Year: 2010

“For God resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble.”

The humility of God’s charity is all our theme on this day, and not for this day only, but also for the week that brings us to the celebration of the Nativity of John the Baptist. What is the humility of God’s charity? It is God’s reaching down to us so that his love may take shape in us.

The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God himself makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ. The summer solstice is upon us; the long summer’s march to winter is about to begin! Say it isn’t so! But, already, Christmas is in view! Yet, this summer’s feast, the Nativity of John the Baptist (on June 24) signals something more. Beyond the reminder of God’s coming to us, there is the purpose of his coming in us. The redemption of our humanity revealed in Christ is about the motions of his grace taking shape in our lives.  The humility of God’s charity in us means the “scattering of the proud in the imagination of their [our] hearts.” There are the practical lessons about the necessity of humility.

The humility of God’s charity calls us to humility against our pride. Pride is that grand delusion whereby we presume to be the center of everything either in our complacency or in our whining neediness. The self-giving love of God stands altogether opposed to the self-centeredness of our pride. Pride stands utterly opposed to God and to God’s ways with us.

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“Rejoice with me”

Humility is the condition of our rejoicing, the condition of our redemption in Christ. Nothing could go down harder in our contemporary world than such a concept. Yet, nothing could be truer to the imperative of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

“God resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble,” St. Peter tells us in his First Epistle General and certainly it is a lesson which he himself has learned. The Gospel reading from St. Luke complements it with a very powerful message about the nature of humility as the counter to human pride and about the paradoxical reality of the divine humility.

The context is animosity and hostility. Publicans and sinners draw near to Jesus; Pharisees and Scribes murmur because of the company which he keeps. They are scandalised and critical. Doesn’t he know with whom he is associating? How can he be a true religious teacher? Jesus response is revelatory and transforming. He tells two parables – actually, three. We have in the gospel for today two of the three, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. The third parable of this triptych of divine humility is the tremendous parable of the lost or prodigal son.

The fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke comprises these three parables, each told in sequence. It is a most powerful illustration of the message of the Epistle about God’s resisting pride and about his giving grace to the humble.

Humility is the counter to our pride which pretends to our self-sufficiency, on the one hand, and our self-centredness, on the other hand. Either we have it all and need nothing outside ourselves or we presume to think that we deserve what we presently don’t have but desire. The gospel of humility is precisely the counter to our pride.

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“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart”

In the early days of the Trinity season, St. John’s First Epistle is read in conjunction with some of the most convicting and compelling parables of Jesus as presented by St. Luke in his gospel.  Last Sunday, it was the story of Dives and Lazarus, a parable told to convict us about our indifference to God and to one another and to convince us about acting out of the vision of love that we have been given to see in the witness of the Scriptures. It means our care for one another out of God’s care for us.

Today’s Gospel is about an invitation – an invitation to a banquet, a great supper to which many are invited. The interest of the parable lies in the excuses which keep us from the banquet; in short, the ways in which we attempt to justify our absence from the divine feast of love. We are indifferent towards the needs of Lazarus lying at our gate because we are indifferent to the lessons of God in his Word, the Holy Scriptures. We refuse the invitation to the heavenly and divine banquet of love because we are pre-occupied with all the matters of our everyday life.

These two parables, seen in the light of the Epistle, speak profoundly, it seems to me, to our world and day. How? Because, let’s face it, in North America, at least, there is hardly a congregation that doesn’t want the sermon to be (a) entertaining and funny whether it is about God or not and preferably not; and (b) relevant to ourselves and the latest issue du jour which really means that Scripture and Sermon are meant to confirm or affirm some aspect or other of our quotidian lives, our everyday lives.

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