Greatness in humility

October 29, 2016 Saturday 30th Week in Ordinary Time 1st Reading: Phil 1:18b–26 Gospel: Luke 14:1, 7-11

One Sabbath Jesus had gone to eat a meal in the house of a leading Pharisee, and he was carefully watched.Jesus then told a parable to the guests, for he had noticed how they tried to take the places of honor. And he said, “When you are invited to a wedding party, do not choose the best seat. It may happen that someone more important than you has been invited, and your host, who invited both of you, will come and say to you: ‘Please give this person your place.’ What shame is yours when you take the lowest seat!“Whenever you are invited, go rather to the lowest seat, so that your host may come and say to you: ‘Friend, you must come up higher.’ And this will be a great honor for you in the presence of all the other guests. For whoever makes himself out to be great will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be raised.”

D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the
Assimilated Life
Experience)

Are you good at riddles? Try this: “I sit tall but stand small, I turn around to find a place on the ground to fall. Who am I?” Hold your guesses until we have extracted the better part of its moral lesson. The answer couldn’t be a human being because experience tells us that humans sit small and stand tall. The answer to the riddle cannot be a human being. The answer, in fact, is a dog. It stands small but sits tall. This is good illustration of what humility is in the mind of Jesus. When we soar to the heights by standing up for our inordinate wants, we really appear small in the eyes of God.

I can never forget an experience at the airplane on our way to Rome for the canonization of St. Pedro Calungsod. Seated beside me was an elderly man who coughed now and then. Each coughing angered an aristocratic chinky-eyed woman seated in front of him. “Hey old man, do you cover your mouth when you cough?” the woman blurted. To which the man humbly answered, “Yes, I did” and apologized.

The next time the man coughed the woman ceremoniously took a mask similar to those used during SARS outbreak from her Louis Vuitton bag and wore it to dramatize her disgust. To my shock he turned out to be a Bishop and a former President of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. He had become a Cardinal lately. No words can describe my admiration for him.

Jesus promised that he would elevate the humble but humble the great. This promise comes with an assurance of heaven, the door of which is like a doghouse that can only be accessed by people who stoop low. – (Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM, MMExM, MAPM, REB. Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com.

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