Pride and Humility

A Sermon for the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee

The Pharisee, standing, prayed thus within himself: «God, I give praise to You that I am not like the other men—extortioners, unrighteous men, adulterers—or even like this tax collector» (Lk 18:11)

While being teachers of the faith among the Jewish people, the Pharisees boasted of their knowledge of the law, and yet they dishonored God more than anyone by transgressing the law and by their extreme hypocrisy. The Savior gave them a perfect assessment, saying that they love the chief seats in the synagogues and kisses of greeting in the marketplaces[1]. This wretched passion of haughtiness arose in them from a false overestimation of their own merits, since, being public teachers of the faith, they knew the law of Moses well, which many of the Jews did not know. The tax collectors, for their part, were collectors of taxes and, by virtue of their office, very often resorted to unlawful means in their exactions. In the Gospel we see an astonishing example of humility and self-denial in a tax collector, in Zacchaeus, the chief of the tax collectors. When the Savior came to his house, Zacchaeus, in a deep feeling of repentance, said to the Lord: Here, half of my property, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have wronged anyone of anything, I will pay it back four times over[2].

Pharisees and tax collectors exist today as well, not in name only but by their deeds. The passion of self-exaltation and self-praise still holds sway in the sons of fallen Adam. Let us converse, at the summons of our mother the Church, on how ruinous this passion is, and on the motives for humility. Where do we get the passion of self-exaltation and self-praise? From the very source from which all our sins came: from the first ancestral sin. Man was created with this purpose: that he should love God, the Author of his being, above all things; that he should gaze upon God’s perfections and imitate them, holily fulfilling His will. But he loved himself rather than God; he wanted to appropriate God’s perfections to himself; he desired to be, in his own person, as great as God; he wanted to be his own lawgiver; he yielded to self-love and pride—and fell. Thus pride is enmity against God and contempt for one’s neighbor. Could God look with favor on a creature that puffs itself up with certain perfections of its own and finds nothing equal to itself in them, as if we had anything that was our own? As a passion, pride is by nature a disease of our soul, one that infected it at the moment of the fall of the first human beings. As a false opinion of our own perfections, as a lawless movement of the will, it is at the same time the fruit of the inward evil spirit, who, having himself fallen through pride and envy, drew man down to the fall by those same sins. We know that human beings did not fall of themselves, but through the temptation of the devil. Need we dwell at length on the fact that pride, or self-praise joined with the humiliation of others, is a disease of our soul? To be convinced of this, one need only look at a proud man with the eye of holy faith. What is man in his present condition? A fallen man, beaten, covered all over with wounds. Does this comparison seem exaggerated to you? Recall the parable of the Samaritan and the man who fell among robbers.[3] Whom does this man depict, the one who fell among robbers, who was beaten and wounded? Whom, if not us, tormented by passions, by the world, and by the devil? If such a man were to insist that he was perfectly well and felt no pain at all, what would we say of him? Would we not say that he was gravely ill and near death, because his body no longer had any sensibility to reveal in him the presence of the powers of life? And this very thing—precisely this—we must also say of the proud man.

Pride, furthermore, is the fruit of the suggestions of the evil spirit. Is it hard to be convinced of this? Pride is a false, exaggerated opinion of one’s own perfections, real or imaginary, joined with an offensive humiliation of others. A false opinion; – but where does falsehood in the world come from? God is truth. Holy Scripture points out to us one source, one father of lies: You are of your father the devil, the Savior says to the Jews, and you desire to do the lusts of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him; when he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own: for he is a liar and the father of lies[4]. It is he who whispers to a man occupied with himself, with his own good deeds, that he is the most perfect of beings, at whom all others ought to marvel, that many people are contemptible creatures who live in the world in vain. But how false this is, judge for yourselves. Is this insolent self-praiser in actual fact the most perfect of beings, and is the neighbor whom he condemns really what he takes him to be? Perhaps at the very moment when he was condemned he repented, wept tears over his sins before God, who tries the hearts[5] of all, and – received forgiveness. Meanwhile, the perfections of the man who exalts himself are suspect on that very account, because he goes about proclaiming and trumpeting them abroad.

True perfection, true virtue, is modest: it loves to hide in secret, and it by no means dares to ascribe its perfections to itself, much less to humiliate others. You say of yourself that you are good, merciful to all, zealous for the faith and for holy Church, and that you exhaust your flesh with fasting. Excellent. But who proclaimed you good, merciful, zealous for the Church and her holy ordinances? God? An angel? Or did you yourself appraise your own virtue? And how can we appraise our own deeds? How shall we weigh them? What measure shall we take in doing so? Do we know well our impure heart, which always, or at least for the most part, takes a great share in the performing of good deeds? Do not the calculations of self-love, or other unseemly motives, enter into our virtues? How easily at times does an unkind motive, which was the cause of our good deed, hide from our own consciousness. The poison of sin penetrates deep into our soul, and, without our noticing it ourselves, it poisons almost all our virtues. True perfection, true virtue, is modest: it loves to hide in secret, and it by no means dares to ascribe its perfections to itself, much less to humiliate others. We ought not to exalt ourselves before others, but to humble ourselves. And how many incentives to humility there are for each of us! Man has nothing of his own: everything he has is God’s – his soul, his body, and all that he has, except sin. Every good deed, too, is from God. What, then, can he boast of? What do you have, man,that you have not received? And if you have received it, why do you boast as though you had not received it?[6]? If, however, he boasts of his virtues, then he sacrilegiously appropriates to himself the glory that belongs to God alone.

Further, every human being is more or less in a state of sinful weakness, and at the very least, very many are in a state of sinful insensibility. How intolerable in them is that sick, false assurance that they are in perfect health and have no need of a doctor. What an incentive this likewise gives us not to hold our good deeds in high esteem, since they may be nothing other than the delirium of our soul. The heavenly, all-knowing Judge has taken upon Himself to appraise our deeds and to render to each his recompense for them in His own time. How necessary it is, therefore, to perform each of our good deeds in the eyes of God and to leave the judgment of it to Him alone, not daring to touch it with our own fallible judgment. But it must be observed that we have very few good deeds, and incomparably more bad ones. A new and most powerful incentive to humility. I am sinful, and God is just: how can we fail to keep before our thoughts the judgment of God, which perhaps stands ready to be executed upon us this very day, and fail to forget the most insignificant good deeds, which in comparison with a multitude of sins mean nothing: because we inevitably sin every day, every hour, in word and in deed, in thought and in feeling. O God, grant us to have constantly before our eyes our total dependence on You, our weakness, our sinfulness, so that we may constantly humble ourselves before You and before our neighbors.

Brethren and sisters! It cannot fail to please you, without any doubt, the example of humble-mindedness presented in today’s Gospel, that of the publican, since it depicts us sinful, repentant ones; and we easily recognize and love our own image, traced for us in Holy Scripture; it cannot fail to please you especially because you saw how he was shown mercy by God for his humility: though he was a great sinner—for publicans in general lived by oppression and bribe-taking—yet he went down to his own house justified[7]. Let us strive, then, to imitate this example of humble-mindedness. No one, of course, will claim to be a person without sin, one who has no need, like the publican, to be brokenhearted over his sins, to strike his breast, and to humbly ask forgiveness: O God, be merciful to me, a sinner[8].

All of us, all of us, are sinners and have need of the mercy of God. If the blood of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, did not intercede for us, then every day and hour the blows of heavenly justice would thunder over us; we would be in distress day after day, our sinful soul would be dying, and neither peace nor joy would we ever taste, to all eternity. But the Son of God intercedes for us; our sins do not cry out so loudly for vengeance upon us; for the sake of His merits God forgives them, provided only that we acknowledge them ourselves and repent of them. Yes, God forgives us our sins. It is only necessary to grieve over them and to ask the Lord Jesus from the whole heart for forgiveness, and He, by the grace and the tender mercies of His love for mankind, will forgive us through His servant all the sins that burden our conscience. Let us imitate the tax collector’s humble-mindedness, and keep ourselves in every way far from the self-exaltation of the Pharisee.

With what unattractive features the Pharisee mentioned in the Gospel is portrayed, the one who took delight in the sight of his own virtues. I, says such a man, am not like other people or like this tax collector. I thank You, he says, for this. You do well to thank God for good deeds; they are not from us but from God; but why do you boast and exalt yourself by them before the face of God Himself, as though He did not know their worth? Why do you demean your fellow man? Are you not the same condemned and sinful man as the tax collector? Have your virtues suddenly made you a pure and sinless angel? Did you yourself fulfill them by your own strength? How is it that you have suddenly forgotten your weaknesses and see only perfections, giving not the least thought to the humility that is necessary for you! Why do you think that you are such an outstanding, virtuous man? Why, even with your virtues, would you not think that you have done only what was due and remain that same useless servant, according to the Savior’s commandment: When you have done all that was commanded you, say: We are useless servants, for what we ought to have done, we have done[9].

Lord! Without You we can do nothing whatsoever[10]. Do You Yourself grant us this humble-mindedness of the tax collector, and drive out of us every thought of Pharisaic pride. May we always remember that we are all Yours, with everything we have and everything we see around us, and that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, to boast of. Amen.