Homily for the 22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, August 31, 2025. Gospel of Luke 14:1-14. Theme: Grounded in Truth, Living in Reality
Considering Jesus’ typically uneasy relationship with most of the Jewish leaders, it’s a bit surprising to hear in today’s Gospel that He was a guest at a Pharisee Sabbath dinner. However, St. Luke tells us that he was being “observed carefully” by those in attendance, which makes the invite look like it was a possible set-up for potential entrapment. You see, the religious leaders were always on the lookout for ways to discredit Jesus because he was a threat to their power and prestige. The humble honesty of Christ exalted him in the eyes of the people while at the same time the arrogant pride of the Pharisees cast them down into an unfavorable position. And it’s this interplay between pride and humility that is at the heart of the parable in today's Gospel.
Pride fools us into having an over-exaggerated opinion of ourselves. It makes us constantly seek recognition. It makes us compare ourselves to others, always wanting the best seat at the table as Jesus put it in today’s parable. What he means by this is that pride is an insatiable hunger for more praise and a greater share of attention. It makes us measure ourselves against others and puts nagging questions into our minds such as: “Am I smarter? More successful? Better liked?” But pride is never satisfied and if left unchecked it can grow into such an immense distortion of our self-importance that we end up dethroning God as Lord of our lives and setting ourselves up in that place of honor.
The Scriptures teach us that this is precisely what happened when because of pride the once-glorious angel of light named Lucifer became Satan, the devil and adversary of all that is good. And that it was because of pride that the once-holy and innocent Adam and Eve became the doorways through which sin and death entered into our human experience. In both cases, pride cunningly fooled them - and can still fool us - into thinking that we know better than our Creator. Pride whispers to us the ancient lie that we can find happiness apart from God and this lie plants the seed of distrust towards him in our hearts.
But humility, on the other hand, sets us free from pre-occupation with self. It’s the virtue of self-honesty that grounds us in truth and has us living firmly in reality. Humility prevents us from fooling ourselves by giving us a proper persepctive of who God is and who we are. Contrary to what people often think, humility isn’t weakness nor is it a matter of putting oneself down. It doesn’t mean thinking less of ourselves, but rather it means thinking of ourselves less. It means recognizing that everything we are and have is a gift from God and so it moves us to live in gratitude. Being humble doesn’t mean refusing to acknowledge our talents or to deflect praise for a job well done. Rather, it enables us to own our achievements and accomplishments while reminding us that they were made possible in the first place only by the free and gracious gift of God and so we give him the glory!
Humble people walk in the light of Jesus’ Great Commandment to love and serve God and neighbor. And in doing so they reorient their outlook from self-centeredness to God-centeredness and other-centeredness. You see, while pride tells us to put ourselves above others, humility moves us to walk beside them. While pride says, “I must be served”, humility says, “I must be of service.” Pride turns our gaze inward, while humility opens our eyes wide open to the needs of our neighbor. And so the humble place their freedom at the service of love, accepting even inconvenience to themselves for the sake of bringing convenience to another.
A very beautiful thing about humility is that it brings us benefits on both the natural and supernatural levels. On the natural level it allows us to be known and loved for who we really are, and this is something that every single human being, every one of us, deeply desires with all our hearts. Humility does this for us because the gut-honesty that it requires means that we can take off the masks that we wear. We can drop our defenses, we can stop hiding behind facades, and we can discard all pretenses as we allow others to know and accept and love the real us as God created us to be.
And on the supernatural level humility enables us to see and accept our spiritual poverty, a quality that Jesus praises and calls “littleness” or “lowliness”. From beginning to end the Sacred Scriptures tell us that God finds this attitude precious and irresistible. Spiritual poverty opens our hearts to the grace of God and moves us to reach out to him because we know that without God’s help we simply cannot do what is right and good. And so the saints all tell us that humility is the starting point for living a life on planet Earth that is destined to end up in Paradise. This is why the very first beatitude that Jesus spoke at the beginning of his ministry was in praise of humility when he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.”
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