In an article titled “The power of humility”, the Archbishop of Arequipa (Peru), Mons. Javier Del Río Alba, offers a deep reflection on this Sunday’s gospel (Lk 18:9-14), in which the parable of the Pharisee and the publican is narrated.
In the text sent this Saturday to ACI Prensa, the prelate meditates on the Pharisee, who believes that they can earn God’s favor only by following external rules, believing themselves superior and despising others; and the publican, a tax collector for the Romans considered a public sinner, but who prayed acknowledging his faults and asking the Lord for forgiveness.
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Bishop Del Río specifies that the parable concludes with a “great teaching of Jesus”: the publican “returned home justified and the Pharisee did not, because ‘everyone who exalts himself will be humiliated, and he who humbles himself will be exalted’.”
The archbishop highlighted that “the Pharisee did not ask God for anything because he felt self-sufficient with his works,” in addition to the fact that “he did not know himself and, in reality, he was arrogant and vain.”
The publican, on the other hand, “felt unworthy before God, to the point that, as Jesus said: ‘he did not dare even raise his eyes to heaven’. He was aware of his sins, which led him to present himself humbly before God and, having no merits of his own, to rely solely on his mercy.”
What justified him, Bishop Del Río highlighted, “was not his sins nor the mere recognition of them, but his humility and his trust in God.”
The gift of humility
The Peruvian prelate then urged us to ask the Lord “to cure any self-righteousness that may exist in us and rather to grant us the gift of humility: knowing how to recognize our sins, repent of them and embrace the mercy of God.”
“Humility has enormous strength: it makes it possible for our prayer to reach God and for Him to justify us, since, as Saint Paul teaches, ‘a man is not justified by the works of the law but only by faith in Jesus Christ’ (Rom 2:16),” he highlighted.
The archbishop then pointed out that “it is not works that make us righteous. Justification is not a human work. Only God can, using his mercy on us, transform the depths of our being, from sinner to righteous, and make works of eternal life spring from us.”
The archbishop then encouraged us to humble ourselves “before God, in prayer, recognizing the poverty of our sinful human nature, and He will exalt us by making us partakers of his divine nature.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.