25th Sunday In Ordinary Time: The Importance Of Humility

Long before he became the cardinal archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan was the rector of the North American College in Rome. He used to give regular talks to the seminarians, which were collected in a very good book called “Priests for the Third Millennium.” In one of the talks, Cardinal Dolan quotes a retreat conference given by the Passionist Scripture scholar Barnabas Ahern.
Father Ahern asked: what do you suppose was Jesus Christ’s favorite virtue?
Was it faith?
Was it hope?
How about charity or justice?
All of those are contenders.  But Father Ahern had something else in mind.
Christ’s favorite virtue, he suggested, was humility.
He made a persuasive argument.
Again and again in the gospels, Christ chose the most humble.  He chose the sick over the healthy…the weak over the powerful…the poor over the rich. He didn’t select scribes and scholars for his apostles; he picked a fisherman and a tax collector, a doubter and a betrayer. He encountered a woman begging for scraps from God’s table, and he performed a miracle where every crumb was collected and saved. He drew to himself those who were broken and needed healing, from the blind and the crippled to the possessed and the spiritually lost.
The gospels offer a reassuring message for all of us who feel unworthy, or fall short; they offer this blessed hope:
Jesus often found more among those who, in the eyes of the world, seemed to be less.
And in today’s gospel, we see this again. To settle a dispute among the apostles over who, in fact, is the greatest, Jesus put before them the most inconsequential person in the room: a small child—a figure of perfect trust, and simplicity, and need.
“Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me,” he said. “And whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.”