The Rev. Pamela Dolan
January 7, 2024
In the lovely little volume, The Book of Joy there’s a story about humility that I found amusing. Apparently, it was a favorite of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s, although it’s almost certainly apocryphal. It goes like this: One day in the side chapel of a grand cathedral, three bishops were “standing before the altar, beating their breasts with great humility, saying how, before God, they were nothing.” Soon, a lowly acolyte “approached and started to beat his chest, professing that he, too, was nothing. When the three bishops heard him, one of them elbowed the other and said, “Look who thinks he’s nothing!”[i]
Humility is on my mind for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a profoundly countercultural trait. How many of us considered “focusing on humility” when we were deciding on our New Year’s resolutions? Think about what we’re always encouraged to do at this time of year: find ways to be more and better. Constant improvement, constant growth, always measuring and achieving—that’s what our culture values. Humility is an almost forgotten virtue. We see it as “settling” or “giving up.” But what if instead it were a path to contentment and peace?
This year, the lectionary and the calendar combine in such a way that we don’t get to hear two of the more exalted stories that we associate with the season of Epiphany. The arrival of the magi or three kings happened yesterday, so we don’t have all that great pageantry and fuss. And the story of the wedding at Cana, where Jesus performs his first miracle, is only found in the Gospel of John and is not one of our Sunday readings this year. So, what we are left with is the story of the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, followed by weeks of Jesus calling people to be his disciples.
This puts our humility to the test. If you never saw Jesus perform a miracle, and you never saw him worshiped and revered by the high and mighty of the world, and nobody had ever told you he was the Son of God brought here to save us from sin and death, what would you think of Jesus? Would you follow him? Just a lowly carpenter, an itinerant preacher, with no guarantees about how his story would end? What about if most of the other people following him were questionable characters, riffraff even?
It turns out that humility may be the key to understanding the Gospel text we have today and is definitely one of the keys to understanding what it means to follow Jesus. The great mystery that surrounds the baptism of Jesus is why? Why does someone born without sin, someone who is both human and divine, need to be baptized? And I think the answer lies in the profound humility of Jesus, a humility we can only hope to approximate in our own lives.
The word “humility,” as you likely know, has the same root as the word “human” and probably goes back to a Proto-Indo-European word meaning earth. Humans are human because we are earth people, not heavenly beings. There is a similar punning concept in the Hebrew name Adam; the word for earth in Hebrew is adamah. So, the first human came from the humus, the earth; in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus proclaims that the meek (or the humble?) will inherit the earth, there may be a hint of wordplay and even humor there. Being of the earth is part of a what it means to be human. We talk about humble, good people as “grounded” or “salt of the earth.” And it seems likely that those were qualities that the first followers of Jesus noticed in him, part of what made him so appealing and compelling.
Christians say that at the birth of Jesus God humbled himself to take on our humanity. That is what we call the incarnation. His baptism is a kind of seal on that, a sign that the grown-up Jesus, about to enter into public ministry, is not holding anything back in his solidarity with us. People are being baptized as a sign that they want to repent and have a new life; Jesus, who is our new life, does not hold himself back even from this, and lets himself be plunged into the water, transforming this action into a symbol of death and resurrection, no longer a mere purification or cleansing ritual.
The Baptism of Jesus is an icon of wholeness. Earth, air, and water are all present. The people, the nameless crowds who were there to be baptized by John, are present as well and ultimately God is present, made manifest by the voice from heaven proclaiming God’s pleasure. This is the new creation—claimed by God as not only good, but beloved.
The “why” question about the baptism of Jesus can only be answered by saying that Jesus did not need to be baptized: Jesus chose to be baptized. Jesus did not need to be baptized for God to love him. Jesus was already God’s beloved child. We do not need to be baptized in order to be loved by God, either. And yet, baptism does bind us more closely together as children of God and siblings of one another. It does seal us with the Holy Spirit and mark us as Christ’s own forever. It is a symbol of our solidarity, our absolute equality, our radical kinship.
That is why it makes sense for our Baptismal Covenant to be so focused on our responsibilities to our fellow human beings. We promise to look for Christ in one another, to love our neighbor as ourselves. We promise to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being. And we readily and humbly acknowledge that we can only do these things with God’s help. Even the relatively simple spiritual disciplines of learning, fellowship, worship, and prayer can only be entered into with humility, with an understanding that we are likely to fail repeatedly and need forgiveness and repentance repeatedly.
As we enter this new year, with all its hope and worries, a healthy dose of humility may be just the thing we need. Humility doesn’t mean we think less of ourselves, but rather that we have a balanced and realistic perspective, and maybe even laugh at ourselves from time to time. It can actually be a way to appreciate the good things in our lives without constantly striving for more. I applaud everyone who is sticking to a better exercise routine or a new diet, but just remember that none of that has any bearing on how good of a person you are, or whether you are loved. This might be the year when you don’t need to work on being new and improved; maybe you just need to work on accepting who you are, reminding yourself of your intrinsic worth, and finding ways to connect more deeply with other people and all creation.
Around this time every year, Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber goes on social media to remind people of this essential truth: “There is no resolution that, if kept, will make you more worthy of love. You, as your actual self and not as some made-up ideal, are already worthy.” Amen.
[i] Dalai Lama [Tenzin Gyatso] and Desmond Tutu. 2016. The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World.
