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2 Kings 5: 1-14
This is the first of a series on the virtues.
“Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.” Thomas Merton
This past week we heard about the tragic deaths of nineteen Granite Mountain Hot-shots, top firefighters who were killed in a forest fire in Arizona. We are all moved by their bravery and by their sacrifice. These are men who demonstrate arête, the Greek virtue of excellence—they strived and succeeded at being the best of the best, part of a world-wide elite of firefighters. They died doing what they believed in and what they trained for, and so, according to the Greek heroic tradition, they died a good death, and therefore lived a good life.
And it’s true. These men are heroes.
But throughout the week I listened as well to their wives, their parents, their children, their friends, talking about how proud they were of their loved ones but also how they’d often been fearful for them—sometimes wished they’d quit this dangerous job—waited up late at night and for days at a time, wondering and unsure if they’d ever come home. One woman said she called her husband “her sailor,” that she felt like the woman who was waiting at the port for her husband to return home from long tours far away. And while she and others like her grieve, and no one could blame them if they were ambivalent or angry about this dangerous job that took them all so young, that’s not what you hear them saying. They say they’re proud. They say their husbands, sons, and fathers are heroes.
What’s striking is their humility. They have willingly given up a lot, first to be firefighter’s families, and second to have lost them. But they’ve put their own self-interest on the backburner. They did it because it was good for the men they loved, but just as important, because they saw it as serving a larger good.
Some people would say that’s unhealthy—that these family members subverted their own good to the arrogant plans of someone else.
But these wives, parents, siblings, friends and children are not people with unhealthy self-images. They are role models for us as much as the Granite Mountain Hot Shots are. They stand up for some old-fashioned values that have been lost in our self-help culture. They were willing to make sacrifices for someone they loved; and they believed there were higher purposes in life than their own happiness, purposes that sometimes required them to make sacrifices, but which also gave their lives meaning. The family and friends of the Granite Mountain Hot Shots believed that fighting these dangerous forest fires, saving the property and lives and communities of others, was a cause important enough to risk their loved ones.
It’s the same sort of ethical position that is taken by family members who see their loved ones off to fight in wars or to provide humanitarian aid in dangerous places. It’s a value that was a commonplace among those of you who grew up in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Without that sense of humble subjection to a higher purpose and the larger good, the great successes of the Civilian Conservation Corps could not have happened in the midst of a debilitating international economic Depression. Without that kind of humility, Americans wouldn’t have risen to the call of World War II, where not only young men went to fight, but their wives and mothers and sisters suddenly took on responsibilities and made sacrifices that would have been unthinkable before.
And without that sense that we are all humble subjects of a higher purpose, the United States could not have been so generous as it was after the war, and the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe, including Germany and Japan, could never have happened.
In our reading from Second Kings, we read about Naaman, a great warrior of the Arameans. He was a famous and mighty and highly successful Aramean General, who has a serious problem: he has leprosy. Leprosy was universally feared and usually caused the leper to be treated, well, like a leper—cut off from normal human society. It’s possible, since the Bible says Naaman has “a spot” of leprosy, that he’d only just gotten the diagnosis. But it was certain to be a diagnosis of isolation.
Naaman’s illness forced an otherwise proud man into humility. And it’s extremely important to note that humility was hardly considered a virtue in the ancient world. In fact, Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics actually described it as a kind of vice: He writes, “For the unduly humble man, being worthy of good things, robs himself of what he deserves, and to have something bad about him from the fact that he does not think himself worthy of good things, and seems also not to know himself; else he would have desired the things he was worthy of, since these were good. Yet such people are not thought to be fools, but rather unduly retiring.”
The problem with these “unduly retiring people,” Aristotle says, is that they are so hamstrung by humility that they do not pursue the greatness they are capable of; so to Aristotle, humility is a vice and pride is a virtue. “Pride, then, is concerned with honour on the grand scale, as has been said.” (Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle, Book 4, Chapter 3, Pride, Vanity, Humility)
No doubt Naaman subscribed to that same philosophy. He had much to be proud of, and this one thing, of which he was ashamed, hamstrung his potential for greatness. He needed it removed to achieve his full potential, to be fully “self-actualized,” to use a modern term.
From a Judeo-Christian perspective, however, it’s arguable that Naaman’s disease, terrible though it was, served an essential purpose, because all the monotheistic faiths hold one key common ground: They all agree that we have to submit to the Sovereign God. They all agree that humans are called to humility. In fact, the very word humility calls attention to the reason that we, like Naaman, need to be humble: it derives from the word humus, meaning dirt, dust. “dust we are, and to dust shall we return” In Scripture, our own mortality calls attention to the fact that we are subject inevitably to forces beyond our control, that we will never achieve the ideals of greatness and perfection we hold out for ourselves; and for that reason we need one another, and we need God. We are ironically, most whole, and also most realistic, when we’re humble.
Naaman’s leprosy forces him into humility. He is forced to depend on others—a Hebrew Servant Girl, The King of Israel, the prophet Elisha. He is forced to swallow his pride because Elisha at first doesn’t even bother to meet him, and he must wash off in the River Jordan, of all places—a dirty river even then. He is even forced to abide by the advice of his own servant, who says, “If the Prophet had asked you to do a heroic thing, you’d have done it—so why is it so hard to do a simple thing?”
Humility teaches us that we need God and we need each other. Those Hot Shot family members knew the world needed their firefighters, and sacrificed for them. But don’t forget, those firefighters needed the support of their families and loved ones, too. Whenever any of us aspire to be our best, we can only do it with the support of the people who love us. And we’ll never be our best if we aren’t humble enough to listen—to learn from our mistakes—and most of all to recognize that our best is never good enough—it is always flawed, and most of all, it is ONLY the best if it’s subject first to God.
And often what that means is that our best may not look like our best to anyone else. Aristotle would have been shocked—as I think many of us still are—at the paradoxical humility of Jesus. Why would the Son of God submit to arrest, torture, humiliation, and death? It’s the very opposite of living fully into your potential! Now of course some may argue, well, He knew He’d rise again—but keep in mind that was not by his own power; Jesus wasn’t born with internal resurrection points that he could call up when he needed them. His resurrection was directly and only dependent on God—therefore He had to submit to God, to be humble before God—He had to empty himself of the human desire for honor and glory and victory and trust that God would provide.
Christian humility requires us to empty ourselves, and Aristotle would have found that very concept offensive. He believed that it was a virtue to magnify ourselves, whereas we Christians believe it’s a virtue to magnify God, even if it’s at the cost of our own pride. The hard truth of Christian humility is that it requires a never-ending self-examination—we must examine ourselves to empty ourselves. And none of us like it. We reach a point, as I have, when we feel like we’ve learned all we need to learn and know all we need to know. We know right from wrong, we’re clear on everything about God and Jesus and life and everything. Most of all, we say to ourselves, we know ourselves. We’re secure in our self-knowledge.
But Christian humility calls us to let that go. We can always learn from others. We can always change the way we view things. We can always learn new things about God and about life, and those things can turn our world upside down. We are called by the cross to deconstruct the very things we take pride in, including our great humility!
And not only can we do these things, we must do these things. And it’s unsettling, and importantly, as Thomas Merton observes, we won’t succeed at it. Just as soon as we think we’ve got humility down pat, we’ll get proud of how humble we are. We’re never fully humble, and that’s okay, because after all, we’re only human, so we won’t get even humility right sometimes. The point is to try, and to not stop trying, because to seek humility toward one another, the world, and God, is the most accurate and certain way of seeking Jesus Christ.