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THE DANGER OF PRESUMPTION
SCRIPTURE READINGS: [HOSEA 5:15 – 6:6; LUKE 18:9-14 ]

One of the most dangerous sins that can destroy our spiritual life is that of presumption. The sin of presumption can manifest in two extreme ways. The first way is presuming God’s unconditional forgiveness for our sins. The other extreme is to presume that we are not in need of mercy and forgiveness. Both of these extremist positions will lead us away from God, either to the sins of the world or to the sin of pride.

Indeed, in the first reading from the Prophet Hosea, the Lord spoke of the presumption of the Israelites. They were not sincere in their repentance because they were over-confident of God’s love and mercy. They said, “Come, let us return to the Lord. He has torn us to pieces, but he will heal us; he has struck us down, but he will bandage our wounds; after a day or two he will bring us back to life, on the third day he will raise us and we shall live in his presence. Let us set ourselves to know the Lord; that he will come is as certain as the dawn, he will come to us as showers come, like spring rains watering the earth.” They believed that at most the Lord would punish them for a while and all would be well again.

The Israelites had no real love for the Lord. God knew them better. “What am I to do with you, Ephraim? What am I to do with you, Judah? This love of yours is like a morning cloud, like the dew that quickly disappears.” The sacrifices they offered were not from their hearts or an expression of their contrition. So, the Lord said, “This is why I have torn them to pieces by the prophets, why I slaughtered them with the words from my mouth, his judgement will rise like the light, since what I want is love, not sacrifice; knowledge of God, not holocausts.”

This is how some of us also conduct ourselves before God. We take for granted God’s unconditional love and mercy. We continue to live a selfish life and sin against Him and against our fellowmen. We break His commandments again and again without having any intention to change. Isn’t this how we often behave? We go for confession believing that God will forgive us our sins. But confession is just a license for us to continue sinning. We do not have a contrite heart when we confess our sins. Confession is a mere routine, just repeating the same sins we have committed to the priest so that we can receive forgiveness. We never examined our conscience, the gravity of our sins, the consequences of our sins on our fellowmen, and how we can avoid them in future. Indeed, we go to confession with full confidence not just in God’s forgiveness but that we are going to repeat the same sins again.

For those of us who subscribe fully to the doctrine of justification by faith alone in the way some Protestants do, we can end up transforming costly grace to cheap grace. This was what the German Lutheran warned his fellow members in his classic book, “the cost of discipleship.” He wrote, “Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” This is a very real danger for those who are overly presumptuous of God’s grace and mercy. It leads to a complacent Christian life.

St Paul warned the Christians in Galatia. After writing such a convincing letter on justification by faith not by the law, he also warned them equally, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.” (Gal 5:1,13) For this reason, he never took for granted the grace of God. In his letter to the Corinthians, he said, “I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.” (1 Cor 9:27) Indeed, whilst we can be confident in the grace and mercy of God, we should not be overly presumptuous. This has always been the position of the Council of Trent and in our Joint Declaration on the doctrine of Justification in 1999 with the Lutherans. In other words, we can be confident of God’s mercy and forgiveness but we should not be presumptuous because it leads to the sin of pride.



Presumption of His mercy is the way the devil destroys us. He keeps telling us that we can continue to sin because God always forgives. Indeed, there was a time when some preachers after Vatican II went to the extreme of teaching that God’s love is unconditional. So, there is no need for conversion at all because He will always forgive us. So much so there were even theologians who declared that hell does not exist and that no one would go to hell. As a result, many continue to live a sinful life without fear by presuming God’s compassion.

Little do we realize that even though it is true that God always forgives, yet He does not limit Himself from allowing the consequences of sin to take root in our lives. For those of us who take God’s love and mercy for granted, there will come a time when we are numbed to sin. We no longer feel the seriousness of sin. Evil gradually consumes us until a day would come when we will even deny the reality of God. When our hearts are evil and our minds are darkened, we will no longer be able to see the truth or feel the love and mercy of God. So we cannot be presumptuous that we will continue to have faith in Him or in His love when we enter deeper into sin. St Peter wrote, “be all the more eager to confirm your call and election, for if you do this, you will never stumble.” (2 Pt 1:10)

At the other end of the spectrum, we must avoid falling into the sin of pride, presuming our holiness. This was the case of the Pharisee in the gospel. He thought highly of himself, not as a sinner but as saved. “The Pharisee stood there and said this prayer to himself, ‘I thank you, God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous like the rest of mankind, and particularly that I am not like this tax collector here. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes on all I get.'” He did not pray to God but to himself as the evangelist mentioned. He was not thanking God but himself for being such a great Jew who is just, not greedy, faithful, and even fasted twice a week when the requirement was only once a year at the Feast of the Atonement. And most of all, he paid tithes on everything, even the most minute things he owned. In his self-appraisal, he does not need God’s grace and help because he is so disciplined and faithful to the Law. He did not come to God to ask for help but to boast to Him what he had done for Him. He was blind to his faults, presumptuous of his holiness, and because of pride, compared himself with the tax-collector whom he despised utterly.

On the other hand, we have the Publican, a tax-collector who was most hated by the Jews because he was considered a traitor to the Jewish religion and their country by being collaborators of the Romans. He was considered unclean and most of all, he was dishonest because he charged exorbitant fees to enrich himself. But he knew himself and acknowledged his sins in all honesty and with a contrite heart. He did not boast about himself. He was not overly presumptuous that his sins would be forgiven. But he surrendered himself to the mercy of God. He “stood some distance away, not daring even to raise his eyes to heaven; but he beat his breast and said, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.'”

The Lord said, “This man, I tell you, went home again at rights with God; the other did not. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the man who humbles himself will be exalted.” It was this tax-collector who was justified because God saw his humility in acknowledging not just his sins but his position before God. He had no demands to make from God. He came with a humble heart, commending himself to the Lord, waiting for His mercy. He knew he was nothing before God. He had no claims to make. Only such a man who knows his sins, is contrite and sincere to change, will be justified by our Lord.

Written by The Most Rev William Goh, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Singapore © All Rights Reserved. The contents of this page may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission from the Archbishop’s Office. This includes extracts, quotations, and summaries.

Best Practices for Using the Daily Scripture Reflections
Encounter God through the spirit of prayer and the scripture by reflecting and praying the Word of God daily. The purpose is to bring you to prayer and to a deeper union with the Lord on the level of the heart.
Daily reflections when archived will lead many to accumulate all the reflections of the week and pray in one sitting. This will compromise your capacity to enter deeply into the Word of God, as the tendency is to read for knowledge rather than a prayerful reading of the Word for the purpose of developing a personal and affective relationship with the Lord.
It is more important to pray deeply, not read widely. The current reflections of the day would be more than sufficient for anyone who wants to pray deeply and be led into an intimacy with the Lord.
Note: You may share this reflection with someone. However, please note that reflections are not archived online nor will they be available via email request.

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