Luke 18:9-14
I have always maintained that Jesus made life just a wee bit harder for mankind in singling out the two great commandments. Now we are required to use our heads and hearts to live and love according to God's plan for us. With the Ten Commandments it was relatively easy, you simply obeyed those laws and you could feel saved, self righteous. Even with the myriad manmade religious laws that the Temple elite set forth you could be assured of complete salvation by obeying every law to the letter.
Here we have the tax collector who walks away more justified than the self righteous prigg who has his nose in the air while looking down on everyone else.
It seems a much harder challenge to love everyone in it's most encompassing form than to simply check of a box that you fulfilled the letter of the law. Love requires compassion, recognition of everyone's inherent value. Love requires that we put others before ourselves. Love requires that we exercise some form of introspection and analysis of where we are succeeding and where we are failing. Love requires us to grow.
That growth thing is what hangs a great many of us up. That is what Lent is all about. Someone I know likened it to a cocoon. On Easter we all burst forth as magnificent butterflies - or at least that's our goal. Someone else I recall said Lent was a time to become as human as we possibly can. I'd like to try and embrace both these ideas for Lent. Whatever I do, whatever plan I may come up with or whatever I "give up" for Lent, all of it should be geared to making me more human.
Embracing our humanity completely as Jesus did requires a lot of living and loving. It requires us to fight against the evils that may tempt us and requires us to live fully, embracing those things that God gives us as gifts for the living.
The first option at my disposal to be fully human will be to love others. It seems easy enough and the joys of companionship, loving, bonding, holding, sharing and caring are all part of being fully human. Even our sexuality makes us more human. It is a gift to us as God created us. Embrace that too on your Lenten journey. Share your God given gifts in all it's glory and forms. Listening, loving, talking, sharing, the list seems endless and our journey in Lent is as grand and as varied as we are as humans.
Whatever we do for Lent, let us do it for the glory of God in love and let us embrace our humanity to the full.
He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.’
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