Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.
Today’s readings convey a strong and uncomfortable message—the indispensable need for humility if we are to enter the Kingdom of heaven: humility as a human stance that pleases God because it allows room for him to enter our heart; humility as a trait that makes lovable the person who possesses it; and humility above all as an attitude that reflects Jesus’ own mindset and manner of life: Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart (Mt 11:29). It is helpful here to remember the group of significant English words with which “humility” shares the same root hum-, namely: humus, human and humor. Why do these words belong together? What links them is a clear-eyed realism about ourselves, hinting that we should always prefer staying close to the soil from which we were taken as a way of abiding in the truth, rather than flying too high for our own good on the wings of conceit, which will soon bring us crashing back to earth. When we laugh at ourselves, I’m sure, we always elicit a conspiratorial smile from God, whereas any form of pomposity offends God’s Heart and makes him worry grimly about our fate.
In the gospel, Jesus has been invited to dine (φαγεῖν ἄρτον, v. 1) at the house of a leading Pharisee, an occasion which Jesus’ mere presence mysteriously transforms into turns into a wedding banquet (εἰς γάμους, v. 8). As he reclines at table he feels the freedom to address, first, his fellow-guests, and then the host himself. He does not discourse abstractly about moral truth and the desirability of humility as a virtue: Jesus is no professor of moral theology! Rather, reading between the lines, we realize that, the whole time, Jesus is really speaking about himself, revealing his innermost Heart. Jesus is always revealing himself because, what he harbors in his soul, is nothing but the love and truth of the Father, and it was after all precisely to reveal the Father that he came. As the incarnate Word of God, he is not a teacher like other teachers, who point to truths “out there” somewhere in reason’s horizon. Instead, in every detail of his words and deeds, Jesus is always revealing to us the nature and Heart of God as these become visible and audible and graspable in his own person: I and the Father are one (Jn 10:30).
What Jesus reveals today in particular is the humility of God—beautiful, majestic, gentle and enthralling, seeking to convert our hearts to itself by enticing us to fall in love with such abiding kindness. Christ is the one who, even though he was “in the form of God”, nevertheless humbled himself, became man, and assumed the form of a slave to the point of sharing fully in our mortal human condition, even to death on the cross. This is the humility of God’s love, wellspring of all other humility. Christ is the one who, condescending to come to us at all, then proceeded to choose the last and lowest of all places among us, not primarily to “teach us a moral lesson in humility” but as if, truly, his love could be fully satiated only there—as if only in that last place he could fully reveal the splendor of God’s majesty. For Christ to be mediator of the new covenant, as we hear in Hebrews today, means that he did not redeem the world by a master-plan of superefficient, cosmic management. No: Christ redeemed the world by the power of a humility that led him to shed his own blood for us, and his blood speaks more eloquently than the blood of Abel. “In his self-humiliation,” writes von Balthasar in an unforgettable passage, “the Lord Jesus went so low that henceforth no one can ever fall, no matter how deeply, without falling into Jesus”.
Jesus is the one who, having lowered himself, was then lifted up by the Father, according to the spiritual law that he here proclaims: Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. And Jesus is the one who, in his own life, prepared a place of privilege for the poor and the little, the sick and the weak, the crippled, the lame and the blind. He delighted in speaking about the love and the nearness of God above all to those who had been cast aside by others. But let us note well that Jesus’ delight in so doing is not a case of noblesse oblige, as when the rich deign now and then to visit the slums and throw a few coins to the beggars. Jesus’ delight in the poor is not a show or a sham; it is the deeply genuine and subjective reality of his own interior being, because it comes precisely from the fact that Jesus as a matter of course numbers himself among the outcast and dwells there as in his natural habitat. In his own flesh he has experienced both the suffering and despair of the afflicted and the Father’s strength and consolation. In this experience he has given us the sole valid pattern of our salvation.
But what does humility look like in our own lives? Let’s first of all leave aside all artificial poses of unworthiness and theatrical self-abasement à la Sarah Bernhardt, because surely authentic humility never makes a show of itself and wastes no time on pretense. Humility, I would say, means to be perfectly content to be what God has made us to be, and to stay gladly at the precise place assigned to us by the Lord in our day-to-day existence, yet without being closed to further manifestations of God’s will. This is the honest and healthy renunciation of one’s own self-promoting will that the Gospel calls for. The greatest enemy of humility is compulsive ambition, jealousy and envy. At the practical level, furthermore, humility is being faithful to the particular task the Lord has entrusted to us, no matter how hidden and lack-luster, no matter whether we’re working with five talents or only a single one. Humility, quite simply, is knowing in our bones that we are not our own masters, and that therefore we do not belong to ourselves: that the deepest and most beautiful thing that we can be is servants of God, a title which ought to give us the greatest joy. Humility is also the wisdom of the person who values his or her own worth with precision, not aspiring to things that are too high or beyond one’s strength. Humility bows soberly to reality and doesn’t seek to escape it either in an upward or a downward direction, through the sham of pretense or a calculated show of abjection.
St Paul wrote to the Romans: Do not think of [yourselves] more highly than [you] ought to think, but think soberly, each according to the measure of faith that God has apportioned (12:3). Paul is here pointing out how humility is not self-humiliation or false modesty but, rather, being in harmony with the objective reality created in us by God, choosing to abide contentedly within our apportioned “measure of faith”.
The first in the Kingdom, says Jesus, will be those who were scorned as the last by human society. Even as self-proclaimed “followers of Christ”, we often find it normal to invite to our home (or to our friendship and intimacy) only persons to whom we are bound by ties of affinity and love, and those who have previously invited us and whose invitation we must reciprocate, as if we were paying back a debt or perhaps in the hope of being invited by them again… But Jesus, in his contrary teaching, is here obeying God’s (to us) strange and topsy-turvy logic. He reveals to us—yes, reveals, because this is so foreign to our native instincts—that the illogical logic of God can become a source of blessedness for us, too: Blessed indeed will you be [if you invite to your home the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind], because of their inability to repay you. Jesus expects from us an unconditional love and generosity that does not seek a reward. He is calling our hearts to practice a love such as he bestows on each of us, which communicates to us the power of loving with a like love, simply because it is through our love that God’s Kingdom spreads. Blessedness, according to the Gospel, consists in our participating in the mind, Heart and destiny of Jesus, who loved us unilaterally while we were sinners and enemies of God; Jesus, who bowed meekly to Judas in order to wash his feet, even though Judas was about to betray him; Jesus, who sought no earthly rewards, and did not attempt to force anyone to love him….
Finally, the kind of blessedness generated by this love derives from pure gratuity, from the joy of loving indiscriminately, “wastefully” even, based on the conviction that love is its own end, that (for the person who loves) love is its own reward. Such is the blessedness of loving as Jesus loves, the blessedness of the person who is free from the fear that he is going to lose something precious by loving, the indestructible bliss of the person whose only desired reward is being one more guest in God’s great wedding banquet in the Kingdom, no matter what his assigned place there or who his companions at table might be.
At today’s particular banquet at the home of this leading Pharisee, I have no doubt but that Jesus, while teaching this world-changing doctrine, was doing so sitting at the last place in the banquet hall, which he himself selected on entering, for there is nothing Jesus preaches which he is not himself already practicing. And it was precisely this position as least of all that conferred on Jesus unrivalled authority and freedom to communicate to us unforgettably the puzzling but always glorious and liberating ways of God.
