Zechariah foretold the coming of a humble king as saviour. "He is victorious, he is triumphant, humble and riding on a donkey." Jesus tells his listeners: "I bless you Father for hiding these things from the learned and clever and revealing them to mere children. Jesus is of value to us precisely because he is gentle and humble of heart. Humility is not exactly flavour of the month at the moment. There are no great queues forming to do courses in humility, for example. You will have no problem finding courses in assertiveness, however. I think it was one of the Marx brother who quipped: "The meek shall inherit the earth, but only if they forge the will."

Meekness and humility is not much admired in the world. Assertiveness, self-aggrandisement and self-promotion are far more desirable qualities in the market place today. Perhaps humility is not much admired because it is not fully understood. Traditional Catholicism gave humility a bad press. The doormat was the ideal Catholic. Your elders and betters wiped their feet with you, and you thanked them for the privilege! That was true humility in practice. But in theory at least, humility concerned itself with honesty and a realistic assessment of the self. St. Thomas defined humility as "an honest appreciation of the self in relation to others and to God." And, according to him, the outstanding example of humility in practice was the Master washing the feet of the disciples. This version of humility and gentleness must be allowed temper this world of naked aggression. The aggression of the market place coarsens the human spirit. The market place encourages us to promote the self and to dominate and exploit the needs of others. Wherever people congregate, the temptation to dominate will present itself in some form. And the tendency is as strong in a tantrum-throwing infant as it is in an arrogant boss. This is the precise corner of the human spirit that humility sets out to reclaim and redeem.

I think I mentioned here before Victor Frankl's list of primary human needs or drives. Frankl was a German Jewish psychiatrist who spent three and a half years in a German concentration camp during the Second World War. He observed the behaviour of both the prisoners and the jailers and the way they interacted. He held that there wasn't much difference in the way both groups behaved. He identified four primary drives or instincts that kept every human being going. The first instinct is self-preservation; The second was self-propagation; to reproduce ourselves; Our third great need to make sense of our world. Unless we put the jig-saw together, we simply go insane. Our fourth great need is the need to dominate others. This latter need was very obvious in the camps. We see this present in all areas of human activity, whether at work or at play. Obviously, the world of politics thrive on it; and the Church itself is not untainted. Unfortunately you will find as many power mongers within the church institutions as you will in any other human institutions. This is very much the way of the world. But, as our first reading states tonight: "See, your King comes to you; humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of an ass." He is our King, not in the sense of him ruling over us in the way of an absolute or constitutional monarch; He is our king in so far as we aspire to the values he embodies. In the context of today's Liturgical theme, that means that if we are sufficiently confident of God's love for us and our own worth, there is no need for us to dominate and lord it over our brothers and sisters.

Today's gospel also shows us that Jesus operated from different principles. The will to serve and heal and to offer rest will replace the will to dominate others as the motivating force in his community. The master himself, and his life and death in the service of his people, is to be our model.

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