Pondering the humility of God on His birthday

In his confession of faith, entitled What I Believe, François Mauriac tells us how he marvelled at and repeated Charles Gounod’s words that were sung on the morning of his first Communion: “All the way to me, You can descend, such is the humility of my Savior” (Jusqu’a moi vous pouvez descendre, humilité de mon Sauveur!). For the Catholic Nobel laureate, these words were a perfect preparation to receive the Eucharist. They represent the merging of Humility with humility.

According to St. Augustine, the three most important virtues are humility, humility, and humility. Here, the great bishop of Hippo is not being redundant but emphatic. The humility of God is opposed by the pride of man. In order to receive God, one must, in humility, recognize his own lowliness and how unworthy he is to be loved by his Creator. At the same time, his humility allows him to accept God. The paradox of humility is that although we do not think of ourselves as great, we can, nonetheless, accept the greatness of God.

Humility disposes us to receive Communion in a proper way. It also properly disposes us to accept Christ in Christmas. God sent His only-begotten Son into the world to save man from himself, to use humility to inoculate
man against his own arrogance. We may resist force, but we are powerless against humility.

God’s Incarnation as a babe, born to poor and obscure parents, was not what had been expected. God’s power, not His humility, was what was expected. The Jews expected the birth of a great king. Even Plato and Socrates spoke of the universal wise man “yet to come.” Confucius spoke of “the Saint,” “the Sibyls,” and a “Universal King.” In his play, Prometheus, Aeschylus wrote, “Look not for any end, moreover, to this curse until God appears, to accept upon His Head the pangs of thy own sins of vicarious.” The Magi travelled to meet a king and brought with them appropriate gifts. The arrival of a savior had been long anticipated, but not in the form of a babe at Christmas.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen states in his classic Life of Christ that “A stable would be the last place in the world where one would have looked for Him. Divinity is always where one least expects to find it.” After all, divinity is God’s idea, not ours. Humility is a great teacher. 

Humility sweeps away the dust from our eyes so that we can see what is before us. The shepherds must have possessed this virtue in order to believe the angels’ message: “And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12). Joseph Ratzinger, (later Pope Benedict XVI) remarks that for God “nothing is too small. Precisely this overstepping of the greatest and reaching down to the smallest is the true nature of absolute spirit.” The humility of God is consistent with His love for man, proud and deceitful as man is.

We tend to think of greatness on a quantitative level. We are impressed by size, strength, and power. Yet man’s ability to love is greater than
all the galaxies combined. Here is the paradox of Christianity and of Christmas: the love that streams from Mary and Joseph to their Child, and from the Child to the world, owing to their collective humility, outshines all the forces of the world. We will be saved by our own humility in accepting the humility of God. 

DONALD DEMARCO is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University and adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review and is the author of 38 books. Two of his latest titles, The 12 Supporting Pillars of the Culture of Life and Why They Are Crumbling, and Glimmers of Hope in a Darkening World, are posted on amazon.com.