Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 1 September 2013

22nd Sunday of the Year C

A favourite quote from scripture is the lovely phrase from the Prophet Micah, ‘what does the Lord ask of you ?… to act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with your God’. Justice and love we can easily equate ourselves with, but humility? The call to humility weaves itself into our readings this week, it is seen as a prerequisite for knowing and understanding God. Somehow the image of us walking with God implies a relationship in which we have a degree of self insight and realism about ourselves. We accept our human limitations but also understand that God knows and loves us for that!

I don’t know about you, but occasionally I dip into old manuals and prayer books of devotions often long dated in their use of language. The treasures there are mixed, some insights are timeless, but some, like the relics of another more imperial, patriarchal age seem out of place. Take differing views about humility, do you think that being ‘docile’, accepting everything that comes without question submitting yourself to a ‘superior’ is an appropriate way to describe this virtue? Ecclesiasticus doesn’t, for linked to the concept of behaving humbly is a realism about life, being gentle, listening attentively, being sensible. Jesus describes being humble in terms of service, putting others needs before our own when called for!

In the past religious life linked our deportment, the very way you stood or moved suggested an interior disposition, it was in its time a way of removing distractions, not to look about you, not to get involved but it could be artificial. One of the images of humility, cast down eyes and bent head does not ring true for me anymore, unless of course it is truly genuine and as in the image of the sinner praying reflects a deep compunction of heart. To my mind the bowed body and cast down eye is the stage before true humility comes, a time when we are still involved with ourselves. Micah and Ecclesiasticus point out, as does Jesus that humility is about a right relationship with God, that moment when we lift our head and stand upright to face God. That is the moment of truth, when we realise we are just like everybody else but when we also understand that God loves us deeply!

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain. Today is his 60th birthday. MANY HAPPY RETURNS FR ROBIN!