Homily for Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
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: "Those who exalt themselves shall be humbled, and the humble shall be exalted." 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 for seminars on humility, for example. I think it was one of the Marks brothers 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 ideal Catholic was the compliant doormat. Your elders and betters wiped their feet with you, and you thanked them for the privilege! That was true humility in practice. You kept your head down and left the running to others. This understanding of humility destroyed people, undermined their confidence as individuals and human beings. Thomas Gray captured this false humility in his famous lines:
Full many a flower was born to blush unseen,
and waste its sweetness on the desert air.
But this was a caricature of the virtue Jesus promoted. When we look at the personality of Jesus, and the way he lived out his life, we see immediately that he was no wilting lily. Even as a 12-year old, he had the confidence and the courage to put his mother in her place. And yet, he is always deferring to what he regards as the greater reality, the Will of the Father. The humility he advocated 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 can coarsen 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, just that their circumstances were different. He identified four primary drives or instincts that motivated every human being.
The first instinct is self-preservation; if my own very survival is at stake, by God I will fight like a rat in a trap. The welfare of other will be way down the line of priorities.
The second instinct or drive was self-propagation; there is a biological imperative built into every human being to reproduce its own kind. Hence the centrality of sex in our lives and our world. And when that instinct is denied, all sorts of distortions emerge.
Our third great need to make sense of our world. Unless we put the jig-saw together, we simply go insane, or take our own lives. A meaningless life is painfully intolerable. We are saved by frameworks of meaning, Christianity being the predominant one in the western world
Our fourth great need is the need to dominate others. Fellows in uniform are sitting ducks for this instinct: guards, traffic wardens, priests, bishops, and the odd pope has fallen into this trap. 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 thrives 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.
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.
The Church exists as a humble servant of its master and of mankind. It has no other function. Its function is to present the face of Jesus the healer and servant to successive generations, through succeeding centuries. It must continue to provide shelter to troubled spirits. Unfortunately, this role is not always obvious. The more the Church clamours for political mastery, the less credible it will become as a messenger of the servant. People experience city centre churches -the actual physical buildings- as places of rest and restoration. They can come in and sit down and be still. It is the challenge of every Christian to provide that same service, to be a healing agent in the lives of our brothers and sisters.