The obvious theme running through the liturgy today is the virtue of
humility. What we just read there in Sirach, “Humble yourself the
greater you are and you will find favor with God.” And we heard the
words of Jesus through Luke, “Everyone who exalts himself will be
humbled and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” Well, I’m
not going to attempt to give a personal definition of humility
because I guess that would imply that I know all about it, and that
might open me up to an accusation of pride. So, I don’t want that.
So, I’ll fall back on the very profound definition that was given by
St. Teresa of Avila when she said, “Humility is truth.” Yes, just
three simple words, “Humility is truth,” the truth about ourselves,
truth in our relationship with God, truth in our relationship with
other people. We all know that humility is not pride, but neither is
it pretense. It does not consist in proclaiming that we are the worst
of sinners, that we are hopeless, useless. Nothing we do is any good,
and on and on and on and on.... No, that’s not humility. It is facing
the truth about ourselves, the bad and the good. Personally, I think
that the vast majority of people do more good every day than they
give themselves credit for. We’ve a right to take legitimate pride in
our achievements. If we do something well, we are entitled to feel
good about it. And then, hopefully, humility will kick in and tell us
that our gifts, our talents, our successes are not entirely of our
own making, that there is such a thing as genes and upbringing and
schooling and of course, our God.

The word “humility,” the English word, of course, comes from the
Latin, “humilitas,” which in turn comes from the Latin word, “humus,”
which means “the earth, the ground, the dirt” beneath our feet. And
so, I think humility requires us to be grounded, to have our feet
really on the ground, to be truly acknowledging of who we are and who
other people are. To have that truthful relationship with ourselves,
I think we do really have to have a truthful relationship with God.
If humility is to be genuine, we need to have and to constantly
nurture a strong sense of the fact that we are creatures, that we are
created beings that were made by God, and that we owe our very
existence to God, that every breath we draw, everything we do,
everything we have and can do is ultimately gift from God. To be
humble is to be truthful about this to ourselves, to be forever
mindful of it, and to be eternally grateful for it, this gift, this
great gift from God.

Humility is truth in our relationship with others, conscious that all
we are, all we have, all that we are and can do is gift from God.
We’re not going to spend time, then, just kind of building ourselves
up at the expense of others by putting others down. This may, at
times, seem to be the way to success in life, but it is certainly not
the Christian way. Humility will tell us that we should not just
retreat into stubbornness or long silences when someone, perhaps in
our own family, disagrees with what we say or what we do. And that’s
a big temptation for all of us, just to retreat into that silence. We
have to get to the point where we can acknowledge to ourselves and to
others that sometimes, well, yes perhaps sometimes, there is the
possibility that we could be wrong. We have to be able to come to
that point if there is to be genuine humility. Truth in our
relationship with others means that we don’t look down on anybody
because they may possibly be less well-educated than we are, less
successful in life, have a lower paying job, have less prestige or
whatever. We don’t look down on other people because we know that we
ourselves and everybody else are created and loved by God and made in
the image and likeness of God, and to be respected, to be truly
respected because of that.

Humility is truth and no one lived it more or better than Jesus did.
It started, of course, with the Incarnation, God becoming flesh, God
becoming human, coming down to the humus, the earth, the dirt, born
in a stable, raised in an obscure village, wandering the roads
without a roof over his head and finally dying naked on a cross. It’s
really very, very extraordinary when you think deeply about it and
reflect on Jesus and his life. St. Paul, of course, put it most
powerfully and forcefully in his second chapter of his Letter to the
Phillippians when he said, “Have among yourselves the same attitude
that is yours in Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he
emptied himself.” What an extraordinary expression, that God “emptied
himself,” taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness and
found in human appearance. He humbled himself, becoming obedient to
death, even death on the cross. And because of this, God highly
exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, of those in heaven
and those on earth and those under the earth, and every tongue
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. So,
Paul is very clearly saying to us that our very salvation, our very
redemption we owe to the obedience and the humility of Jesus Christ.
And this same Jesus says to each one of us today, “Learn of me, for I
am gentle and humble of heart and you will find rest for your
souls.” And isn’t that something we all want? Rest, for our
souls... Peace with ourselves.... Peace with our God..... Peace with
other people. And this, Scripture says, is the fruit of humility
because humility is truth. Amen.