Saturday 3rd of Week of Lent
Catholic Men’s Fellowship Concluding Mass
St. Louis, Clarksville
14. III. 2026
I. Shine the Light
A. I hope you have enjoyed this day and have gotten a lot out of it.
Above all, I hope that the light of Christ is shining in your heart
so that you can go forth from here to shine the light of Christ
on your families, your places of work, your friendships,
and upon this world that often stumbles about in darkness.
B. Before we go, let us ask the Lord to shine the light on us one more time.
Let us ask him to shine the light on how we pray.
How we pray defines our relationship with God and with ourselves.
How we pray defines how we look at other people around us.
If we want to shine the light, we have to pray in the clear light of faith.
II. Two Men at Prayer
A. To help us do that, Jesus tells us a parable about two men at prayer,
one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector.
The Pharisee was an expert in the law and a man of social prominence.
He enters the Temple area and confidently takes his place up front.
He proceeds to speak to God as if he were his equal,
and as if everyone else were his inferior.
He thanks God, not for his divine blessings,
but because he, the Pharisee, is better than everyone else.
Other people are greedy, dishonest, and adulterous – but not this Pharisee.
Out of the corner of his eye, Pharisee’s sees the tax collector behind him.
The Pharisee thanks God that he is not like that tax collector.
The Pharisee goes on to catalogue his good works for God’s benefit:
fasting twice and week and paying tithes on all his income.
Summing up, the Pharisee not only boasted before God,
but also nudged out God as his judge . . .
he was his own judge and he found himself to be a very fine fellow.
B. What about the tax collector? He does four things:
First, he stands afar off. He goes, not to the highest place, but the lowest.
Second, he keeps his eyes lowered, in deep reverence for God.
Third, he beats his breast as sign of repentance.
Fourth, he cries out for mercy: “O God have mercy on me a sinner.”
The tax collector declares himself to be
what the Pharisee said he was – a sinner.
Meanwhile, he refrains from speaking to God about anyone else.
He lays bare his soul before God.
For the tax collector, God was both his judge and the source of mercy.
III. Application to Ourselves
A. What happened to the Pharisee can happen to us.
Let’s say you’ve turned the corner in your spiritual life.
You’ve managed to get rid of some bad habits and you’re growing in virtue.
You’ve started praying every day, reading Scripture prayerfully,
going to Confession regularly, and participating in Sunday Mass without fail.
By and by, your spiritual life takes off.
Your wife, your family, and your friends begin to notice a difference.
B. That’s when the devil takes to the mound and pitches you a curve ball.
The ball is coming in kind of high
so instead of looking down you’re looking up.
You can see the folks cheering in the stands.
You can see the sky above. You imagine God is cheering for you.
You tell the dear Lord you gonna hit a home run.
But just as the ball gets to you, it suddenly drops. You swing and you miss.
If the devil can get you to do that three times, well, you get the idea.
Just when we think we’re going to bat a thousand, we strike out.
C. In his description of the Pharisee,
Jesus gets at something deep and important in us.
As one author put it,
“The love of God can so easily turn into idolatrous self-love;
the gift can quickly be seized as a possession;
what comes from another can be turned into self-accomplishment.
Prayer can be transformed into boasting . . .” (Luke Timothy Johnson, Matthew, p. 274).
When we pray in a self-righteous mode – like the Pharisee –
we become resistant to God’s further blessings..
We look around and compare ourselves to others.
We look down on those who haven’t turned the corner.
Why hasn’t my neighbor joined a prayer group?
Why isn’t he volunteering at church?
I didn’t see so and so at Adoration… and so it goes.
D. By contrast, the tax collector’s prayer is simple, truthful, and from the heart.
The tax collector knows he is a sinner in need of mercy.
His heart is contrite and humble.
The tax collector asks for mercy and receives mercy.
He goes home justified in the sight of God. The Pharisee does not.
IV. Prayer Is Our Relationship with God
A. How we pray reveals what our relationship with God is like.
In fact, prayer is more than a way of enhancing our relationship with God –
prayer is our relationship with God,
that time when we acknowledge him to be Lord,
those moments when he reveals us to ourselves,
those moments when we discern what we must say and what we must do.
If we fail to pray, our relationship with God suffers.
If we boast when we pray, we crowd God out of our prayer;
we end up talking to ourselves
whilst rendering ourselves incapable of receiving his blessings.
If we come before him to pray with a humble and contrite heart,
the Lord will pour forth his blessings upon us, blessings without number.
B. So let us allow the Lord to shine the light on life of prayer,
so that his light might shine in us and through us –
a light that does not come from ourselves
but from him who is light of the world shining in us and through us.
May God bless us and keep us always in his love.