There’s hope for us all.
Ecclesiasticus 10-12-18
Hebrews 13.1-8, 15-16
Luke 14.1, 7-14
It seems fitting, as we inhabit the Wild Cathedral and share this place with the things of the earth, that our Gospel reading this morning should encourage us to reflect on the soil-grounded virtue of humility.
Here is Jesus, with all eyes on him, at a dinner party in exalted company. And instead of telling them what they’d like to hear, he notices all the jostling for top positions and punctures the hierarchy. His puncturing is two-fold: it’s not up to you to decide where you sit, he says; and you’re seeking the wrong rewards by choosing to exist in this ring-fenced social bubble.
We’re used to humility’s being seen as a virtue – a proper sense of one’s own lowliness - but in the Graeco-Roman world, it was the opposite: the word ‘humble’ meant ‘crushed’ or ‘debased’, and it was associated with failure and shame. In reality, I think the way we use both the word and the concept today actually reflects some of this other sense, within our broad idea of virtue – we’re a bit ambivalent about what it means to be humble.
We speak of ‘humble circumstances’ as a state of affairs to be pitied, or we might find ourselves saying ‘Well, I’m only a humble messenger’. Then there’s the act of being humbled, which could be synonymous with disgrace. The use of language in the King James Version’s translation of this reading is telling on this point: it distinguishes between having humility done to you, and making yourself humble. ‘…[W]hosoever exalteth himself shall be abased;’ it says, ‘and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted’.
One of the people who springs to mind when I hear the word ‘humble’ is Charles Dickens’s character, Uriah Heep, the law clerk in David Copperfield, who makes a spectacle of his own lowliness: ‘I am well aware,’ he says, ‘that I am the umblest person going’. He is in fact the villain of the piece, and uses the appearance of humility to further his own ends: ‘When I was quite a young boy,’ he tells David Copperfield, ‘I got to know what umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the umble point of my learning, and says I, “Hard hard!” When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. “People like to be above you,” says father, “keep yourself down.” I am very umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I’ve got a little power!’ It is no accident that his exercise of that power is brought to an end by Mr. Micawber, a person who takes no thought for his own security, but instead sets out to expose the truth of Heep’s swindling ways.
I don’t think we need to be evil schemers to have a bit of Uriah Heep in us. Socially, a little appearance of humility can oil the wheels a bit, and before we know it, we find ourselves teetering on the brink of the disingenuous. ‘IMHO’ is a favourite social media chat acronym – In My Humble Opinion. If you really thought it were that humble, you probably wouldn’t be putting it on Twitter. And then there is the humblebrag – a fairly recently-coined word for something that is ages-old: dressing up a boast with an appearance of humility. ‘I always seem to get landed with the most responsible projects – no idea why!’ ‘I just cringe when I see myself on TV’ – and so on. A recent piece of research has shown that doing this really makes people dislike you – but it also sounds a warning note that all of us probably do it at some point - so a little humility is probably needed before we rush to judgement!
Like anything earthy, then, humility is a complex, concept. We’ve got the vice, the virtue, and our human nature, which as always tends to straddle the two rather uncomfortably. We can probably see all this complexity at work in a dinner party, so it’s a perfectly chosen vehicle for Jesus’s teaching. And this particular party is also laden with symbolism. A sabbath meal is by its nature a foretaste of the Kingdom – but this one, he says, is getting it wrong. And, seeing into the hearts of the guests, he knows how to explain his point in a way they will understand. Think of the social disgrace that would come upon you, he continues, if you put yourself in the top spot and had to be moved down by the host. So much better, not to be humbled, but to humble yourself – to put yourself at the bottom and see what happens.
The French philosopher Simone Weil describes this humility of which Jesus speaks as ‘the freely accepted movement towards the bottom’. It is the opposite of both pushing yourself forward and humblebragging; instead, it is the action of someone who knows that it is not they who are to determine where they sit, but their host – and who is comfortable with that state of affairs.
Jesus can speak like this, because he embodies the free acceptance of that movement to the bottom. He takes on the classical vice of humility and allows himself, by the world’s vices, to be crushed and debased. And by doing so – by willingly moving to ‘the lowest place’ – he redeems it. And redeems us.
Because of this, we are given eyes to see the folly of our own power games and ears to hear the half-truths in the narratives of human relationships – both our own and others’.
This seeing and hearing isn’t easy. And it gives us a particularly hard truth with which to come to terms: I am not the host; I am not in control of my own importance. I can’t assume anything. But more than that, I can’t, by my own posturing, make any difference to where I sit.
Lest we are tempted to get stuck with this thought and to become downhearted, it’s really important for us to take in the second part of Jesus’s vignette. If we renounce that sense of control which never was ours anyway, recognise that ‘Pride was not created for human beings’, and sit down at the lowest place, then something will happen. The host will come and invite us to move up. That redemption of humility, that grace through humility, which Jesus has both modelled and won for us, means that we are free to be content with our place, wherever it is.
But Jesus’s images go beyond the places of individuals. We have to look at the whole party. Having dealt with the issue of our own position, he immediately talks about the broader invitations. He recognises that our preoccupation with our own place can only happen because of the arresting and beguiling concept of the pecking order. If we’re concerned with our own appearance, it matters to us where we sit in relation to other people. And it also matters to us that we surround ourselves with friends who make us look good. And the bonus is, that if we invite them, they’ll invite us, and we’ll have another forum in which to shine.
But we have no more control over this than we do over our own places. In the Kingdom, we are not the host. We have no control over whether we will get in. And if we do, we might be very surprised by some of the other guests. As Desmond Tutu said, ‘[M]aybe we are going to be surprised at the people we find in Heaven that we didn’t expect…There is hope for us all.’ We have no control, but as our Host invites us to move up higher, so he asks us to work with him to make sure that as many people as possible know that they are also invited. We won’t get any plaudits for doing this; quite the opposite: we’ll be denied that particular, fleeting satisfaction which comes from trying to draw our own sense of self-worth from the denigration of others. We have to sling out that whole system, because ‘The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord’. Instead, if we know that freedom which comes from letting Jesus show us our place, then we will have the confidence and the joy we need to welcome and encourage everyone, and to say, with the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid’. Amen.