How Can I Practice Humility?


Homily 09 01 2013
22nd Sunday OT - C

View the Readings for this day

During the American Revolution, a man in civilian clothes rode past a group of soldiers who were busy pulling out a horse-drawn carriage stuck in deep mud.

Their officer was shouting instructions to them while making no attempt to help.

The stranger who witnessed the scene asked the officer why he wasn't helping. With great dignity, the officer replied, "Sir, I am a Corporal!" The stranger dismounted from his horse and proceeded to help the exhausted soldiers himself.

When the job was completed, he turned to the corporal and said, "Mr. Corporal, next time you have a job like this, and don't have enough men to do it, inform your commander-in-chief and I will come and help you again."

Too late, the proud Corporal recognized General Washington.

Today's readings challenge us to be truly humble.

When today's Gospel opens, the Teacher was somewhere in Perea. It was a narrow strip of land east of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea twenty miles wide and sixty miles long.

He was a guest at a supper party in the home of a VIP Pharisee. He must have been delighted to get a good sit-down meal after so many quick suppers at fast food counters on the road, or having to cook for himself and others.

Some scholars feel the occasion may well have been a wedding banquet. One wonders what sort of gift He brought for the bride. And did He dance with her? I think I would say yes. In any event, it gave Him an unusually good opportunity to observe the various guests as they entered the catering hall. A number of them were anything but studies in humility.

Thus we have His timeless observations on our human condition. To paraphrase poet ee cummings, they open the eyes of our eyes. They remind us that if we are looking for faults to correct, we need but look in a mirror. . It is only LUKE who tells us of this parable.

Jesus' theme is of course puffed-up pride, a vice much present in our society. No doubt the Christ would have laughed His head off at the story of the man who was awarded a gold medal for his humility.

Think about two persons whom we had not seen in some time. The first breathlessly exhausted himself and us with the interminable length he spent in talking about himself and his health. He never had the time to even quickly ask of us, "How are you?"

Given the time his monologue had consumed, we secretly were just as happy as someone else joins us and the conversation moves away from him.

The second told us that he was flattered that we had remembered his name. We tell him the college where he taught still talks about the numbers of students who chose to take his course. The eager pupils sat on the floor when there were no more desks. This kind of guy would turn away the praise by telling us how much he had enjoyed something that we did.

The second man was hardly in need of today's Gospel. The first decidedly was. More importantly, which one of them is a type for our own selves?

Over the years of my life I've met some wonderful people who I met who didn't seem to have the word "I" in their vocabulary. Many of these were walking studies in humility. They had learned the lessons of today's Gospel. But have I? I fear not. Have you? You must answer that question for yourself.

If you too must answer in the negative, none of us should despair. Life's challenges, said a sage, are designed not to break us but to bend us toward God.

Perhaps we would all do well to reflect on this piece of wisdom from Christopher notes. The sage said, "Let me tell you of the most important words in life. The six most important are, `I admit I made a mistake.' The five most important are, `You did a good job.'

The four most important are, `What is your opinion?' The three most important are, `If you please.' The two most important are, 'My gratitude.' The least important is 'I.'

"Knowing God makes us humble. Knowing ourselves keeps us humble."

We need to remember that we are the invited guests: We celebrate that coming Banquet Feast in heaven every time we come together for Our Lord's Supper in Holy Mass.

We are the (spiritually) poor, crippled, lame, and blind that Christ calls to himself. Our place is assured. Let us accept Jesus' invitation by actively participating in this Eucharistic celebration.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and writer, on receiving Holy Communion, writes that, as he received the Sacrament for the first time, as an adult, he thought to himself:

Heaven was entirely mine...Christ, hidden in the small host, was giving himself for me and to me, and with himself the entire Godhead and Trinity ... Christ was born in me, his new Bethlehem, and sacrificed in me, his new Calvary, and risen in me ... (God) called out to me from his own immense depths [The Seven Story Mountain, (New York: Doubleday Image Books), pp. 273-274).]

Thomas Merton sensed the wonder of God's invitation to communion and received it joyfully. So should we.

jjl

Home › Homilies › Homily 09 01 2013