We Go to Church to Be Made Good, Not to Show We Are Good

Today’s Gospel concerns people who go to church, but also those who don’t go to church. Those who don’t come to church sometimes torment us exactly because we go. During one meeting of Christian students some said: “People go to church with a pious face, with the Bible under their left arm and with a song book under the right one. They sing Hallelujah with a loud voice all excited; they receive Communion with great devotion, but they are hypocrites. As soon as they go out of the church, they forget what they did in the church. Already on Monday they come back to cheat at work. They behave as corrupt people without faith. They are exactly the same like all others. They are not different at all from us who do not go to church. We don’t go, because we don’t want to mess up with your dirty play.” All this implies that only saints should go to church; only those who are totally honest, absolutely pure, completely sincere; those in whom there is nothing but goodness, loyalty, beauty and divine virtues. As a matter of fact - all those who have no need of God’s mercy and help. Jesus told a parable about two persons who went to the temple to pray. They were two completely different people. One was good, sincerely good; in a sense – too good. He never stole anything; never treated anybody badly; never transgressed the sixth commandment; fasted 104 times a year, even if it was prescribed to fast only one day a year… That man was so holy that he surely could go to church. His place was there. He wasn’t a hypocrite. He truly lived up to his ideal. At the back of the church there was the other man, a tax collector; a person truly indecent, greedy, adulterous. A person that never should go to church! What a hypocrite! What did he do there? What did he think he was? It was not his place! Well, Jesus didn’t think this way. He listened to his prayer and recognized that he was beginning his prayer with the words of Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.” How could be called a hypocrite somebody who prayed this way? Jesus didn’t do it; he didn’t say that this man shouldn’t have gone to church. On the contrary Jesus said: “This man went home justified, better, changed.” If we prayed this way, who could call us hypocrites? The other one, the good one, he didn’t go home justified, for he had a small defect that obviously for God was the most important: he thought himself to be better than others, he considered himself just! You see, we go to church not because we are good, but because we ask God to make us good! We don’t go to church to show God how good we are, but we go to church to admit that without God we are not good at all!

Fr Janusz