Sunday of Publican and Pharisee

In today’s Gospel, our Lord tells us that two men went into the temple to pray – one was a Pharisee who was diligent in keeping the fasts and all the rules of the Jewish law and the other was a Publican, a lowly and despised tax collector. The Pharisee stood in the temple with great confidence and pride, thanking God that he was not like other men. He fasted twice a week, he gave a tenth of everything he owned… he did all the right things. Meanwhile, the Publican stood in the back of the temple and could hardly raise his eyes to heaven, crying out “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Our Lord Jesus Christ tells us: I say to you, it was the publican who went away justified rather than the Pharisee – ‘for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.’

What a powerful and poignant picture the Church places before us as we begin to prepare ourselves for the season of Great Lent.

So often, when we think of the approach of Great Lent, we think of the hardships of fasting, we think of more frequent and longer Church services, we think of the call to minimize our worldly distractions – in a word, we think of all the things which the Pharisee was focused on.

How often is it the case that when we think of the approach of Great Lent, we think about breaking our hearts open in repentance and love for God? How often do we think about better attuning ourselves to helping our family, our friends, our neighbors, and even strangers? In a word, how often do we think of the season of Great Lent as a special time given to us to humbly come before God and to draw nearer to Him?

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, if we approached the season of Great Lent as the Publican, we would look forward to it as a time to draw nearer to the One Whom we most love! May God grant that this be so for all of us.

In addition to our commemoration of the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, today is also a special day for our Church… today we celebrate the holy new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church - those millions of Christian souls persecuted, tortured, and killed for their faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is not only spiritually profitable, but I would dare say, it is becoming more and more essential for us to study the lives of the martyrs of those who suffered under the atheistic yolk of the 20th century. These men and women saw their once Christian land dismantled bit by bit until it reached a critical point wherein the dam burst and Godlessness poured out its poison upon their nation.

These times of trouble were not so long ago in places like Russia, Romania, and other lands where atheistic communism took hold. And we have people with us today, in this very Church, who lived under these intolerable conditions – where going to Church was a crime that could jeopardize the wellbeing of your family and could land you in the Gulag for many years, if you were fortunate enough to survive.

We would do well to listen to the voices of those who lived through this… because they have much to tell us both about the warning signs of a society losing its grip, and also about how one’s faith might survive under almost impossible conditions.

What I have gathered over the past many decades of reading from and listening to these voices is that we must be firmly grounded in the Truth. We have to know what truth is and we have to build a strong relationship with the One Who is Truth Himself.

When the society around us loses its grip and doesn’t know which way is up and which way is down, we have to have the faith and the strength to navigate those stormy waters with a sure grip on the rudder – which is Christ. We have to build a strong foundation of prayer and of knowing the Holy Scriptures. We should work to memorize our prayers and to memorize verses of Scripture which can guide us and console us should the situation ever arise when our prayer books and our Bibles will no longer be available. (Whether that dreadful day ever happens or not is irrelevant to the benefits we will derive from putting to memory these things and to firmly grounding ourselves in prayer and Scripture.)

The cloud of witnesses that we commemorate today, the holy new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church, are guiding lights for us. I encourage you to study their lives, to see how they retained their dignity in the most undignified circumstances, to marvel at their strength of faith in the face of mockery, intimidation, imprisonment, torture, and even death. These are the heroes we should be looking to if we are Orthodox Christians. May their steadfastness and their courage inspire us to be faithful to our Lord and to our Holy Faith no matter what!

The words of the Apostle Paul from today’s Epistle reading for the martyrs expresses this the best: ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: For Your sake we are killed all the day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Yet in all things we are more than conquerors, through Him Who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

May we stand strong in that faith and in that hope that nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.