God humbles us – 1 Pet 5:1-6

Moreau Lucenarium; 1/26/12.  I didn't preach this week as I was on vacation, so here's an old one from earlier this year.  Note: I instructed the lector to say "be humbled" rather than "humble yourselves" in v. 6.  Both are grammatically possible translations, but the passive is preferred to the middle as it puts the emphasis on God's saving action rather than making it seem as if we could humble  ourselves without His grace.

“My future spouse often humiliates me.”  That’s a red flag.  When you’re preparing a couple for marriage and one of them agrees with that statement on the FOCCUS questionnaire, you know you’ve probably identified something you’ll need to talk about during the preparation process.  In fact, when you get the results printout from the computer, it even puts a big star next to that statement, in case you couldn’t guess that it’s kind of a big red flag.

So, when I brought this up to Maria during one of our meetings, I was surprised when she was surprised that I brought it up.  Her fiancé was pretty surprised about the whole thing too.  Eventually, and there’s five confusing minutes of conversation I’m abridging, we worked out what was going on.  Maria is not a native speaker of English and in her language (actually, in many languages), the word for ‘to humiliate someone’ is the same word as ‘to humble someone.’  “John makes me humble,” she told me. “To be loved by such a wonderful man, how could that not make you humble?  Isn’t that beautiful?”

I couldn’t help but agree with her.  That is beautiful.  That’s not a red flag, that’s good news, great news, for their future marriage.  During that conversation, I struggled to put into words something so seemingly obvious as the difference between being humiliated and being humbled.  Part of it is consent – humiliation ordinarily happens against our will, it’s forced.  To be humbled, we must cooperate, “not under compulsion but willingly.”

To be humiliated is to be pushed down, often by someone smaller than you, so you are forced to crank your neck to see them.  To be humbled is to stand tall willingly straining your neck to gaze upon something much bigger than you.

God never humiliates us.  God humbles us.  That’s good news, that’s great news not for our future marriage but for right now.  It’s so tempting to skip past that line in our reading, “be humbled under the mighty hand of God” and jump to “so that he might exalt us.”  And that’s beautiful too – the exaltation that is to come, the unfading crown that belongs to a future age – all wonderful.  But, “be humbled under the mighty hand of God…” that’s not quid pro quo; that’s not the price, how we earn a crown we could never earn.  That’s the good news for right now.

God takes our virtues and shows us what they look like in their fullness, in his mighty hand.  To strain your neck to gaze at that is to be humble.

He takes us when we finally realize we have slipped up and fallen down and offers us that hand.  To be humble is to take it, to grasp that loving hand, that wounded hand.  To be humble is to bear witness to the sufferings of Christ and say look at this hand that holds me, look at the sign of love etched into its palm.  Can I love like that?  On my own, am I nothing, but I am not on my own.