Cutting sin off at the root

On humility

A homily for the Third Sunday after Trinity

The road brings out my worst attacks of self-righteousness. When someone tailgates or hogs the middle lane, I start thinking the worst of them and the best of myself. They are the bad drivers, they think the law doesn’t apply to them: thank God I’m not like them! I’m a law-abiding citizen, a good driver, a good person.

And that, of course, is pretty much what the Pharisees thought of themselves, minus the road rage.

Being religious can lead us all the more deeply into this trap. It’s commonly thought, sometimes even by religious people ourselves, that religion is about being a “good person.” Well, that too is just what the Pharisees thought. "This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them!" They thought their religion made them good, better than everyone else.

But as Our Lord taught, only God is good.

The shepherds of the religious flock are even more susceptible to this error. Look at what has been happening in the highest echelons of our church and, more recently, the Church in Wales if you doubt the ability of bishops and deans to delude themselves into thinking that their wrongdoing is justified. The Pharisees were shepherds, too. But what they had forgotten is that on top of being shepherd, they were also sheep themselves, as lost and sick as anyone.

The Psalmist could have told them that it is the Lord who is the true shepherd of us all.

The Pharisees were rich men, and perhaps when Jesus told them the parable about the woman with ten silver coins, they thought of themselves in her place. But no. They were not the woman.

They were the lost coin lying somewhere on the floor, buried in dust that needs to be swept away.

So am I, and so are you. And we are silver coins, not gold. To be sure, you are precious—infinitely precious in the eyes of the one who minted you—but it's not because of the quality of your metal, it's not because of the stuff you are made of. It is because of the image you bear. The coin in your pocket bears the image of our king; but the coin of your soul bears the image of God Himself, King of Kings. It is the eternal Sovereign who gives your silver sovereign its worth, and that worth remains, however mired in dust it may be.

The sickness: pride

The dust which mires the hearts of the Pharisees is the thickest of all and the hardest to shift. It is the worst disease that can afflict the sheep. It is like a cancer which eats you from within. This dust and disease is, in a word, the sin of pride.

Pride is the first and chief of sins. All the other sins are only its symptoms. Too proud to bow to humans, the Dragon swooped down to Eden and spread his disease to them. Infected by the Devil's pride, Eve and Adam thought like him that they could take God's power for themselves like plucking fruit from a tree: that they no longer needed God to rule them; they had grown out of all that sort of thing.

Their pride begot the envy and wrath of Cain, the gluttony of Noah and the lust of Ham, the covetousness of David and Solomon. Envy is the pride of thinking you should have what others have; wrath the effect of pride insulted; gluttony and lust are the pride of prioritising one's own desires above the needs of others; covetousness, the pride of supposing that everything exists for you alone; sloth, the pride of indifference towards creation.

Pride, then, is the first sin to be treated in the Prayer Book’s traditional series of lessons at mass in the Trinity season, because it is the root of all the others. Pride is a failure to recognise and live within our limitations, and, fundamentally, a denial of the distinction between ourselves and God. This amounts to idolatry of the self.

But as I said, religion—or at least, the Christian religion—is not about "being a good person." It is not about imparting values. Christian morality is not an end in itself. Nor is it something we can achieve by our own power of will. Try that, and we will only begrudge it. We will see the divine Law as nothing but a series of "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots." We will learn only to despise the Law, as a slave despises a master. This is not the point at all.

Our Lord presents sin not as a cause for censure: “judge not,” He commands, and here he rebukes the Pharisees for doing just that, judging themselves above others. Sin is not failure to comply to a list of regulations. Nor is it something "naughty but nice." It is a disease, and it disfigures us, and makes us deeply unhappy. It twists us in on ourselves.

But when Jesus berates the Pharisees, He does not simply point out the poison and leave it there. He offers them the remedy, and shows them what they have to gain:

"Joy in the presence of the angels of God."

This is the purpose of our war against sin and growth in virtue: not to be slaves to an external code, but to enjoy union with God among His angels, the Law of love written in our hearts.

The remedy: humility

So how do we get there? What is the remedy to pride?

The First Epistle of St Peter teaches us, in a single word: humility.

"Humble yourselves ... under the mighty hand of God, that may exalt you in due time."

Do not take the top place at the feast, but sit nearer the foot of the table. Be like Mary, whose joy came in accepting the Lord in secrecy; like St John the Baptist, who would decrease that the Lord might increase; like St Paul, who would no longer live, but Christ would live in Him. "Be subject one to another," none lording it over the other, the king and priest serving the people as the people serve them and one another.

For this is what it means to be like God.

Pride, the work of demons who make themselves gods, teaches something quite different: the lie that to be like God is to be unrestrained, independent, totally free to exercise domination and power, to do as you will and damn the consequences. But we know, and we see so clearly today, that this brings no lasting happiness to anyone. This kind of freedom is a curse. This kind of god is a demon, and those who worship such demons become like them: roaring lions, insatiable, angry, ever-hungry, and above all, proud.

Humility is the virtue by which pride can be cut off at the roots, and with it, all the other tendrils of sin that grow from it.

What God is really like

Our Lord Jesus Christ has shown us what God is really like. For did He not make Himself subject to us? Though he was equal to God the Father, He did not cling to that equality, but emptied Himself and dwelt among us, taking the form of a slave. That is what God is like. That is what life in all its fullness is like. That, alone, is where we find true and lasting happiness, made perfect, stablished, strengthened, settled.

It is in self-emptying love, opening ourselves that Christ might dwell in us, humbling ourselves to His Presence around us, that we find ourselves most truly.

The deepest humility is total acceptance of one's finitude as a creature, and total reliance on God. It is not something that we can achieve. God is the shepherd; God is the woman with the coins; it is He who comes looking for us, calling for us. We are in the Church because we have heard that call.

In Baptism, we respond, the dust is cleaned off the image, and we are purified of our sins, healed of the sickness. From then, our spiritual health will waver, but what we are after is a fit and healthy state of illumination by the Spirit wherein the victory over sin is no longer a burden but a joy: like getting used to jogging in the early morning, after some time, the pain becomes a pleasure one cannot do without.

We will, inevitably, lapse back into the anxiety and unrest of sin, those spells of spiritual illness which deprive us of the healthy, holy rest of the soul settled in God. But the life of the Church gives us the regime we need to keep the flow of grace unblocked. The daily reading of the Scriptures in the Divine Office is the nourishment which forms healthy souls, the spiritual work-out which reforms our minds into the Mind of Christ. The Eucharist is our spiritual booster, the medicine which keeps us in eternal life. Through the Church’s life of prayer and service, we become more and more Christlike, and so more and more like God.

Sustained by the spiritual regime of Holy Church, day by day, what keeps us free from the cancer of pride is what St Peter calls “sober vigilance”: the constant recollection of God's presence all around us, throughout His creation, but especially in the faces of our fellow humans, bearers of His image — and our subjection to them, clothed with humility. And above all, we must keep turning our gaze to the Cross, where the fulness of humility reveals the fulness of glory.

Let us therefore pledge ourselves to a deeper and more disciplined regimen of prayer, to intentional awareness of everyday opportunities for the exercise of humility, and to decrease, that Christ might increase in us.