Humility Today

In our contemporary culture, Humility is a value that many people must find extremely hard to understand. Humility, by its nature, is silent. Indeed, these days, the word “meek”, the word with which “humble” is associated in The Magnificat, is now almost a pejorative term. To be meek today is somehow seen a failing of character and resilience. To be humble is no longer a state of being; the word is invariably used as a verb, usually in the passive voice, something that someone has done to them in the overthrow of a public reputation. In a newspaper scandal, public figures are “humbled”, or face “humiliation”. It is a word usually uttered with glee, with sense of just deserts being served. Our culture thrills to the first part of those lines of the Magnficat, “He has put down the mighty from their seats”, but glosses over the second, “and exalted the humble and meek

Paul, explains at different points in his letters what it means to be humble and, in doing so, he picks apart a series of inherent contradictions in the way we conduct ourselves. Paul sets up the value of “association” with others as a key to humility and sets association against the very precise charge of “competitiveness”. In his letter to the Romans, he tells us to “live in harmony with one and other, not to be haughty but to associate with the lowly,” and pits that type of self-effacing encounter against, what he describes in Galatians as Conceit – “competing against one another”. In Philippians he defines the opposite to conceit or competitiveness as “regarding others as better than yourselves”. If you regard others as better than you are, it follows that you cannot be competitive with them. But, in his first Letter to the Corinthians, Paul, I think, goes further and identifies humility as the preparedness to appear foolish - a virtue that shows up the shortcomings of conventional wisdom. He argues it in this way: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Freedom to follow Christ depends not just in denying competitiveness, but upon one’s preparedness to look past the confidence of those who believe that truth can be established through winning an argument. There can appear no more foolish an argument, Paul implies, than to look for salvation to a crucified God, but if you do, and face down that judgement of your foolishness, then, in his words, you will “discern all things”, and in so doing, he says “be subject to no one else’s scrutiny.”It follows that all those rhetorical tricks of cut and thrust debate, and that articulate arrogance of competitive wisdom that we display in order to prove that we are right, are overthrown by an inarticulacy that is at the centre of true Belief.

The First Letter to the Corinthians may contain some of the most flamboyantly rhetorical of Paul’s writings but his argument is really for the virtue of inarticulacy. “I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with the demonstration of the Spirit and of Power.” Power here is turned upside down by Paul and used as the consequence of diffidence and self effacing trust in God. Today’s fashionable virtue is, by contrast, is not humility but “self esteem”. At work, people who would once have been described as “meek” are encouraged to go on “assertiveness training” courses. For, in an ever more competitive world, where the idioms of corporate culture demand certain types of behaviour, so there is less room and less time and less tolerance to appreciate the quieter virtues of those who work alongside one. Today’s belief in building self esteem recognises the damage we do to each other in the day to day business of working and living and seeks to offer to the person potentially hurt by the encounter a breastplate of assertiveness with which to hold their ground. But this is not Humility.Humility, in the Christian life, is ultimately the state whereby one can approach a right relationship with God.

But, since such a relationship can only be approached through seeking some rightness in our relationship with our fellow men and women, Humility, it seems to me, inherently rests on the manner in which we make contact with others, not just how we see other people, but how we see ourselves seeing them. Invariably, when we meet someone, we deliberately set up our own sense of self to get in the way of our encounter with another person’s life. It gives us a sense of security to know where we ourselves stand in relationship to someone else. In pondering what is the right relationship to one’s fellow human beings, I have found myself asking the question in a more particular form: how do we fully engage with the narratives of other people’s lives and connect them into our own. Paul enjoys the paradox, those who think they shape the world - the wise, the scribe the debaters of our age - can only understand the narratives they wish to frame when they are forced to confront that which they cannot make fit into them. At that moment, we are challenged to stop; to stop thinking, stop talking, stop opining. You have to stop shaping the story you are making to recognise that the meaning of it lies outside what you can do with it and you cannot enclose it in your own. But the Grace of God lies in his allowing us foolishly to blunder into those confrontations with the lowly and meek, and, in those encounters, we can, in the shock of understanding, recognise the grace of Humility which is all God requires us of if we are to seek a relationship with Him.

As Paul puts it “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no-one might boast in the presence of God”.