16th Sunday after Pentecost 9.9.18 Humility
St Paul prays that people grasp the greatness of Christ, the
full extent of His goodness and glory (epistle); and in doing that they will find
everything else fall into place.
For many, even to acknowledge Christ as having any
importance at all would be a step forward. How much ignored, denied, blasphemed
against He is. And this is the Saviour of the world. It is a strange way to
treat someone who has come to rescue us!
How should we regard Him? In the Gospel image today, we
should take the lowest place before Him. This will mean that we do not ‘exalt’
ourselves to tell Him what to do; but rather humble ourselves to listen to Him;
to trust Him; to obey without question whatever He asks of us.
Then He can call us up higher, as in the parable. Only if we
are truly humble before Him can we make progress.
We are tempted to seek our security in the things of this
world. Christ is too far away, it might seem.
But all earthly things are fragile and can disappear in a
moment: money, friends, success, status…
We can find security only in Jesus Christ, the one true God.
This is what St Paul is always telling us.
We will find security in Him, and also great happiness.
It is happiness to be healed of sickness, to be free of
demons, to be raised from the dead.
Would you kill someone who can do all that?
They did already. But our present generation would do it
again.
He has total goodwill towards us; He wants to heal, bless,
save, guide us. He can provide everything we could ever dream of (more than we
can desire or understand – today’s epistle Ep 3,20).
All we have to do is receive what He is giving; humble
ourselves to the point of letting Him do what He wants. We concede defeat as
far as any battle of wills is concerned.
Thus we are ‘exalted’. We find, if we are silent before the
Lord, no longer complaining or arguing, we will actually get more of a say. The
Holy Spirit will fill us with His gifts, and we will be able to speak, to rule,
to be creative – all in due proportion.
This is how it is meant to work.
We are admitted into a share of Christ’s authority if we
have first learned to obey.
In the world people grasp power, and often kill, lie and
cheat to get there.
They are not obeying Christ first; they are bypassing Him
completely.
What does frail mortal man think he is doing, trying to take
over the whole world?
The devil has tricked us into turning things upside down.
We look in the wrong places for security, for happiness, and
all the while there stands God Himself, waiting for a response.
We respond in humility and so we are exalted. Exalted
through having greater security, greater happiness, and share more fully in Christ’s
own saving work.
Thus we come to know the breadth and the length etc, of His greatness;
or at least more than we knew before; enough to know there is more to know.
Faith in Christ is central, not peripheral, not optional,
not a matter of minor importance. He is the All.
Believing this will not make us religious fanatics. It just
means we become well-balanced people, able to deal with any sort of reality.
May Christ Himself forgive us all our past neglect, exalting
us as high as Heaven.
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