The importance of being meek and humble

CHRIST tells us why. “I confess to thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth,” he said, “because thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to the little ones.” (Mt 11,25) 

 In short, God’s wisdom can only be shared if we are like the little ones referred to by Christ, i.e. when we are humble. We have to be wary of our tendency to seek the truth and wisdom for our own sake, and not for the glory of God. We want to be knowledgeable so we can become more self-sufficient and less dependent on God. In other words, we would just use God for our own interest. 

 The same is true when we need some rest. We have to be meek and humble, as Christ himself said very clearly, if we want to have the real rest that is proper to us as children of God. 

 It is a rest that is not only physical or emotional or natural. It is one that involves our whole selves, body and soul resting in the very home of our life who is God. When we are not meek and humble, our idea of rest would get stuck on the natural level. 

 When we are meek and humble, we would know that true wisdom can only come to us if we believe and follow Christ through our Christian faith. We have to be wary and be properly guarded against the strong pressure to acquire our wisdom from our own estimation of things and from other sources. 

 We are always in need of faith. We can never say that we have enough faith. We should never be complacent in this regard. Faith is an ever-dynamic thing that needs to grow and grow as well as to inspire us more deeply, thoroughly and consistently. 

 We need to make it grow to cope with our natural needs. In this level alone, we always need faith to make things very clear for us, even if in theory we can handle the natural challenges and difficulties we can encounter in life. 

 We cannot deny that there are just too many of these natural challenges and difficulties for us to handle with a certain ease and confidence. Especially these days when the pace of development is faster, and the developments themselves are more complicated and tricky, we need the light of faith to see things properly. 

 Besides, it is faith that gives the ultimate meaning and proper direction to all our human knowledge and endeavors. It is what gives the original perspective to all events, good or bad, in our life. Otherwise, we would end up confused and lost. 

 With regard to our rest, we should not just look for it through earthly solutions. Our rest should involve our whole being that is not only material and natural, but also, and most especially, spiritual and supernatural. 

 Unless our rest covers these latter dimensions, we can never find true rest. We may have some degree of physical relief which, if not related to the spiritual and the supernatural, can only poise us to greater dangers sooner or later. 

 To be sure, our true and proper rest can only be found in Christ. He gives us the rest that is not only physical. It is a rest that includes all the aspects of our life—emotional, psychological, mental, moral and spiritual. We need to broaden our understanding of rest to go beyond the physical dimension. 

 Again, this can only take place when we are meek and humble. It’s the condition that opens us to Christ in our need for rest.

Christ meets us in our doubts

THE story of the doubting Thomas brings to light the phenomenon about doubts in our Christian faith. We should not be surprised by it. We know that doubts about our faith can easily rise in our mind for a number of reasons. 

 Why do we doubt sometimes? Because our capacity to know things well is hampered by a number of limitations and factors. We tend to depend too much on our senses, we can commit mistakes in our reasoning, we can have biases that color the way we see things, we are dealing with things spiritual and supernatural that are beyond our natural powers of knowing, etc. 

 We cannot deny that we can have some doubts, for example, about who Christ is and what he is to us. These days in the world in general, we can see strong evidence of a culture of skepticism, agnosticism, religious indifferentism, if not, outright atheism. 

 This should come as no surprise to us because even during the time of Christ, many of the supposedly religious leaders were skeptical of him and were often suspicious of him, always trying to find fault in him. 

 The quick reason for that phenomenon is that the person of Christ is largely shrouded by mysteries that are difficult if not impossible for us to understand fully. That he is both God and man, that he was brought to earth through a virgin birth, are just some of the mysteries many people do not even bother to consider. 

 There are, of course, many other reasons. Many people are lazy and do not bother to know Christ, let alone, study the gospels. And even the Bible is considered by many people as a mere collection of myths and legends. And we can go on and on with reasons for the lack of interest in Christ. 

 But what we can do is first of all really to pray, to humble ourselves, realizing that the question about Christ is a matter of faith which is a supernatural gift that can only be appreciated by us if we are humble enough to accept and correspond to that gift. Of course, Christ can strike a most powerful grace to convert a person instantly into a man of faith, much like what happened to St. Paul also. 

 What we should do is to be humble to acknowledge these limitations and be guarded against them. Specifically, we should be humble enough to ask God for that gift of faith which he is all too willing to give us. And from there, we should just have to make many acts of faith in God and in things related him, even as we study the doctrine of our faith, trying to assimilate them in our life. 

 This way we would be imitating the attitude of many of the Biblical characters, especially like Our Lady who, in spite of not fully understanding how she was going to be the Mother of God, simply said “Be it done to me according to your word.” 

 But let’s remember that Christ is not scandalized by our doubts. He may reproach us for them, but he will not remain indifferent to that wounded condition of ours. Like in the case of St. Thomas, Christ would be willing to clarify them for us in his own mysterious ways. 

 In short, our doubts should spur us some more to get closer to God rather than to run away from him. That’s why we need to be humble.

Christ cares and heals both our body and soul

THAT’S what we can learn from that gospel episode about some people presenting a paralytic to Christ, asking for healing. (cfr. Mt 9,1-8) Taking note of their faith in him, Christ did not delay in responding to their plea. But instead of curing the body immediately, Christ cured first the soul by saying: “Courage, child, your sins are forgiven.” 

 Of course, the usual villains took issue with what Christ did, accusing him of blasphemy. That’s when Christ, to show his divine authority, asked the paralytic to stand up and walk. And when the paralytic managed to stand up and walk, the crowd was completely left awe-struck and could not help but glorify God. 

 In this moment, Christ wanted to show that reconciling the soul is a more profound healing than repairing the body, that spiritual restoration—forgiveness—is the ultimate healing. As a corollary, he wanted to show that it is sin that is the deepest paralysis, making forgiveness the most necessary healing. He wanted to make it clear that healing the inner person is paramount, and that a restored soul is greater than a cured body. 

 Christ, of course, is also interested in giving our body its ideal condition. And we should also be. But we should make sure that our concern for the health of our body, which can make use of whatever human means are available, should never compromise our complete reliance first on God’s grace and mercy. 

 We have to remember that our body cannot achieve its distinction as being human if it is not animated by our spiritual soul that in turn should channel the very spirit of God. Without the spirit of God, our body would not be much different from the body of an animal. 

 Our body and soul should be properly united. This is how the Catechism describes this unity: “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body, i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.” (CCC 365) 

 This clarification is significant for it would show us that somehow the condition of the body is determined to some extent by the condition of the soul, and vice-versa. There is some kind of correlation between the two, though not in a strictly one-to-one mathematical kind of correlation. 

 To put it bluntly, we cannot say that just because one has an ugly face or a frail body, he too has an ugly soul or a weak soul. That is absolutely foul. In the lives of saints and holy men and women, we can see a beautiful soul in ugly faces and sickly bodies. 

 In fact, we have these prophetic words from the Book of Isaiah that described the future Christ: “He had no stately form or majesty to attract us, no beauty that we should desire him.” (53,2) 

 So, we have to be careful with making judgments based on looks alone and other external things. Just the same, we have to say that when the body is sick, especially of the mental, emotional, psychological kind, we cannot say that the illness is due exclusively to some organic malfunction. The condition of the soul has something to do with it also. 

 The main point to learn here is that the unity of our body and soul should have Christ as its living principle.