Notes on Humility VII

What does it actually look like to live out this humble calling?

One false trail in Christian spirituality has been to institute outward signs and symbols and practices of obesiance so as to make a great public display of humility. But these become quickly corrupted with the perverse human tendency to find pride even in these symbols. So, for example, the church procession always puts the most important person at the back rather than the front: the first shall indeed be last! But we all know of course that the last person in a church procession is the most important and usually the most prettily dressed. Even practices like footwashing become opportunities for pride rather than true humility, because in symbolic or ritual practices they become something else other than what they originally were.

Humility as a virtue finds difficulty in being expressed symbolically, or outwardly. How could it not?

I think, rather than religious displays of humility, we rather ought to be seeking reminders of our utter dependence on the grace of God alone. We need to know even better than we do how vulnerable we actually are, and how needy, and how poor. In practice, Peter wants us to live amongst our fellow citizens, and even amongst ourselves, in quiet devotion to doing good. We not subversives or revolutionaries - at least not in the way we normally think of it. Our revolution is a quiet one: we point power to its own source by freely submitting to it. We lead through care and by service, not looking for the benefits of leadership. We put aside our natural tendency to disrupt leaders of all kinds. We take the immense risk of laying down our freedom to self-realise through our action, to express ourselves and our wills in reference only to our own selves, in favour of following the model of Jesus Christ, who used his freedom in humble and obedient service and died an ignominious and shameful death. His risk is our risk, too: we risk not being who we could be. But his promise is our promise, also: as he was raised from the dead, so we have a guarantee of our own exaltation, or the glorious inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade...