Humility

             Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. (Philippians 2:3-4) 

In the verses before this, Jesus is presented as the model. He is the one we are to imitate in doing nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. He is the one who humbly valued others above himself, not looking to his own interests but to ours. But as I read the passage this morning, I thought about what I’ve heard about the idea of humility. Once again, since we’re talking about definitions, this is a challenge for me.

Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin allowed me to explore one of the definitions of humility. Some of the characters in that story were bound and determined that people of color (even if they were as light-skinned as a white) needed to be humble and remember their place or to be humbled by a master for thinking too much of himself. In the book White Fragility, we’re told that because we see things from a White perspective, we are racists and that the only solution is to constantly humble ourselves to learn to see things from the perspective of others. I’ve had people look down their noses at me and tell me that I need to humble myself, stop seeing myself as better than others, and start seeing them as better than I – as models for my own behavior. Bad definitions and applications of humility seem to abound.

Today’s passage, however, shows Jesus as being humble. But Jesus never said He wasn’t God, that His ways might be wrong, or that the ways of either the religious and political authority or the ways of the sinners around Him might be right. He set aside His rights as God, but that didn’t make Him less than who he was. And this is my first struggle with humility – the idea that it involves beating myself or others beating me down, accepting that I am not only nobody but nothing, despising myself as much as I perceive I am despised by others (or more.) But that’s not what I see Jesus do. He never sees others as better than Himself. In fact, betterness and worseness seem irrelevant to Him.

He came to do something that we could not do for ourselves, that no one but He could do. He didn’t let His self or us get in the way.  We were sufficiently valuable to Him to endure the cross, despising its shame. But that didn’t decrease His value to the Father, the Holy Spirit, the Universe, Himself, or any of us. In fact, if He had thought as little of Himself as I tend to think I should think of myself, He could not have thought very much of the Father, the Holy Spirit, the Universe, or us either. How can we be worth the price if He saw Himself as having no worth? Our value to Him must be reflected in His understanding of His value. If your life is not worth more to you than the life of a worm, how can giving that life for the well-being of others be worth more than the life of a worm? We can only stand in awe of that He did because both He and we understood His value.

And He did not give up His place forever. He gave it up to take it up again. This touches on another of my bits of bad thinking: that to be humble, we must devalue ourselves permanently. But Jesus dealt with a specific set of problems by setting aside His prerogatives as God, and when the problem was dealt with, He resumed His place. He was willing to give up His life, and we should be willing to give up ours, but He has promised that we will gain life. There’s something better than we have that we will gain by not demanding that we be given our due now.

C.S. Lewis wrote of humility as not thinking less of ourselves but of thinking of ourselves less. Here’s the struggle. If we must constantly watch that we do not think of ourselves more highly than we ought, we have to evaluate every thought and action, meaning that we must constantly think of ourselves. If we must compare our behaviors with those of others or their expectations (and ours), we must think of ourselves constantly and question whether we are doing a good enough job of being of no value. Instead of one-up-man-ship, we engage in one-down-man-ship, but it’s still a competition in which we can emerge victor. We become proud of our supposed humility.

Clearly, more thought is needed, but for now, the conclusion that I’m reaching is that being humble has to do with valuing ourselves but not allowing that value to interfere with our valuing of others highly.