“Humility, Humility, Humility” - 31st Sunday OT (A) – 11.5.23
“Humility, Humility, Humility”
By: Fr. David Schmidt
St. Mark the Evangelist Parish (Cranberry/Butler, PA)
Mass Readings- https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/110523.cfm
In the Gospel today it says, “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
The virtue of humility that is highlighted in the Gospel today is central to everything that we do as Catholics.
St. Augustine once said, “If you ask me what the essential thing in the religion and discipline of Jesus Christ is, I shall reply: first, humility; second, humility, and third, humility.”
The reason humility is so important is because the deadliest of all sins is pride. This was the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden, and this is the sin that humanity continues to struggle with most today.
In our pride, we pit ourselves against God. We take credit where credit should be given to Him. We seek to make a name for ourselves. We claim to be the source of our own success. We strive to exalt ourselves even to the point of placing ourselves ahead of God. Simply put, we try to make ourselves God without God.
One of the most beautiful examples of humility is St. Mother Teresa. St. Mother Teresa is most famously known for her work with the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India. As her work began to grow, so did her popularity. However, she never desired the attention. She only wanted to glorify God and serve the poor. As her popularity grew, she received more honors and rewards. However, again, she only desired to do God’s will by serving the poorest of the poor.
Any time that people tried to give her credit, she said that she did nothing, and all the credit and honor should be given to God for what He is doing through her.
Mother Teresa once said about humility: “Humility is the mother of all virtues; purity, charity and obedience. It is in being humble that our love becomes real, devoted and ardent. If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are. If you are blamed you will not be discouraged. If they call you a saint you will not put yourself on a pedestal.”
As Mother Teresa says, humility is about truly knowing what you are. That is, we are sons and daughters of the Father, so we have great dignity and worth. But we are also very lowly creatures, as we learn that we are nothing without God.
St. Mother Teresa knew her nothingness well. There is a story about how in spiritual direction “She would always pound her chest and she would say `Look at what God is doing with nothing.`”
She saw herself as nothing. This is not in a bad sense, but she recognized that without God, she was nothing. He came down to her in her nothingness and did amazing things in and through her. And He desires to do the same with us.
It is very easy to desire honor and praise from others. To desire to be recognized. To be given all the credit. However, St. Mother Teresa shows us that honors and praise from others is not what we should be pursuing. In 1979, St. Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace prize, and in her speech, she said that she is receiving this award not for herself, but on behalf of the poor.
She said, “[T]oday when I have received this reward, I personally am most unworthy, and I having avowed poverty to be able to understand the poor, I choose the poverty of our people. But I am grateful and I am very happy to receive it in the name of the hungry, of the naked, of the homeless, of the crippled, of the blind, of the leprous, of all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared, thrown away of the society, people who have become a burden to the society, and are ashamed by everybody. In their name I accept the award.”
God wants to do the same through us. Without God we are nothing. However, He wants to do amazing things in and through us. He doesn’t do these things because we are great or have made ourselves worthy for Him to work through us. It is all Him. We need to recognize that anything good that we do is not us, but God doing the good through us. We are not capable of doing the good without Him.
So humility is the context of how we are to read this Gospel passage today. Part of the reason that I mention that is because this can be a difficult passage for some people especially when it says call no one “father.” This of course is important for us Catholics because we refer to priests as father.*
I think one of the traps that we can fall into when reading Scripture is taking Scripture verses out of context and isolating them to try to prove our point. When instead, we should look at how each verse fits within the context of the whole, so that it may be interpreted properly.
In this case, when Jesus makes this statement, He is exaggerating to make His point. He is condemning the Pharisees who are seeking the high places and to be praised and honored by others. They were failing in their call to be servant leaders.
There is Scriptural evidence of why the using the religious title “father” is OK, and that it wasn’t condemned by Jesus.
First, St. Stephen in Acts 7:2, as he is about to be martyred, says to the Sanhedrin or the Jewish priests, “Brethern and fathers, hear me. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopota’mia...” Here we see, St. Stephen, who was filled with the Holy Spirit in that moment, and was the first martyr of the Church, used the title father to address the Jewish priests and referred to Abraham as their father in faith.
St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 4:15-16 calls himself father in reference to the Corinthians. He says, “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”
The final example is from St. John who in 1 John 2:13-14 addresses the leaders of the congregation as fathers saying, “I am writing to you, fathers, because you know who is from the beginning.”
So these are a few examples to show that Jesus’ words weren’t meant to be taken literally, but that He was exaggerating to make a point. As we know today, Jews still refer to their spiritual leaders as Rabbi’s. And we call people teachers all the time. As well as call priests father.
We do this because priests are meant to be an image of the heavenly Father. It is the Fatherhood of God that priests share in. The priest has a similar mission as Christ to reveal the Father to the world. Christ came to reveal the Father. The priest in His spiritual fatherhood, gives an image of God the Father, and is given many spiritual children in his ministry.
Priests are meant to live out their priesthood and fatherhood with the type of humility that St. Mother Teresa lived. Priests are meant to be like Christ and be servant leaders unlike the Pharisees who desired only honor and praise from the people. Priests, as spiritual fathers, are meant to love and serve their spiritual children with great humility and love.
Each one of us is meant to live with great humility. To always seek the lower places. To not worry about recognition or praise from others. We are simply to focus on what God is calling us to do and then do it. We are not to seek to be exalted. We are too leave that completely in God’s hands. If He desires to exalt us, He will. If He desires for us to remain hidden, then we stay hidden. If we are exalted, it is because He desires to make His glory known to the world through us in a special way. The Blessed Mother is the best example of how in her humility she was exalted. She was a lowly handmaid whom God raised up to be the Mother of God and Mother to all the world.
May each one of us follow the example of our Blessed Mother, St. Mother Teresa, and all the saints in their humility. Let us pray that God continues to root out the evil of pride that is deep within each of our hearts, so that God may exalt us by lifting us up into the glory of His heavenly kingdom.
*Pitre, Brant, “Call No Man ‘Father,’” Catholic Productions, accessed Nov. 3, 2023, https://catholicproductions.com/blogs/mass-readings-explained-year-a/the-thirty-first-sunday-of-ordinary-time-year-a.
