Seek the Meek!

Supreme self-confidence: it's a highly valued personal quality. At some point, "pride" became a good thing. Black pride. White pride. Gay pride.

I knew a young prosecutor. He was in trial. In a break in the trial, the defense attorney slapped down in front of him a picture of a Porsche. "That’s my car", the defense attorney said. Possession-proud.

A good friend of mine boasts that her body is better than it has ever been. And she is lean and strong. And I admire pictures of myself snapped at a swim meet. My friend and I are body-proud.

We can be career-proud. We can be education-proud. We can be brain-proud.

The Pharisees of Jesus’s time were famously proud of their own virtue. Virtue is, well, virtuous. But it can makes us think of ourselves more highly than we ought.

And what’s more pious that piety? But we can be impressed with our own piety. Piety-proud.

What about a man who writes about pride and humility? No doubt he can be humility-proud.

But we can't be proud and humble at the same time. Owning our failings foments gratitude. Those who are forgiven much love much. Those who are forgiven little love little. (Luke 7.)

1. Sin and me.

Maybe this is a truism: it’s easier to be an expert in other people’s sins than our own.

But sometimes knowledge of my sins leaps on me like a rabid badger. Times like those make me contrite.

But sin is not always a rabid badger. Sometimes I don’t begrudge my sins like an early riser begrudges the late-night music at his neighbor’s party. In those times, my knowledge of sin is a detached diagnosis. It’s like a doctor telling me that I have a medical condition that does not, however, keep me from doing anything that I want to do.

So love doesn’t exactly overflow when I consider God or think of my neighbor. Or choices that might be easy if I knew how to lean upon an all-knowing God to make them are hard. God isn’t a God of anxiety, but I have times of anxiousness; if I walked perfectly with God, I would not worry.

I cling to the things of this world. I am fretful of my reputation. I want to put a verbal thumb in the eye of a lawyer who insulted me. I get wrapped up in making a political point and forget to be kind. I’ve been foolish with money and opportunities.

These are murmurs of the heart that reveal to an educated ear that trouble lies inside. But, day to day, they don’t necessarily trouble me, because they are conditions that seem normal because they are long-standing. But they should.

2. Hailing sin.

I suppose that some of my friends will say that I’m debilitating myself with a "guilt trip". But to know my fault is valuable. I value humility when I find it in myself. I pray for a contrite spirit before God.

Thinking of myself as a neatly-ironed-and-folded man wouldn’t make me so. Hubris doesn’t ground me in reality. It spins a parallel universe in my mind of my own virtue that doesn’t match the reality of the world and doesn’t match the state of my soul.

And God can work with people who know their faults. In the Hebrew Bible, no man was greater than Moses; and no man was more humble. (Numbers 12:3.)

Jesus was humble. "[Jesus] humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross." (Philippians 2:8 (NRSV).)

The direction to be humble comes with a promise. For example: "Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you." (James 4:10 (NRSV).)

3. Bearable faults.

Self-criticism is bearable because I hope in a kind God who loves me, sin and all.

And looking at the gutter-water of my soul channels me into right relationship with God. Knowing my wrong makes me grateful for his right. Knowing my sin makes me admire the man who died without sin, bearing in his dying body the sins of everyone else.

As a Christian, I can’t trust in riches, strength, status, learning, or smarts. To do so isn’t humble, and I want to be humble. When I am humble, I trust in the mercy, riches, strength, and wisdom of the one who made me.

4. Antiphonies.

But there is a call-and-response between accepting my sinfulness and striving to do right, to be right. I have to recognize that sin will always be close at hand, even mixed in with my virtues like sprayed colors of an artsy necktie. But I can’t think that sin is OK.

I can never trust that I am without sin; and if sins drop away with time, I can’t dilate with a sense of self-righteousness. But I’m supposed to work for a clean conscience with good works, so that in time of trouble my faith is founded on a rock.

I know that I have to strive to do what God wants. But I have to give credit to God when success in that comes.

I have to try to be perfect. But on my dying day I will have to trust in God’s virtue, not in my own.

Jesus speaks of people being "worthy" of the heaven. (Luke 20:35.) But in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14), the righteous Pharisee was not justified before God; the contrite tax collector was.

5. Perplexity.

I admit to perplexity here. I’m a cross-eyed archer who doesn’t know which eye to close.

Which I guess is fine. It keeps me from glorying in my own smarts.

Or maybe, when I first wrote this, I forgot at least a partial way to reconcile these biblical ideas: the Bible is fundamentally pastoral. Sometimes we need to strive to be better than we are. Other times we need to lean upon the grace of God. Sometimes we need to reckon the terrifying God of the book of Ezekiel. Sometimes we need to hope in the merciful God of Romans.

Humility makes peace between our fear of God and our knowledge of our own insufficiency.