The ancient tradition of the Church almost immediately developed the forty-day observance preceding the great feast of Pascha, or Easter, which we now know as Great Lent. The standard for the fasting and prayers of this time grew out of the catechumenate, the period of teaching and discipleship that preceded baptism, but with the monastic movement begun in the fourth century, these observances took on a rigor that seems daunting to us today. This was the modus operandi of ancient Christianity: more is more. It was maximalist as opposed to minimalist.
As the disciplines of Great Lent developed, there developed also the period we now know as the Triodion: the three Sundays prior to the start of Great Lent in which the Church prepares for the great forty-day struggle. We have received from the ancient Church the tradition that every year the first Sunday of the Triodion begins with the Lukan parable of the Publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18.9-14). In this parable the Pharisee thanks God he (rather in the manner of Michael Jackson) is not like the other guys, particularly like the publican, or tax collector he sees standing over off to the side. The Pharisee prays, fasts and tithes. But he doesn't go away from the Temple justified. The tax collector, on the other hand, we well know, does.
It's interesting to me that the Pharisee was left in his sin, not because he was praying, fasting and tithing. Readers of Matthew's Gospel know that these are the very things the Lord requires of us. Rather, the Pharisee approached these righteous acts from the standpoint of himself. He is the biblical equivalent of the religion of me. The Pharisee's faith was centered on himself, and thus he left the Temple condemned by his own prayer.
It strikes me that this is the great blessing of the Church's tradition. Too much of my own religious life is the great struggle to guage my spiritallity in terms of me. The great barometer of my faith has been . . . well, me, my feelings and my own judgments. But with the great gift that is the Tradition of the Church, it no longer has to be about me. Indeed, it cannot be. The Tradition is given to me by God through the Church for the sake of my own justification and salvation. Not that through it I earn my salvation--that would simply put me back in the religion of me. But rather that God has chosen in his mercy to actualitze my justifcation, to sanctify me, within that which is most emphatically not about me.
The Pharisee had it wrong, not because his worship practices were wrong, per se. He had it wrong because his religion and worship was about himself. It seems to me that we Christians need the kind of worship of the publican who starts his prayer with God, appeals to his mercy, and only at the end, inserts himself. And not a self that feels good or is made comfortable, but a self who knows that the distance between himself and hell is exactly the width of God's mercy. It seems that any worship or religion that focuses on me, on the worshipper, is ultimately idolatrous. Worship is first, last and middle about God. If we keep the focus right, we'll not only know his mercy, we'll know ourselves as sinners in need of it.
Posted by Clifton at February 16, 2003 01:29 PM | TrackBack