The family likeness

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 23: 8-12) is taken from the options for the feast of St Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury from 669-690. In it, we hear Jesus in hyperbolic mood. We must call nobody teacher, we must call nobody father, He says, for God the Father above is the only true teacher and the only true father. Jesus gives us these commands in the same way he tells us to cut off our hands and pluck out our eyes if they lead us into sin. It is a matter of hyperbole that seeks to make a wider, deeper, and more substantial point: do not idolise other humans but attend to the Lord.

In His final remarks, however, Jesus passes from hyperbole to paradox:

The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Behold a paradoxical teaching more often honoured in the breach than in the observance. It challenges us in the same way that Jesus’ teaching on death and resurrection challenges: unless the seed of grain falling to the ground dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it springs forth with new life. And perhaps our disastrous failure to observe Jesus’ teaching about humility and the dangers of self-exaltation is measured by the two vast mysteries that it encompasses.

The first of these mysteries concerns the human heart and its own self-knowledge. No matter who we are, not only are we strangers to each other, we are often strangers to ourselves. It is precisely the one who has poor knowledge of himself that is prone to self-exaltation. And yet, it is not such an easy mistake to avoid. On the one hand, even after Baptism, our souls retain the wounds of original sin; we suffer from the pride of life, as St John says. Our minds are sometimes like a hall of mirrors that make us appear in our mind’s eye as more important, more accomplished, more deserving than we are in reality. To cite words I have often used on this blog, pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said.

But if this human frailty is one reason we do not know ourselves well, our personal woundedness is another. We are not merely the person we were when we were born; we are also the sum not only of our experiences, but also of how we have dealt with those experiences. Too often, our hearts have been wounded afresh – wounded deep down where our emotions and fundamental perceptions entwine with our moral choices – and our inner psyche lives with painful memories that compromise our journey, and leave us pointed inwards on ourselves. It is as if, after the wounds of original sin, we suffer a secondary infection that is personal to ourselves. Why indeed then do we exalt ourselves? If at one level it is sheer common or garden human vanity, at another it might be some kind of unconscious compensation, the ready-made herbal salve of self-delusion supposedly to protect us from further hurt. But our medicine is useless, a case of human quackery pretending to solve the waywardness of sin.

The antidote – the only way we can lay hold of this mystery of our broken selves - comes actually from humbling ourselves before the Lord. We must sit in our abjectness alongside blind Bartimaeus, and simply beg for the mercy of the passing Saviour. Humbling ourselves here means not only confessing the distorted nature of our sinful self-love, but also avoiding the dangerous temptation to self-hatred or abasement, for this too is a kind of compensation, a form of self-harm that attempts to force the attention of others:

It is easier than we think to hate ourselves. Grace means forgetting ourselves, as the priest writes in his journal towards the end of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest.

And through a humble recognition of ourselves, of our own complexity, our inner wounds and poverty, we are brought to the edge of the second mystery I alluded to above: the mysterious action of God in our own lives. For the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

The term exalt is derived from the Latin altus meaning on high. For God to exalt us means for Him to bring us to the heights, i.e. close to Himself. For He that is mighty has done great things to me, as Mary our model observes. And yet, He does great things in each of us who are willing to be His disciples. Here, the paradoxes of Jesus’ initial teaching deepen further still, for to bring us on high, the Lord God must go deep within us to bring us – we who are often exiled from the truth about ourselves - into the very cell and centre of our souls, there to encounter the Lord who dwells within through grace.

When, in COLW, we speak of others encountering in us the Word made flesh in Mary, we evoke in many ways the path which Jesus Himself has followed in order to live among us. This is our family likeness. For He too humbled himself to take on flesh only to be exalted upon the Cross of our Redemption. Our spiritual likeness to Mary is likewise made apparent, for it was in great part her utter humility that enabled her to play the role of the Mother of the Saviour. What, after all, distinguished her from our first parents if not her readiness to humbly obey the Lord, knowing the truth of who she was in relation to God, rather than identifying with her own delusions like they had done?

This then, as I say, is the family likeness that runs on both sides of the family of God. If Jesus who is God put off His own glory and took the form of a servant to seek the lost sheep, if Mary bore the gaze of the Almighty in her lowliness and so became the place where the Word took flesh in history, so we who would be His followers must put off our deluded glory, in order to be brought to those heights that only His wisdom knows.