"One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the
house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being
carefully watched.
…
When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at
the table,he told them this parable: “When someone invites you to a wedding
feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you
may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will
come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will
have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest
place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a
better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be
humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”'
Humility is
probably one of the hardest virtues for us to have. It certainly goes against what society tells us we should
do. We hear all the time about how we
need to be proud of ourselves and the things we do.
Watch a pro football game
sometime. Every time somebody makes a
good play, or even an ordinary play, they have to dance around for about five
minutes to make sure everybody saw what they did. It’s a rare thing when someone scores a touchdown and just jogs
back to the sideline.
Politics is the same way. When’s the last time you heard a politician
say, “You know, I really don’t deserve credit for this. These other people are really responsible
for the good stuff that’s happened while I’ve been in office. I just happened to be in the right place at
the right time.” It never happens, it
either party.
I always get kind of a kick out of
reading Numbers 12:3. It’s talking
about Moses, and here’s what it says about him. It says, “Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than
anyone else on the face of the earth.”
The reason I get a kick out of that is that, by tradition the book of
Numbers was written by Moses. If you
would actually write that about yourself, it pretty much by definition cannot
be true.
That’s one of the things that makes
humility so hard. It’s really hard to
be aware of our own humility. Once we
start think about being humble, we’re tempted to be proud of it, and then we’re
not humble any more.
Because of that, it seems like
humility is something that really has to come from somewhere inside of us. And of course, when we say that a virtue
needs to come from inside of us, what we’re really saying is that it needs to
come from letting the Holy Spirit into our hearts, because that’s really the
only place virtue can come from.
What I think Jesus is
telling us here, though, is that, even though humility needs to come from
inside of us, we can still actively work on it. It’s like a lot of things, I think, in that the only way to learn
how to do it is by doing it. With most
things, we can read about them, we can think about them, we can listen to
people talk about them, but the only way to really learn how to do them is to start
doing them. And that’s the way it works
with humility, too. The only way to
learn how to become humble is to start practicing humility, even if it does not
seem natural to us.
Jesus gives an example of how to do
that. He says when we’re invited
somewhere, we should not just go ahead and assume we deserve a prominent place
and therefore take it. He says that if
we do that, we might get asked to take a worse place, and then we’ll be
humiliated. Instead, he says, we should
take a low place and let someone invited us to move up to a better spot,
because then, we’ll feel honored.
I think the reason Jesus tells us
to do that is because a lack of humility can get us in all kinds of
trouble. It really gets back to what we
talked about last week. Whenever we
achieve something, it’s really tempting to start thinking we achieved it
ourselves. It’s really tempting to give
ourselves the credit for it, rather than giving God the credit.
What we think about it that way,
when we take that place of honor that Jesus describes in his story, what we’re
really doing is taking the place of honor away from God. We’re putting ourselves in the most
prominent place, and putting God in the less prominent place.
Whenever we do that, we are making
a big mistake. God loves us, but God’s
sense of honesty and justice will not allow us to put ourselves ahead of God
forever. When we become too arrogant,
when we put ourselves in the most prominent place, we will eventually
fall. When that fall comes, it can come
in very sudden and unexpected ways, and it can be a very long fall.
We see that in the sports
world all the time. Think about Joe
Paterno. Think about Tiger Woods. Think about Michael Vick. Going back further, think about Pete
Rose. None of these people were evil
people, at least not intentionally so.
In fact, before they got into trouble, each of them was thought of very
highly. They were held up as role
models, people we should try to be like.
What happened to them? They thought too highly of themselves. They started thinking their success was all
due to themselves, rather than to God.
They started thinking that the rules of society did not apply to
them. They thought they could do
whatever they wanted to do because of who they were. They thought that, because they had achieved so much and were so
good, that nothing bad could ever happen to them.
It happens in the financial world,
too. Look at Bernie Madoff. Look at the Enron guys. It happens in politics. Think about Richard Nixon. Anthony Weiner. Gary Hart. It happens in
religion. Look at Jim Bakker. Look at Ted Haggard. Again, I don’t think any of these people
were purposely trying to do wrong. In
fact, sometimes they thought they were doing right. They did not set out to be evil or bad.
What happened to them, though, is
that they put themselves and their own success ahead of everything else. They thought that, because they were so
successful, or so good, they no longer had to answer to anyone. They thought they could make up their own
rules. They thought they could do
whatever they wanted and no one would ever know or care and nothing would ever
happen to them as a result.
It’s something they never
intended to do. It’s something very few
of us intend to do. The thing is
that praise can be such a tempting thing to fall for. We do something right, and people tell us how well we did. It makes us feel good. So we do something else, and it goes well,
and more people tell us how good we are.
It makes us feel better. We do
something else, and lots of people tell us how good we are. Eventually, if enough people tell us how
good we are, we start believing it.
You know what else happens? When people start thinking we’re good,
they’re more likely to give us a pass when we mess up. We do something that should get us in
trouble, but because people like us and think we’re trying hard, they make
excuses for us and we don’t get into trouble.
And somewhere inside, without even realizing we’re doing it, we think,
“Gee, I got away with that. Nothing
happened to me. I wonder what else I
could get away with.” And we’re down
that slippery slope, without even being aware of what’s happening.
The thing is, if there was ever
anyone who was subject to that temptation on earth, it was Jesus. Jesus actually was better than anyone else
on earth. Jesus had more power, more
knowledge, more wisdom than anyone on earth.
He had lots of people telling him how great he was. Jesus was able to resist that temptation
because he spent lots of time with God.
Think of all the times Jesus went off by himself to pray. I have to think part of that was so Jesus
could remind himself that everything he could do, and everything he was, came
from God the Father. We need to remind
ourselves of that, too.
Jesus is telling us that if we
practice humility, it can give us that reminder. Because, think about this.
Jesus said to take a low place so we can be invited to move up
higher. But what happens, if we’re not
invited to move up higher? What happens
if we take a low place and everyone thinks that’s where we belong?
That’s a reality check, right? That’s a wake-up call. All of a sudden, we realize that we’re not
that great person we thought we were. We
realize we’re not above the rules. We
realize that, after all, we’re no better than anyone else, and in fact there are
plenty of people who are better than we are.
That can be a blow. It can hurt our pride to find that out. But it’s a lesson we need to learn
sometimes, and it’s a whole lot better to learn the lesson that way than the way
Joe Paterno or Richard Nixon or all those other people learned it. It’s a lot easier if we never put ourselves
on a pedestal in the first place than if we put ourselves up there and then get
pushed off.
We all like to hear applause. We all like the approval of others. The only one whose approval matters, though,
is God’s approval. If we do what Jesus
did, if we spend some time with God and remind ourselves that everything we can
do and everything are comes from God, we can stay focused on earning God’s
approval, rather than the approval of others.
That will help us practice humility, and will keep us closer to being
the people God wants us to be.
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