We often think of pride as something loud and slightly boastful, someone demanding centre stage or bragging about their achievements.
But during today’s Sunday service at St. Edmunds, Reverend Jeff and the team shone a light on a much quieter, far more dangerous form of pride. It’s the pride that hides you away from God.
Let me explain…
It is the stubborn, often silent voice that tells you, “I can go it alone.” It is the feeling that when life gets heavy, which it often does, or when we stumble in our faith, the solution is simply to bite down, grit our teeth and just try harder. We treat our relationship with God like a test we need to pass on our own merit, rather than a gift of grace we desperately need to receive.
When we get lost in this mindset, our gaze often shifts. Pride looks sideways – comparing our struggles and righteousness to those around us, finding comfort in others’ misfortune, that we might be doing a ”better” job as a parent, as a Brother, or maybe a friend than someone else. It becomes a comparison game without us realising that’s what it is. Pride looks onwards, fixating endlessly on the next self-improvement challenge/goal, the next boundary to cross, or the next thing we need to fix about us before we deem ourselves ”good enough” to face God.
But when we’re fixated in the wrong places, be it sideways, or looking onwards, when really they should be looking upwards. During today’s service, Church leader Jeff presented us with a large mirror on stage, which beautifully illustrated what happens to our hearts when we give in to this selfish mindset in life. He spoke about the moment when a window becomes a mirror.
A window is meant to let us look outward, to see the world, and to look upon others with compassion and love. But when pride takes over, that glass silver backs, the once a window now becomes a mirror. Suddenly, we are no longer looking out at God or our community; we are entirely focused on our own reflection, our own efforts, and our own image.
The danger of this self-reliant pride is that it subtly convinces us we don’t need a saviour, we just need a better strategy to compete in this game of life. It builds a wall between God and us, constructed out of our own determination not to appear weak to those around us. We falsely believe that God is tracking our efforts, waiting for us to hit a certain standard of performance before He welcomes us in.
Yet, the Gospel completely flips this human logic on its head. God does not demand perfection, nor does He require a checklist of our hard work. He only requires our admittance of need for Him, and a willingness to receive His mercy.
This was so clearly laid out in the reading today from the Gospel of Luke, in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Jesus describes two men praying in the temple. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed a prayer soaked in that sideways glancing, mirror-gazing self-pride: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people.” He listed his own virtues, confident in his own strength, presenting God with a resume of his own efforts while comparing himself to everyone else. He was looking into a mirror of his own righteousness.
But the tax collector stood at a distance. He wouldn’t even look up to heaven. Instead, he beat his breast and offered a prayer of absolute, beautiful surrender:
“God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” (Luke 18:13)
Jesus tells us that it was the tax collector, not the Pharisee, who went home justified before God.
Notice what the tax collector didn’t do? He didn’t promise to do better next week. He didn’t look sideways to see if he was doing better than his neighbour, and he didn’t look onwards to a future where he had finally sorted his life out by “trying harder”. He broke the mirror completely. He simply looked at his present reality, admitted his brokenness, and threw himself entirely on the mercy of God.
And in that single moment of honest admittance, mercy was instantly there to meet him. That is the incredible truth of who God truly is. Mercy is not something we can earn, earn back, or achieve by working a little harder. In fact, the harder we try to earn it, the further we pull away from it, because trying to earn a gift is often pride in disguise. God’s mercy is already brought, paid for, and fully available to those who want it. It is a boundless ocean, but we cannot swim in it until we stop trying to build our own bridges.
To be saved by mercy means we have let go of the exhaustion of self-reliance. It requires us to lay down our pride, step out from hiding places where we try to fix ourselves in secret, and simply say, “I can’t do this alone.”
When we finally smash the mirror of our own self-sufficiency and look through the window of God’s grace, we find that He isn’t waiting for us to fix ourselves. He is simply waiting for us to turn to Him, just as we are, and let His mercy do what our striving never could.
Blessings,
Frankie.
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