The good of Good Friday 6: humility

Next in Thomas’s list of ways the incarnation of God in the man Jesus is “useful for our ‘withdrawal from evil’”:

Thirdly, because, “in order to do away with man’s presumption, the grace of God is commended in Jesus Christ, though no merits of ours went before,” as Augustine says.

Fourthly, because “man’s pride, which is the greatest stumbling-block to our clinging to God, can be convinced and cured by humility so great,” as Augustine says.

     The evil we are journeying out of includes presumption and pride, which, like so much of that evil, seems to define what we are as humans. But in Jesus we learn what humanity is as created and what we are moving toward (see the previous post in this series).
     The paths we followed as we moved from childhood into adult roles have involved many of us in pretending to be self-assured. We have wanted to be like the people who seem to have it all together, so we pretend, not realizing that their self-assurance may be just as cobbled-together out of weak parts and blended of second-rate ingredients as ours is. Whatever maturity any of us comes to is likely to be compounded of opposites — disappointed enlightenment and continued attempts to believe our old hero myths.
     But however that has worked for me or for you (and you needn’t be as morose about it as I am 😉), we cannot convince or fool God. And Jesus rated presumption regarding one’s beyond-death situation as the riskiest occupation one can have (see Matthew 7:21-23; 18:3; 23:12-13; Luke 14:11; 18:9-14). That kind of presumption is the evil (or perhaps merely misinformed) twin of hope. Hope is upbeat about the future, but in reliance on God’s grace, while presumption is positive about the future on the shaky basis of one’s own place in some version of a supposed people of God, one’s sharp eye for the morality or lack thereof in other people, or one’s own churchy accomplishments (Matthew 3:9; 7:1-2, 21-23). But, as Thomas tells us in Augustine’s words, human presumption is defeated by how God has ensured our eternal future, because we haven’t assembled or arranged that future.
     Such presumption is like that displayed by the people of a country who presume that they cannot be defeated in war because they are the good people. If they are defeated, it is not because they have overestimated the connection between their righteousness and a blessedness that includes divine protection. It is, rather, because they have overestimated their distinction from the rest of humanity as those who are especially good (like the man who prays in Luke 18:11-12). It is not an attitude to take before God.
     And pride as well is defeated in Jesus, because he, the one who leads us into our restoration, is the instance of the greatest humiliation:

Don’t do anything out of competition or conceit, but in humility count each other more important than yourself. Don’t look out only for your own concerns, but also for those of others. Have this attitude among yourselves: that which you have in Christ Jesus. He was by nature God and did not consider his equality with God a thing to be grasped tightly, but gave up any reputation, took the nature of a servant, was born in human form, and in that form humbled himself, becoming obedient as far as death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:3-8)

     Stay well, folks. 😷

• • The good of Good Friday
    1: introduction
    2: faith and hope
    3: and love
    4: doing and being
    5: bodies
    6: humility
    7: brought low and lifted up
  • Humility and despair can be charted along with hope and presumption: humility can be uncertainty about one’s future coupled with reliance on God’s grace, while despair lacks both the certainty and the reliance. I wish I could remember what I learned years ago about the history of this chart: