that he could not save them because they would not go to him for salvation: “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do” (Mark 2:17). If you think you are not sick, you will not go to the doctor. And Jesus is the real doctor of the soul, and we are all spiritually ill, and he will only heal those who come to him, who sincerely repent. But if we convince ourselves that we are good people, and won’t go to him, and won’t beg for mercy by using the sacrament of confession, then he won’t heal us. In his extraordinary teaching about prayer, Jesus says, “Ask and you shall receive….” (Luke 11:9). Ask for what? Please, don’t ask for power, wealth, honor, and pleasure. Don’t ask for a Lamborghini or that sleek and classy Mercedes-Benz. Don’t ask to be on top of the world. Don’t ask for the death of your enemies. Ask for mercy! In the great Beatitude, Jesus says, “Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Is this a masochistic or a sadistic idea? No! Jesus is not saying that the unhappier we are, the more we are consoled or comforted. The great spiritual tradition reads it this way: Happy are those who mourn for their sins. We feel sad about many things. When our dreams do not come true, we feel bad. When we lose the job we once had, we feel bad. When love goes sour and the relationship we thought was made in heaven collapses, we feel bad. When things aren't working out or aren't going in our favor, we feel bad. But what is the one thing we should really feel bad and mourn over? Our own sins! Why? Because sin hurts! It hurts us and severs our relationship with God and with the people of God. If the consequence of a sin is not physical, it is definitely spiritual, which is the greater harm. Sin disorders nature. It disorders the orderliness fashioned by God.

God bless you!