22nd Sunday Year C - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2019 

I felt uneasy about both of Jesus’ stories that Luke records for us this Sunday. The first one about taking the “lowest place” sounds, at first, like helpful advice about the value of the virtue of humility. But it has me scratching my head. Think about it a bit more and all it is really is devious advice about how to fool people enough to be “honoured” by them – if the trick works. Was Jesus pulling our leg? I think he was. And perhaps even Luke realised it – though I am not sure. He prefaced Jesus’ intervention by calling the story a “parable”. So it may not be a straight story. There could be more to it than meets the eye. Jesus wants us to think more deeply.

I remember my first-ever parish priest. He used to wisely warn against what he called, “humility with a hook” – doing something that looked humble in order precisely to be honoured. Rather than an exercise in humility, it was something motivated by pride, by the desire, the need, to be thought well of by others. Even the conclusion that Luke added to Jesus’ story can be somewhat suspect, “All those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted”– presumably by God. I wonder! Can we sometimes try to be super-smart and so trick God into honouring us? The motivation of self-imposed acts of humility can be very suspect. What matters is not to look humble but to be humble. The best training ground for that is to be humiliated by others, particularly when the finger-pointing is justified.

The current persistent public fall-out from the sexual abuse tragedy is a case in point. It can provide the Church with the opportunity to grow in humility – though I wonder at times how well we are doing so. Public humiliation can even be dangerous. It can lead some sadly to walk away. It can lead others into psychological denial. It may have the effect simply of making us sullenly lick our wounds and hope for a chance, some time in the future, triumphantly to humiliate our accusers.

Humility grows best as we learn to accept that we are loved, loved unconditionally, with our real strengths and many failings – by precious friends, if we are lucky enough to have them, and perhaps, especially, by God. A great model is Mary who, though a pregnant but unmarried young woman with an unlikely story, in a village presumably of gossipers, still “exulted in God” who, she could say in the one breath, “looked on his servant in her lowliness” and at the same time "did great things for her”.

Today’s second story, likewise a parable, presumably has more to it than meets the eye. Your guess what that is is as good as mine. What has me scratching my head is the reference to “repayment… when the virtuous will rise again”. My former parish priest did not mention it, but I wonder if, like “humility with a hook”, there can also be “generosity with a hook”? When Jesus loved “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind”, he loved them for themselves. He loved them because he saw them in their true dignity. He did not love them for “repayment”.

There is something of God in everyone; and it is not separate from but part of our human reality. Jesus wants us to recognise that – to learn to see it in ourselves, to learn to see it in others, and to love the beauty, the dignity of every human person. Obviously it is gift. It has to be. But as we let God love us, as we accept God’s love, the insight gradually grows. We don’t use people, as it were, to get sweet with God. We learn to love them for themselves with a love that flows freely from us. God already loves us. “Repayment” is an irrelevance.