Today’s readings: Ecclesiasticus 3, 17-20.28-29; Hebrews 12, 18-19.22-24; Luke 14, 1.7-14.
Jesus’s words in today’s gospel “to make our way to the lowest places” and about humbling ourselves may easily be seen as masochistic in a culture that constantly verges on narcissism where the self is concerned. Society has a tendency to cling to models of power and to forget the strength that lies in humility.
At worst, Jesus’s words can be reminiscent of a pathological asceticism that was at the basis of old heresies like the Manichean dualism that rejected matter and creation, and Jansenism, with its pessimistic attitude to natural human behaviour. For quite some time, these heresies crippled the teaching and spiritual practice of Christianity, displaying an inadequate awareness of the dynamism of our personalities and perpetuating a rigid view of God as well as a private concept of salvation.
But our human existence is not something static, and our personality, as human beings, is constantly in formation. Even in early Christianity, the notion of static perfection was a problem in that the only possible change was negative. But Gregory of Nyssa, one of the most prominent eastern Church fathers, suggested that life is a kind of mountain climb – there is always more, constant, unending progress as we stretch out to what is ahead.
“Health,” writes theologian David Ford, “is the root sense of the word ‘salvation’.” This is what today’s readings speak about when, for example, Ecclesiaticus in the first reading highlights gentleness in our way of being and affirms that “there is no cure for the proud man’s malady”. It is also what Jesus emphasises in the gospel in what may easily be taken as a lesson in table manners but which is projecting what truly makes our entire humanity humane.
The letter to Hebrews recalls how God’s transcendence throughout the Old Testament was mediated through fire, or darkness, or a storm, always through some unsettling experience. The absolute novelty with Jesus is the bridging of the gulf between the mystery of God and the mystery of man. Jesus mediated to us an experience of a God who is at hand, accessible and merciful.
The so-called Christian paradox lies in the fact that faith makes us inhabit harmoniously the world, that in the light of the beyond, the here and now can be grasped in its real depth. The human soul is so glorious that God Himself chooses it as His dwelling place. As Mirabai Starr writes in her new translation of The Interior Castle of Theresa of Avila, “the path to God leads us on a journey of self-discovery”.
The imagery of a meal as setting for what Jesus has to say about this self-discovery, or about humility, is not fortuitous. Being at table is, or at least should be, the expression of conviviality at its best, even of perfect sharing. Jesus is here showing how the perfect moments of conviviality in our life can be permanently distorted by what we carry inside, by excessive self-promotion at the cost of genuine consideration of others.
The criterion suggested by Jesus of making for the lowest places, of giving without expecting to be paid back, is a rule that extends far beyond table manners to permeate our entire way of being with others and for others. Jesus knew, and we are more aware today, that the law of competitiveness is too gripping on our nature, on the dynamic of our growth as individuals, and on the way we consider the other.
Jesus here is not making a virtue of self-demeaning. Demeaning oneself and humility are two different things. Rather Jesus is highlighting how we can invest, throughout our upbringing and character formation, to make of ourselves healthy people, capable of genuinely relating to our own self and to others. The gospel, rather than mere choices, demands the purification of our lives because it is only then that we can encounter the other in humility. This is what we call the sacrament of encounter. It is a sacrament because it makes Jesus present, because it mediates God’s transcendence in our human experience.
True encounter can only be possible between those who discover themselves as equals, who are capable of mutual trust and of perceiving the other as gift. This can have an amazing force that transforms the ecology of our relationships.