A homily for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

+ “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted,” we are taught by Our Lord this morning through the words of the Holy Gospel proclaimed in this Mass. But few people aspire to humility. It is a happily and widely ignored virtue. We like attention and success; they soothe the injuries from which we suffer—new and old. And humility often seems to require us to pass up even just pride in our achievements. It seems to require us to deny what we have done that is good, even very good.

This is not the case, of course: humility is first and foremost the recognition of the truth, and just as at times the truth requires me to kneel in the confessional and beg for mercy and forgiveness in the light of the reality of my sins, so too, at times, humility does require me to recognise that I have done well. To deny either—to pretend to be a saint or to deny real achievements and progress, personally, academically or socially, would be to lie.

However, as the Collect of this Mass underlines, humility does require that I acknowledge my dependence on the grace of Almighty God which precedes and follows our every action and which, we pray, may ever dispose us to good works. Without God’s grace, I am nothing. If I cooperate with His grace, I can grow in virtue and bring forth good fruit in abundance. This is the very essence of humility: the realisation that I am dependent on God’s grace and the resolution to cooperate with it.

It can often take some time for us to come to understand this reality. When we are young and busy about our lives and working hard to establish a career or forge a path or a name for ourselves in our chosen field of pursuit we can seem to be autonomous, particularly when we taste success. Sometimes it takes a personal or professional crisis to shake us out of this stupor and to bring us back to the basic truth that without God’s grace I am nothing.

Such a crisis is, of course, a God-given opportunity, for the man or woman who has learnt to be humble (even—or especially!—through falling into the traps of the sin of pride) is a man or woman remade in Christ, as it were. Their gifts and talents are not denied but are refined and purified by God’s grace and are all the more able to serve Him and give Him glory—as gold is purified and refined in fire. (cf. 1 Pet. 1:7)

So important is this process of purification, so important is it that we come to true humility, that St Benedict dedicates the seventh chapter of his Rule to humility, outlining twelve steps of humility by which to ascend to God. They are written to teach those called to the monastic life, but their principles are that of the Gospel. It will do us well to recall them here:

1. God comes first.
2. We are not to love our own will.
3. We are to submit to our superior.
4. We are to obey always, and we are to persevere in times of difficulty.
5. We are to be transparent and open about our difficulties.
6. We are to be content with the lowest and most menial of jobs.
7. We must have a correct but not overestimated opinion of ourselves.
8. We are to remain within the boundaries of our organization according to our position.
9. We are to control our tongues.
10. We are to avoid frivolity.
11. We are to speak clearly and plainly.
12. We are to comport ourselves humbly.

There is much for each of us to ponder here and I recommend meditatively reading the full text of chapter seven of the Rule and good commentaries on it. St Benedict insists that: “When all these degrees of humility have been climbed, the monk will presently come to that perfect love of God which casts out all fear: whereby he will begin to observe without labour, as though naturally and by habit, all those precepts which formerly he did not observe without fear; no longer for fear of hell, but for love of Christ and through good habit and delight in virtue. And this will the Lord deign to show forth by the power of his Spirit in his workman now cleansed from vice and from sin.”

Thus, as we seek anew to conform ourselves to the Gospel’s teaching that “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted,” let us go now to the altar, to the source of all grace, Christ Himself, offered in sacrifice for our salvation, and beg the growth in humility we each so desperately need. +

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