Second Week of Advent - Wednesday: ‘Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’

Readings: Isaiah 40: 25-31 Ps 102 Matthew 11:28-30

In today’s gospel Jesus tells us: ‘learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.’ The implication seems to be that in lowliness of heart, in humility, we find peace and rest. In my experience most people intuitively grasp this point from their own experience. One of the things we notice when we reflect upon the stresses and anxieties of our life is that often, not always but often, the root cause of our distress is that we are trying to be something that we are not. To put this another way, we create tension in our lives when we try to be the person that we want to be, or the person that others think we should be, rather than the person that God created us to be. A humble person is one who knows the truth about themselves, a person who has a realistic vision of who they are, and who God is calling them to be. Humility, then, does not mean thinking negatively about oneself. On the contrary, it means thinking accurately about oneself and our relationship with God.

The paradigm of our relationship with God is the Trinity itself. In our first reading the prophet Isaiah is at pains to emphasise that we must recognise God alone as almighty, and that as such we are utterly dependent on Him. At the same time we must recognise that this almighty God loves us more than we can possibly concieve and even sent us His Son and His Spirit that we might share in His life. Christ's humility, Christ's peace, flowed from his knowledge of God and his knowledge of Himself. Because Christ saw the truth he knew that he was loved. When we live with and in Christ through the Spirit, we share in the mutual outpouring of love of the Trinity. We can gain a taste of this peace, this rest, this Divine life here on earth: but it comes to its completion only in the vision of God in heaven.

Humility, then, is the recognition and acceptance of the truth of who we are, and the recognition and acceptance of the truth of our relationship with God. The opposite of humility, Pride, must therefore be a rejection of this truth. Pride is fundamentally an attempt to live independently from God, an attempt to live by our own strength. Often Pride is driven by fear, a fear of taking a risk, a fear of becoming a disciple of Christ. Sometimes Pride is motivated by a desire for autonomy, a refusal to submit to God’s authority in particular areas of our life. Sometimes Pride is driven by a lust for power, a desire to become a kind of god, a rival to God. Pride is ultimately the root of all sin so it is worth reflecting seriously upon what lies behind our sins in this pentitential season. St Augustine famously declared at the beginning of his Confessions that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. We exhaust and wound ourselves when we struggle to live apart from God. Obedience to Christ may mean taking on a yoke, but it is a yoke that He has made for us, one that fits us and suits us, one that will lead us into ever deeper love of God and neighbour.