HUMILITY, WAY TO GOD, WAY OF LIFE.
July 5, 2020
Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - A
An Indonesian proverb says, “A smart man is usually humble.”
And a German proverb adds, “Meekness is the pride of the humble.”
Humility is one of the most powerful virtues, and it is the
virtue of the great. We could say without fear to mistake that it is the first
virtue. All came from “humus” and all goes to “humus”. All that leads man to
God leads him to life. For, the way of God is life in plenitude. “Come to me, …
for I am meek and humble of heart.” The Lord Jesus is our way to God, and he is
also our way of life. To be Christian means to have chosen Him, to belong to
Him, and to be with Him. Humility has the power to make us live like Jesus.
The Christian life is a life of imitation of Christ. Who says
imitation says incarnating in our way living and our life the way of Christ.
About that way of Christ, the Gospels are clear voicing out: humility. With Him
and through Him, we learn that God reveals Himself to the humble, the little
ones, the poor. Therefore, to see God and delight in His embraces, one must
humble himself.
Through the Prophecy of Zechariah, in today’s first reading,
we are led to that truth. He says wordily to the City of God, to Zion: “See,
your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, meek, and riding on an ass,
on a colt, the foal of an ass.” A powerful King on an ass and even more, on a
foal, what a strange and unusual image! The asses were animals for the poor and
the lower social classes. The great kings, as the expression of their
supremacy, used to ride on powerful horses. God instead, comes to His people in
meekness and humility.
Jesus, in the Gospel, introduces himself as, “meek and
humble of heart…” It is an “I am” that speaks about the way of God. But before
that “I am”, the Lord clearly states that his Father reveals his glory not to
the wise and the learned, but rather, to the little ones, and that, to know the
Father, one needs to pass through Him, Jesus, perfect expression and
incarnation of the divine humility.
We live in a world and in societies where people are caught
into the traps of worldliness and self-praises. For some people, it seems life
gets its meaning only when they can subdue and dominate as much as possible the
others. And for them to reach that dream, they live of accumulation of any
material possessions, of the greed of power, pleasure, possession at any cost.
The flesh and its desires have become all that many people have. Therefore,
their life is made of worship of the personality, arrogance, disorderedness… There
is no more room in their life for humility which has become an obsolete virtue.
Those people seem to need nothing from anyone, not even from God. For, with
their possessions, they have become their own gods.
When one starts lacking humility, he opens a gate to the
idolatry of the self, of material, and lives only for his flesh. St. Paul, in
the second reading, makes it a firm warning. As Christians, “You are not in the
flesh; on the contrary, you are in the spirit…” Because we have been chosen to
belong to Christ Jesus and to follow him (imitation), we are no longer
subjected to the flesh and its diktats. Our lives, hence, should reflect what
we have become, children of the Spirit. As Paul says, we are not slaves of the
flesh. We are not its debtors. We have no pledges towards it. Therefore, we
should not give the flesh the right to decide on our lives.
Examples could be countless to show what the flesh leads
those who are in debt to it to do. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, gives
a list of what he called the works of the flesh. They are all sins related to
the worship of the body and the self: adultery, fornication, uncleanness,
homosexuality, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft and we could add,
pedophilia, and any kind of addiction (alcohol, game, sex…). As Christians, our
lives should be away from those sins. For sure, we are weak and we all are
sinners. But we must make the effort to work into the footsteps of Christ and
imitate or if possible, incarnate his lifestyle.
Let us not undermine these warnings of Paul: who lives under
the dictatorship of the flesh will die in the flesh, while he who lives under
the authority of and the guidance of the Spirit of Christ has killed from
himself the deeds of the flesh, and therefore, he shall live.
Brothers and sisters, where do we stand? Where is your life?
Are you still in the flesh, or have you embraced the life in Christ, the life
in the spirit? Anyway, if that is that you are still in the flesh, but willing
to do away with it, do not be afraid, do not get discouraged. Let us have the
humility to admit that we are a sinner. Only then will our conversion be possible.
The Catechism will have this very uplifting message for you
and me: “Nothing is more apt to confirm our faith and hope than holding it
fixed in our minds that nothing is impossible with God...” CCC. 274 Know that a
slave can be freed only if he wants to be free. So, in all humility, let us ask
this grace from God to set us free from our slavery to the body and make of us
children of the Spirit.
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