We really love humility. Just listen to our culture talk about some its greatest heroes. Sure, sometimes you get the mind-numbingly egomaniacal CEO or sports star, but their legacy tends to fade fairly quickly. Their company goes south, or the 17th season of The Apprentice flops like the 16 before it, or they start making dogs try to kill each other, and they end up drifting into obscurity, bragging the whole way. You want someone with real staying power, someone who won't be forgotten anytime soon, find someone who is incredibly humble.
I learned something interesting about humility recently. Apparently, right up until just under 2000 years ago, humility was not a positive thing at all. The word humility and humiliation in English come from the same Latin root, "humilitas," and ancient culture definitely leaned more towards that latter term. Humility was seen as being in the least odd, at the most morally questionable. Think about that. Today, it's "morally questionable" for someone to have an extra-marital affair. In ancient cultures, we would have put someone saying "I'm not that big of a deal," in the exact same category.
So what happened that changed all this? Why does our culture glorify humility more than almost any other attribute? The Son of God got nailed to a cross. This isn't just a Jesus freak talking. Historical research (check out the work of John Dickson) points to that moment in history as the site of a pivotal shift in our definition of humility. A man who had shown greatness beyond anything people had ever seen was killed in one of the most humiliating ways imaginable. Shoot, in Jesus' own culture, death on a cross was to bring with it a curse. So what did people do when they saw the greatest man they had ever known embrace humility in death? They redefined greatness.
And Jesus' humility was great indeed. We are, in no uncertain terms in my mind, talking about the Son of God, here. That brings with it some pretty cool perks, and more street cred than I could ever imagine (or at least it should). What did Jesus choose to do with this title? He hid it for the majority of his ministry. During Jesus' time of teaching, demons who were afflicting people would try to make those individuals yell out "I know who you are, you are the Son of God!" Jesus' first response was to shut them up.
This seems weird to us, because we have trouble embracing that kind of humility. If we want to do all that we can for the Kingdom in this world, though, this is exactly the kind of humility we need to establish as our norm. Jesus didn't draw thousands to Him by making a huge deal out of Himself. He brought God's truth in the trappings of a carpenter, traveling from city to city and depending on others for His needs.
Make no mistake, Jesus wasn't scared of His title or His calling. He simply knew their was a right time for Him to come onto the scene in all His glory. Start yelling about how you're the Son of God while standing alone on a hilltop, and not many people are going to follow you. On the other hand, spend years healing, loving, and proclaiming hope to a world that desperately needs it, and people are going to start listening when you tell them those things that are a bit harder to believe. Jesus' patience comes from His unbelievable humility, knowing that what He was doing was not to glorify His human form, but to prepare the way so that He could be sacrificed to bring this whole world, right up into the modern day, back into relationship with God. Jesus lived well below His station for over three decades, and He did it out of love for us.
This is the example that we are called to follow, and we are so blessed because of it. The opportunity to accept what Christ did for us us available to all. God so loved the world that He humbled Himself for years, ending His time here in the ultimate act of humility, that we might be saved. We're wasting our time if our service to Him isn't wholeheartedly committed to glorifying His name before all else.
With His love and grace,
Taylor
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