Memorial of Saint Claire, Virgin
Today’s readings represent great lessons in humility. Perhaps this is fitting, given that today is the memorial of Saint Claire, who is often relegated to being something of Saint Francis’ sidekick! Even her sainthood is an act of humility, one that bears witness to the great selflessness of her life on earth.
Today’s readings give us two different pictures of humility from very different sources. The first example of humility comes from one of Israel’s greatest patriarchs, Moses. Moses is so important that in Jewish tradition, he is said to have written the first five books of the Bible himself. This speaks to his place in the tradition and to his reputation for acting as God’s agent to the Hebrews. Moses, of course, leads the Hebrews out of Egypt, liberating them from the oppressive enslavement of Pharaoh. When God first calls Moses to this task, Moses hesitates, basically asking God, “Why me?” In the Jewish tradition, Moses is sometimes said to have had a speech impediment, making his question even more relevant: why would God ask a man so ill-equipped to speak to the most powerful man on earth and ask him for the impossible?
In the end, God works through Moses to liberate the Hebrews and lead them through the desert, a journey which is not without its trials and tribulations. After forty full years of wandering in the desert, God finally shows his Chosen People the Promised Land. As they look down into their new home, Moses shocks them all by saying that after all this, he will not go into the Promised Land! “I am now one hundred and twenty years old,” Moses says, “and am no longer able to move about freely; besides, the LORD has told me that I shall not cross this Jordan. It is the LORD, your God, who will cross before you.” Just as Moses is going to be vindicated fully for where he has led the Hebrews, he steps aside, redirecting their gaze back to the true liberator: God.
The second story of humility we have today is from Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel of Matthew. Once again, we find the disciples “missing the point,” and they ask Jesus who the greatest in the Kingdom is. Much to their surprise, Jesus calls over a random child as his example. He tells his disciples (and us) that unless a person humbles himself like a child, he will not enter the Kingdom of God.
In a world dominated by power, wealth, and selfishness, today’s readings are a radical departure from how we are told to live our lives. When St. Paul says that the Cross of Christ is “foolish,” I think he means that if we live our lives according to the selflessness we see in the Scriptures, exemplified most perfectly by Christ on the Cross, we will find that the world may think us foolish. We can’t wait to grow up and stop acting like a child; we can’t wait to get our due, and after working hard like Moses, receive the Promised Land we worked so hard for! Even centuries later, these stories stop us in our tracks, forcing us to re-evaluate our lives and mine them for acts of true selflessness and humility.
- Katherine Schmidt