One of the dreams and desires of many Christians is to visit the Holy Land, and retrace the landmarks associated with the life of Jesus Christ. One of the central building there is the Church of Nativity which is built over the cave in which Jesus was born. The entrance to that Church is through a single doorway with a very low lintel. To enter that Church you have to make yourself small, you have to bend low and humble yourself. This is a fitting way to enter the Church, which celebrates the lowliness of God, who emptied Himself to take on our human nature. That doorway is a symbol of the only requirement anyone has to meet to approach God in prayer: humility. The central message of the story today is to recognise that we are sinners and depend on God’s graciousness. If you enter any Church in Ireland you will see that many Irish people readily identify themselves with the tax collector. Very few people in the front of the Church and a lot of people huddled in the back porch of the Church. It doesn’t really surprise us that we are masters at the understatement; talents, abilities, skills even our relationship with God. How many times will we hear people saying or we even say it ourselves: ‘I’m no good for praying’. The modern world might call this ‘low self-esteem’ and encourage ‘self assertion’. However it also can be false modesty, something that true humility has nothing to do with. True humility is recognition of our radical distance from God and our need for salvation. Deep down we like to praise ourselves, and even though we don’t say it aloud, don’t we sometimes feel we’re better than others are. This can lead and sometimes does lead to our looking down on others. It is very easy to fall into the habit of confessing the sins of others in prayer. The danger of this habit is it prevents us from looking at our own sinfulness. In fact there is a Pharisee lurking in each one of us. Like him we may be very conscious of the sins of others but blind to our own. The tax collector shows us how to confess our sins. Even though, we may not be conscious of any specific sins, each of us can still say in all truth. ‘I am a sinner’. Sin is not just an act or series of acts, but a condition, in which we live. This is the great truth, which the Tax Collector grasped. People in support groups will tell you that the turning point for them is when they can name their weakness. The Pharisee was full of himself and he exalted himself. The Tax Collector humbles himself before God. God prefers the broken and contrite heart that knows its failures to the complacent and arrogant one that claims never to have sinned.