Br. Jack Crowley

Matthew 23:1-12

Many years ago, my confessor gave me a tough homework assignment. My assignment was to get over myself. To get over myself and pray with the last line from our Gospel passage tonight, where Jesus tells us, “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

My homework assignment came after I had spent a long time waxing poetically with my confessor about my sins, my shortcomings, all the mistakes I had made in the past, and so on. My confessor looked me in the eye and asked if I thought that God wanted me to think about myself as much as I did, especially my past. I must admit I was tongue tied in my response.

I’ve always been grateful for that homework assignment because it led to years of me praying about humility. What I’ve come to learn in my time as a monk and in especially with getting to meet so many people here, is that genuine humility is not what I thought it was.

To humble yourself is not an invitation to beat yourself up. To humble yourself is not an invitation to be a doormat for other people to walk over and never stand up for yourself. To humble yourself is not an invitation to obsess over yourself.

To humble yourself is to have a genuine and realistic understanding of who you are. To come to know that we are all somewhere in the middle, neither too high nor too low. As boring and unexciting as this may seem, genuine humility creates space for us to serve God. When we are not busy dredging up our past or stuck in our own heads playing our mistakes on repeat, there’s a lot more room for love.

Jesus, who knows the hearts of all people, knows what we think about ourselves. He is right there with us in our journey toward genuine humility. He is there to lift us up when we are down and bring us back down to earth when we fly too high.

To live life somewhere in the middle can feel countercultural. In today’s world, we often crave superlatives, to be the best, the greatest, the most liked, the most viewed, etc. To live in the middle with God is to skirt the temptations of the extreme. This is a boundary we establish in our hearts and live out with our daily lives.

In all honesty, I’m not sure if I ever really completed my homework assignment or if that’s even possible. What I do know is that our walk with God lasts for a lifetime. One day, I will take my last breath, and this servant will be set free. Until then, I intend to serve God.