22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C (2025)

Today’s readings call us to humility. But humility is generally not regarded as a virtue in our culture; a culture that tells us we have to rise to the top and be the top dog, a society that regards life as a competition. In a culture that places organized sports at such high value, can we imagine a coach telling his/her team at halftime that they need to get out there and show greater humility?

In the Gospel, Jesus had been invited to a meal at the house of a Pharisee. Meals were important social events, but this was no ordinary meal: it was the weekly Sabbath dinner. We are told that the Pharisees were watching Jesus, hoping to catch him violating a religious law.

But while they were watching Jesus, he was watching them, observing how these sophisticated religious people were seeking honor. And though he was only a guest, Jesus chose to give a lesson in etiquette to his hosts. He embarrassed them, calling them on their lack of humility: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”. But Jesus wasn’t preoccupied with being liked. His preoccupation was to reveal God’s way of seeing.

The word humble is sometimes misunderstood to mean degrading oneself or deflecting deserved praise. That’s not what humility is. It comes from the Latin word ‘humilis’, referring to soil or ground, reminding us that God formed our bodies from the earth. Humility is knowing who you are as God knows you, in truth, and to live in accord with it, recognizing that we are flawed and broken beings, but we are also made in God’s image and are His beloved children.

Further, while we all have shortcomings and fall into sin, we also have God-given gifts and talents. Humility is the virtue of accepting these gifts and rejoicing in them as blessings, to be put to use for God’s purposes. And in it all, it is recognizing our complete and utter dependence on God’s grace to sustain us; realizing that without God, we can do nothing, we are nothing. That’s humility.

The Blessed Virgin Mary speaks with this humility in the proclamation we commonly refer to as the Magnificat: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior. For He has looked with favor on His lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed. The Almighty has done great things for me and Holy his name!”  (Luke 1:46-49). That’s the lowly handmaid of the Lord seeing herself as God sees her. It’s humility: not weakness, not boasting.

And the life-long task of striving to see things as God sees applies not only to ourselves, but all people and things. But we tend to classify people and treat people according to that determined classification.

More to the point, we tend to treat people whom we think have something to offer us, differently than those who need our help. But as people who look to Jesus as the supreme model for how we are to live, we realize that this means we must make ourselves present and vulnerable to even those who need something from us: “….when you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you”.

A 19^th century painting by the French artist Jean-Paul Laurens (1894), depicting St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople (D. 407), perched high in the pulpit of the church building, known as the Magna Ecclesia (the Great Church). He stands almost eye to eye with the principal subject of his preaching, the Empress Eudoxia, seated up high in something akin to a theater box seat, dressed in stately splendor. John’s body language and the profile of his face reveal clearly, his anger toward her and his rage-filled words. Eudoxia was just one of the many powerful, wealthy and comfortable people who lived extravagantly, while ignoring the needs of the poor.

John frequently said—and he would say it to us—that any this beauty in this space and our worship, is a good and beautiful, only if it leads us out to care for Christ in the streets: in the poor, the hungry, imprisoned, the afflicted. Otherwise, like all our comforts and extravagances, they offend Jesus.

In all this, my task and your task is to strive to know ourselves as God knows us. We do this foremost through prayer. Because without prayer, we will only see as the world sees, a world classified and divided. In prayer, we come to see ourselves, our God-given attributes, and how He calls us to put those gifts to use. In prayer, we strive to see God’s desires for the order of things: our families, our community, and our world. In humility—seeing ourselves and the things around us as God sees—we set out, little by little, to bring His vision into reality.