22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Sir 3:17-20, 28-29
Second Reading: Heb 12:18-19, 22-24a
Gospel Reading: Lk 14:1, 7-14
Humility, the virtue praised in this Sunday’s Readings, is perhaps the most misunderstood of all the virtues. To a Christian, it means realizing and accepting the truth that everything we have is a gift from God; that in comparison with God we are nothing; that God loves us not because we are lovable, but because he is love; and that God loves everyone, not just us.
For a good example, read Mary’s Magnificat: “My being proclaims the greatness of the Lord,” “for he has looked upon his servant in her lowliness;” “God who is mighty has done great things for me.”
When Jesus told us to be humble, he meant us to stop thinking of ourselves as the centre of the universe. Unfortunately, many people think that it means trying to believe our talents to be less valuable than we really think them.
What God wants is for us to recognize our own gifts, and thank him for them, and rejoice in them, and cultivate them, without its making any difference that they are our own.
The vice opposed to the virtue of humility is pride. Here, “pride” does not mean “pleasure in being praised,” as in Christ’s “Well done, good and faithful servant.” It does not mean “warm-hearted admiration,” as when we say that we are “proud” of our children or of being Canadian.
The vice of pride is the state of mind in which we think ourselves the most important being in the universe. This is per se the anti-God state of mind, because God is in every way immeasurably superior to us. His very voice made the Israelites “beg that not another word be spoken to them.” Unless we know that we are nothing in comparison with him, we do not know him. As long as we are proud, we never will.
Our own pride leads us to dislike pride in others, for pride is competitive by nature. For example, it is because I wanted to be the centre of things at the party that I am so annoyed that someone else was.
It is the vice of pride, St. Augustine said, that made first Satan and then Adam and Eve try to become independent of God.
There was nothing to prompt Adam and Eve to choose themselves in preference to God except the bare fact that the selves they chose were their selves. In pride, these two essentially dependent beings, who owed their very existence to someone else, tried to set up on their own, to exist for themselves, like God. God had planned to divinize them, but they wanted to be divine, like him, without him, before him, and not in accordance with him.
The sin of pride is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins. Right now, you and I are either committing it, about to commit it, or repenting it. It is the sin of young children and ignorant peasants as well as sophisticated people, the sin of those who live alone as well as those who live in society.
Many of us say the Morning Offering when we wake up, offering our day to God. However, even before we finish, the day has become our day, with God’s share in it recognized reluctantly and felt to be a deduction from our time.
We want to call our souls, and our bodies, our own. However, as a matter of sheer, stark fact, they are not our own.
The first step in cultivating the virtue of humility is to recognize our own pride: our unhealthy, unjustified bias toward ourself just because it is our self.
The second step is to make a serious effort to obey the commandments, for, as soon as we do, we find that we cannot do it, even for a day, without God’s help.
Father Hawkswell will start teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights, in September. The whole course will be available in written form and, one session per week, in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Father will also be teaching the course in person: on Sundays at 2:00 pm in the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 St John Paul II Way, Vancouver (on 33rd Avenue between Cambie and Oak Streets) starting Sept. 11; and on Mondays at 10:00 am in St. Anthony's Church hall, 2337 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver, starting Sept. 12.