St. Luke, 18. 9-14 From The Liturgical Year by Dom Guéranger, O.S.B. Commenting on this passage of St. Luke, Venerable Bede (V. Bed., In Luc., V) thus explains the mystery: “the Pharisee is the Jewish people, who boasts of the merits he has acquired to himself by observing the precepts of the law; the publican is the Gentile, who, being far off from God, confesses his sins. The Pharisee, by reason of his pride, has to depart in humiliation; the publican, by lamenting his miseries, merits to draw nigh to God—that is, to be exalted. It is of these two people, and of every man who is proud or humble, that it is written: the heart of a man is exalted before destruction, and it is humbled before he be glorified (Prov. XVIII. 12).” In the whole Gospel, then, there was no teaching more appropriate than this, as a sequel to the history of Jerusalem’s fall. The children of the Church, who, in her early years, saw her humbled in Sion and persecuted by the insulting arrogance of the Synagogue, now quite understand that word of the Wise Man: “Better is it to be humbled with the meek, than to divide spoils with the proud!” (Prov. XVI. 19). According to another Proverb, the tongue of the Jew—that tongue which abused the publican and ran down the poor Gentile—has become, in his mouth, as “a rod of pride” (Prov. XIV. 3), a rod which, in time, struck himself, by bringing on his own destruction. But, whilst adoring the justice of God’s vengeance and giving praise to His mercy, the Gentiles must take care not to go into the path wherein was lost the unhappy people whose place they now occupy. Israel’s offence, says St. Paul, has brought about the salvation of the Gentiles; but, his pride would be also their ruin; and whereas Israel is assured, by prophecy, of a return to God’s favour when the end of the world shall be approaching (Rom. XI. 25-27), there is no such promise of a second call of mercy to the Gentiles, should they ever apostatize after their baptism. If, at present, the power of eternal Wisdom enables the Gentiles to produce fruits of glory and honour (Ecclus. XXIV. 23), let them never forget how once they were vile, barren trees: then, humility—which alone can keep them right, as formerly it alone drew upon them the eye of God’s mercy—will be an easy duty; and, at the same time, they will understand the regard they should always entertain for the people of Israel, in spite of all his sins. While the original defect of their birth made the Gentiles as wild olive trees, producing nothing but worthless fruits, the good, the genuine, the natural olive tree, through whose branches flowed the sap of grace, was growing and flourishing, sucking sanctification into its branches from the holy root of the patriarchs, blessed of God (Rom. XI. 16-24). We must remember that this tree of salvation is ever the same. Some of its branches fell off, it is true, and others were substituted; but this accession of the Gentiles, who were permitted by grace to graft their branches into the holy stock, effected no change, either in the stock or in its root. The God of the Gentiles is not another, but the same, as the God of Isaac and Jacob; the heavenly olive tree is one, and the only one, and its roots rest in Abraham’s bosom: it is from the faith of this the just man par excellence (Rom. IV. 11-18), from the blessing, promised to him (Gen. XII. 3) and to divine Bud (Gen. XXII. 18), and to be imparted to all the nations of the earth, that flows the life-giving and rich sap, which will transform the Gentile world in all future ages. When, therefore, Christian nations are boasting of their origin and descent, let them not forget the one which is above all the rest. The founders of earthly empires are not, in God’s way of counting, the true fathers of the people of those empires: in the order of supernatural, that is of our best, interest, Abraham the Hebrew (Gen. XIV. 13), he that went forth from Chaldea at the call of God (Gen. XII. 1-4) is, by the fecundity of his faith, the truest father of nations (Gen. XVII. 4-7). Humility, which produces within us this salutary fear, is the virtue that makes man know his right place, with regard both to God and to his fellowmen. It rests on the deep-rooted conviction, put into our hearts by grace, that God is everything, and that we, by nature, are nothingness, nay, less than nothingness, because we have degraded ourselves by sin. Reason is able, of herself alone, to convince anyone, who takes the trouble to reflect, of the nothingness of a creature; but such conviction, if it remain a mere theoretical conclusion, is not humility: it is a conviction which forces itself on the devil in hell, whose vexation at such a truth is the chief source of his rage. As faith, which reveals to us what God is in the supernatural order, does not come from mere reason, nor remain confined to the intellect alone, so neither does humility, which teaches us what we ourselves are: that it may be true, real virtue, it must derive its light from above, and, in the holy Spirit, must move our will also. At the same time that this Holy Spirit fills our souls with the knowledge of their littleness and misery, He also sweetly leads them to the acceptance and love of this truth, which reason, if left entirely to herself, would be tempted to look on as a disagreeable thought. When this Holy Spirit of truth (St. John XIV. 17), this divine witness of hearts (Wisd. I. 6), takes possession of a soul, what an incomparably stronger light is there in the humility which He imparts, than in that which mere human reason forces on a man! We are bewildered at seeing to what lengths this sentiment of their own misery led the saints; it made them deem themselves inferior to every one; it drove them to act and speak in a way which, in our flippant judgment, outstepped the bounds of both truth and justice! But the Holy Ghost, who guided and ruled them, passed a very different judgment; and it is precisely because of His being the Spirit of all truth and all justice—in other words, because of His being the sanctifying Spirit—that, as He willed to raise them to extraordinary holiness, He gave them an extraordinary clear-sightedness, both as to what they themselves were, and as to what God is. Satan, the spirit of wickedness, makes his slaves act just the opposite to the divine way. The way he makes them take, is the one he took for himself, from the very beginning; which our Lord thus expresses: “He stood not in the truth (St. John VIII. 44); he aimed at being like unto the Most High” (Isa. XIV. 14). This pride of his succeeded in fixing him, for all eternity, in the hell of absurdity and lie. Therefore, humility is truth; and, as the same Jesus says: “The truth shall make you free” (St. John VIII. 32), by liberating us from the tyranny of the father of lies (St. John VIII. 44); and then, having made us free, it makes us holy; it sanctifies us (St. John XVII. 17), by uniting us to God, who is living and substantial truth. The nearer the stars are to the sun, the greater is the light they receive from him, although they seem to dwindle and disappear, overpowered by his splendour; whereas their light appears brighter and more their own, in proportion as they are farther from him. So man, as he approaches nigher to the infinite All, receives a marvelous increase of life and light; while he gradually loses both his life of self, and the artificial light that accompanied it. There are men who, like Satan, have done all in their power to throw themselves out of the orbit of the divine sun. Rather than acknowledge that they owe all they have to the most high God, they would sink back again into nothingness, if they could. To the heavenly treasures which the common Father opens out to all who won themselves to be His children, they prefer the pleasure of keeping to natural good things; for then, so they say, they owe what they get to their own cleverness and exertions. They are foolish men, not to understand that, do what they please, they owe everything they have to this their forgotten God (1 Cor. IV. 7). They are weak, sickly minds, mistaking these vapours of conceit in which their disordered brain finds delight for principles of which they may be proud. Their high-mindedness is but ignominy; their independence leads but to slavery; for, though they refuse to have God as their Father, they must of necessity have Him as their Master; and thus, not being His children, they must be His slaves. As slaves, they keep to the vile food, which they themselves preferred to the pure delights wherewith Wisdom inebriates them that follow her. As slaves, they have acquired the right to the scourge and the fetter. They chose to be satisfied with what they had, and would have neither the throne that was prepared for them (Wisd. VI. 22), nor the nuptial robe (Ecclus. VI. 32); let them, if they will, prefer their prison, and there deck themselves in the finery which moths will soon be making their food! But, during these short years of theirs, they are branding their bodies with a deeper slavery than ever red-hot iron stamped on vilest bondsman. All this happens because, with all the empty philosophy which was their boast, they would not listen to the Christian teaching that real greatness consists in the truth, and that humility alone leads to it. Not only does man not unman himself by humbling himself—for he thereby is but believing himself to be what he really is—but, according to the Gospel expression, the degree of that voluntary abasement is the measure of his exaltation in God’s sight. The Holy Ghost is beyond measure liberal in bestowing His gifts on one, who is sure to refer all the glory of them to the divine Giver. It is to the little that the Lord of heaven and earth makes revelations, which He hides from the proudly wise and prudent (St. Luke X. 21). Or, rather, the truly wise are these same little ones, who understand and have experienced the mysteries of God’s infinite love, and who have been invited to the banquet of divine Wisdom. They are nothing in their own eyes; and yet it is in them that, among all the children of men, the Son of God finds His delights (Prov. VIII. 31). This is what the disciples could not understand when, after the words of our Lord, which are given in today’s Gospel, they insisted, as St. Luke tells us, on keeping back the little ones who wanted to come near Him. But Jesus insisted on their being brought to Him, saying very much the same as He had already said in the Old Testament pages: “Suffer little children to come to Me; forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God. Amen I say to you: whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a child shall not enter into it” (St. Luke XVIII, 15-17). In heaven the humility of the saints is far greater than it was while they were here on earth, because they now see the realities, which then they could only faintly perceive. Their happiness, yonder above, is to be gazing on and adoring that altitude of God, of which they will never have an adequate knowledge, and the more they look up at that infinite perfection, the deeper do they plunge into their own original nothingness. Let us get these great truths well into us, and we shall have no difficulty in understanding how it was that the greatest saints were the humblest creatures here below, and how the same beautiful fact is still one great charm of heaven. It must be so, for the light of the elect is in proportion to their glory. What, then, must all this exquisite truth be, when we apply it to the great Mother of God? The nearest to the throne of her divine Son, she is precisely what she was at Nazareth (St. Luke I. 48); that is, she is the humblest of all creatures, because she is the most enlightened of all, and therefore understands, better than even the Seraphim and Cherubim, the greatness of God and the nothingness of creatures.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 18:28:50 +0000
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