A life of humility

Meditations on 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 and Luke 18:9-14

Saul the Pharisee and Paul the Apostle

One notable feature of today’s lessons is that the experience St. Paul describes in the epistle makes his life an illustration of both characters in the gospel. Before Paul became an apostle, he was Saul the Pharisee. Like the gospel Pharisee, he could have prayed, “God, I thank You that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector.” (See Philippians 3:4-6, where Paul recounts his former resume). But the converted Paul sounds more like the gospel tax collector, who said, “God, be merciful to me a sinner.” As he says in the epistle, “I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Cor. 15:9).

Jesus summarized the parable by saying, “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted" (Lk. 18:14). Paul illustrates this. Saul the Pharisee was an arrogant persecutor of the church. Acts 9 describes his humbling conversion. Christ may have literally “knocked him off his high horse.” The humbled Paul embraced his apostolic vocation of suffering. He was exalted as St. Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles.

Pride and humility

The lessons and St. Paul’s life provide some reflections on the sin of pride and the corresponding virtue of humility. Pride and humility are often misunderstood. The chief errors are to mistake justifiable confidence for pride, and to associate humility with a lack of self-worth or self-esteem.

Pride and humility each stem from a particular standard of self-assessment. Pride is comparative. It assesses self in comparison with others. The result of the comparison may be favorable or unfavorable. This is the reason self-loathing is a version of pride. Self-loathing is wounded pride. It doesn’t matter whether comparing myself to another makes me feel good or bad about myself. The comparison itself is the root of the deadly sin of pride.

Not everything we call pride is a deadly sin. If I work hard and accomplish something so that I feel good about my work, I might say, “I am proud of what I have done.” This is not a sin. The temptation to the deadly sin creeps in when I compare my work with your work. When I say, “I worked harder than you and deserve more.” Or, “My work is better than your work.” Or, as noted above, when I say, “My work is not as good as yours.” The proper focus is to do good work for the glory of God and the good of others and not worry about what anyone else is doing.

We develop humility when we stop looking at others and start looking at God; specifically, when we start looking at Jesus. The lessons illustrate this. The Pharisee’s prayer was comparative. “I thank you God that I am not like others.” The tax collector, by contrast, asked for mercy because he was looking at God and not at other people. Saul the Pharisee was humbled by his encounter with Jesus. The converted Paul learned to assess himself in terms of his relationship with Christ and his faithfulness in doing what Christ called him to do.

The humbled Paul did not lack confidence. In the epistle, he says, “[Christ’s] grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” We can detect a comparison in the comment that, “I worked harder than them.” But this is really just a statement of fact. At that point in time, the other apostles weren’t traveling the world to preach the gospel. Paul’s point is that Christ appeared to him and  called him to be an apostle, and he was faithful to do what Christ called him to do.

The true self-assessment that comes from humility does, in a sense, depend on others. But there is a shift from comparison to service. Humility leads us to esteem ourselves in terms of our gifts and our faithfulness in using them. When we focus on serving God and others, we receive validation because other people appreciate our service. Of course, own motives for giving will be continually tested, but, in general, the faithful exercise of gifts and vocation is valued by those who receive the benefit. This validation confirms our gifts. It is in this mutuality of giving and receiving in the Body of Christ that each member discovers his or her true value and vocation.

This shows that the true value of self is relational and reciprocal, not comparative and competitive. As St. Paul writes in Romans 12:3. “I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.” We are to value ourselves in terms of the faith, gifts, and vocation God has given us, and in terms of our faithfulness in doing what God calls us to do. This is the contribution of each member to the Body. The epistle to the Ephesians expresses it this way:

Speaking the truth in love, [we] may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ—from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love. (Eph. 4:15-16).

When we, with humility, embrace our True Self and our God-given vocation, we end up feeling better about ourselves. Pride results when we reject our True Self and vocation. God made the devil to be a glorious angel, but the devil rejected this identity and calling. This shows that discontentment is connected to pride. We become discontented when we won’t accept our lives and the world as they are. Being discontented, we try to change the world and ourselves to make them what we want them to be. Discontentment is at the root of demonic temptation. It  tempts us to say to God, “I don’t like the way you made me or the world—so I am taking over!”

But that is all wasted effort and time. The world is the way it is, and each of us is who God made us to be. The end result of discontentment and rebellion against God—the end result of pride—is the wailing and gnashing teeth Jesus said will characterize hell (See Matt. 13:41-42).

Thus, we return to the altar of God every week to see Jesus again, be humbled again, and surrender to God again. God raises up again in Christ to become our True Selves and do the good works he has prepared for each of us. For as Jesus said, “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”