WHO ARE YOU?
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
October 27, 2019
If I were to
pose the question, “Who are you?” What would be your first response? There are
actually at least a couple of ways to answer that question, and its rather
fascinating to consider the difference between them. Very often the automatic
response is not a disclosure of who I am, but is instead a report about who I
am as distinct from everybody else around me, as if I can only be a somebody by
locating myself relative to the rest of human beings.
For example,
I am a male—as distinct from female
I am ordained—as distinct from those who are not
I am Irish—as distinct from any other ethnic group
I am middle aged—as distinct from those older and younger
I am a Minnesotan—as distinct from people from every other place
The list
could go on. But once I’ve exhausted all those distinctions about economic
status, political affiliation, religious denomination, sexual orientation,
marital status, employment and so on, I may not have really answered the
question. Who are you?
In fact, the
only way truly to describe who I am is to appeal to God, because otherwise I’m
just a creature who can only be understood by considering who I am not. But
neither my identity or the identity of anybody else depends on comparing and
contrasting myself to others. That’s no identity at all—in fact it’s a void. My
deepest being, and yours too, is not the result of the sorting out of
categories and eliminating things that don’t fit. Who I am cannot be defined
solely with reference to this world and other creatures in it, but boy don’t we
try to.
Today’s
gospel of Luke is an invitation to stop all that. In Jesus’ parable he
contrasts the temple prayers of two Jews, but there’s a lot more going on here
than the comparison between an arrogant man and a humble one. It’s the
difference between a person who can only understand himself when he looks
around at everybody else, and a person who actually knows his deepest identity.
The gospel
presents us with the Pharisee and the tax collector. And the question “Who are
you?” the Pharisee replies, with gratitude, that he is not like everybody
else—and is, in fact, quite a bit better than everybody else. He is not a
decadent sinner. He fasts, as opposed to those who don’t. He gives money to
charity, as distinct from those who don’t. None of which is an answer to the
question, “Who are you?”
For that
answer we must turn to the tax collector—one of the most despised groups of
people in the Israel of Jesus’ time—as the Pharisee is quick to point out. The
tax collector, in his prayer, makes no reference to anybody other than himself,
because he is aware that it just doesn’t matter who other people are or what
they do when it comes to being honest with one’s true self before God. “Be merciful to me,” he prays, “for I am a
sinner.”
That’s who
he is. That’s who I am. That’s who every human being has ever been. Maybe not
as blatant a sinner as some others, or maybe a worse one, but that just doesn’t
matter in answer to the question, “Who are you?” The rating charts are absurd.
The comparisons only serve to avoid the real issue.
So if the
best answer to the “Who are you?” question is to acknowledge one’s sins, then
perhaps the next best question to ponder is what that means for us before God.
It might mean harsh judgement and condemnation and hopelessness, but it
doesn’t. Jesus concludes his instruction today by assuring his audience that it
is the tax collector—the self-admitted sinner—who goes home justified, because
he knows who he is and is aware of the mercy of the God to whom he prays.
That’s the
very same God to whom we pray today, but our ability to welcome that mercy
depends upon our first admitting just who we are. Paradoxically, the only ones
among us who have to worry about judgement are the ones who think that they are
a cut above the rest of the crowd, and who even try to convince God of that in
the manner of their prayers. God knows just exactly who we are, long before we
try to explain it to Him.
Who
everybody else is is irrelevant in the end. Our task is not to locate ourselves
on the hierarchy of virtue, but to show to others just who we all are.
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