HOMILY FOR TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME (C)

Fr Billy Swan

Dear friends. Just over a week ago, 65,000 Irish students received their Leaving Cert results. These results came in grades and points so all the talk among students and their families was how many points they got. When I did the Leaving Cert, the talk was not about points but honours: ‘How many honours did you get?’ And of course, the more honours you got, the better you did.

This pursuit of honours and honour is a good introduction to the Gospel this Sunday that touches on our tendency to seek honour as we see with the Pharisees who sought places of honour at the wedding banquet. We all love to be honoured and it’s nice when it comes along. But what Jesus is warning against is the pursuit of honour that can become addictive and dangerous because it makes us competitive and feeds our insecurities. St Thomas Aquinas included honour among the four classic substitutes for God – the other three being money, pleasure and power.

Closely related to this hunger for honour is the lust for respectability. The desire to appear important in the eyes of others betrays an insecurity that comes from not really appreciating oneself. This helps us to understand certain decisions that families made in the past that were motivated by a desire to retain respectability and to avoid the family being shamed at all costs. It’s a conversation for another day, but needless to say, people were hurt and wounds were caused by this effort not to lose respectability and fear of dis-honour.

Jesus asks us not to play this game. He asks us not to pursue honour but to be humble like He himself was humble. For the first Christians, one of the reasons they were moved to faith in Jesus as God was his humility as man. He was born into poverty in a stable. He was ‘gentle and humble of heart’ (Matt. 11:29). When they wanted to make him king, he escaped to be by himself (cf. John 6:15). At the Last Supper he stooped down to wash feet (John 13:5). St Paul described the way he died as ‘humbling himself to accepting death, even death on a cross’ (Phil. 2:8). Here is the example and spirit of humility that Jesus has shown us and the path he asks us to follow, to humble ourselves with the promise that when we do so, God will exalt us.

There are three ways we can do this. The first is keeping our eyes and hearts fixed on Christ's humility.

The second is about being grounded in the reality of our broken human nature and living in the reality of who we are. Humility is knowing we are broken and in need of saving. St Philip Neri prayed each morning: ‘Lord, lay your hands on Philip today for if you don’t, Philip will betray you’. Here is humility. Here too is holiness and truth. For this reason, humility is always linked to truth. Humility lives in the truth. In contrast, pride lives in grand ideas, notions and fantasy. So, let’s stay grounded. Pride always falls but humility is already on the ground.

Third, from the parable Jesus tells in the Gospel today, staying humble is about the ongoing challenge to tame our ego and pride. The man in the story who chooses the place of honour for himself, represents that part of us that wants people to honour us, think well of us and see ourselves as well advanced along the social ladder. This social pecking order was very much in place in Jesus’ time and still is in our day – a fact brilliantly portrayed in Colm Tobin’s Brooklyn where Eilis is encouraged by her friends to accept the love of a local man who would be a ‘good catch’ and advance her up the social ladder. In the film, Eilis opts out of the game. Jesus encourages us to do the same.

Honour and people thinking well of us are really not important. Doing God’s will is. Real honour and glory are never conferred on ourselves but always by someone else. Jesus never looked down on people, only across from them as equals. He only looked up to pray to his Father. In the brilliant words of C.S. Lewis: ‘As long as we are proud, we cannot know God. A proud person is always looking down on things and people: and as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you’.

Today let us choose again the way of humility. We pray that we may possess the virtue of humility like Jesus our humble God who kneels before his broken people in service and love.  May we be grounded in the reality of our fragile but graced human nature where God is waiting to meet us. May we never be as concerned for the honour others confer on us more than the honour of being faithful children of God our Father who will exalt the humble as he promised.