PART 12

LIFE OF HUMILITY
AND
MEEKNESS
12





BY HIS HOLINESS AMBA SHENOUDA III,
POPE AND PATRIARCH OF ALEXANDRIA
AND
THE APOSTOLIC SEE OF ALL THE PREDICATION OF
SAINT MARK








Translated from "WATANY" newspaper, 24 September 2000








Pride and magnificence.
(C)

THERE ARE MANY TO WHOM GOD
HAS DONE FAVOURS
BUT THEY RAISED UP THEIR HEARTS

BEARING DIGNITY IS MORE DIFFICULT
THAN BEARING OUTRAGE

TRIALS HAPPEN TO THE GIFTED
TO KEEP THEM FROM PRIDE

THERE ARE
THREE KINDS OF ARROGANCE
WHICH
ENCOUNTER THE PROUD




He who thinks that he is something, sees himself great, and wants to become great in the eyes of people, and may become great in his relation with God, and thus he falls into blasphemy! as it happened to Satan and to many of the atheists.
This is arrogance. Some divide it into three kinds:
secular arrogance,
monastic arrogance,
doctrinal and theological arrogance.
Secular arrogance is that man is puffed up from inside. Pride appears in his looks, in his bearing, his sitting, and in the style of his words ...... He walks assumingly with haughtiness, and he takes an aristocratic appearance in all his dealings.
Monastic arrogance appears in swaggering about silence, solitude and sackcloth, which are all from the outside, without inside training toward the purity of heart and thoughts, and the practice of the fruits of the spirit. (Gal. 5: 22-23). Such a monk affects haughtiness over his fellow monks. He disdains and criticises those who have not his ascetism and his solitude.
Arrogance in the field of doctrine and theology appears in those who seek to speak in tongues, and they say that it is a sign of the filling with the Spirit ...... They talk publicly about their experiences from upon the ambons. They pretend giving the Holy Spirit by laying their hands upon people. They say that Satan is under their feet, and that they trod upon him with their feet.....!
Some of them pretend theological knowledge, and that they have come with something new which others have not understood. Therefore they fall into heresy and deviated knowledge..!
What is astonishing is that many of those who have become proud, or the majority of those who have become proud, were among those toward whom God had been benevolent, or those whom God had granted some gift.
A person to whom God gives intelligence, or a kind of art, is then puffed up because of his intelligence or his art. Another to whom God gives energy or a power to work, and then becomes proud because of his power. A third one to whom God gives riches, and then becomes puffed up because of his riches. Or a person is permitted by God to become in a high position or to obtain a desired job, and then his heart is raised up because of his position or his job...... and he looks at people from upward, or ignores his friends of old, as the poet said:
"When my friend had become one of the rich people......... I became certain that I have lost my friend".
People such as these have not been able to bear the dignity of the position and the riches, nor the dignity of intelligence and energy. And as the great saint Antonius said about that:
"There are those who are able to bear outrage, and cannot bear dignity; because bearing dignity is more difficult than bearing outrage."
Because many of those who had obtained dignity, have become puffed up and their hearts were raised up inside, and they have lost humility and meekness. Similar to them also, are those who obtained intellectual or artistic gifts, or even spiritual gifts, and these incited them to pride, or at least to self-admiration! Self-admiration reached even the apostles of the Lord themselves, when the devils were subjected to them according to the gift which the Lord had given them. [Then the seventy returned with joy, saying: "Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name." And He said to them: .........."do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven"] (Luke 10: 17-20).
Therefore one of the fathers said:
"If God grants you a gift, ask from Him to grant you humility in order to preserve it, or else to take it from you".
Lest your heart be raised up because of the gift, and then you would fall......
Really, only the humble are those whom God confidently establishes over his boons; as it has been said in the Bible: He "gives grace to the humble" (James 4:6), (Prov. 3:34).
Therefore the Lord has chosen the most humble Virgin who could bear this magnificent dignity, to incarnate from her:
This one to whom saint Elisabeth said: "But why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" (Luke 1:43). Although she was the mother of the Lord, she said to the angel who annunciated her: "Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to you word" (Luke 1:38). Truthfully the Omnipotent "has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant" (Luke 1:48).
Thus by her humility, she bore the coming of the Spirit upon her and His work in her. She bore to contain the flame of the divinity inside her. She bore the visions and the angels and all the miracles which accompanied the Nativity of the Lord from her. She did not speak much about all these glories, but it was said of her that she: "kept all these things in her heart" (Luke 2:51).
The Lord has likewise chosen His apostles, from the lowly classes:
It was said: "But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence" (1 Cor. 1: 27-29).
He has chosen Moses "of uncircumcised lips" (Ex. 6:30), who knew his weakness and said to the Lord, when He called him: "I am not eloquent, neither before nor since You have spoken to Your servant, but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue" (Ex. 4:10).
He called that one who could not speak, to become the interlocutor of God, and the author of miracles!
Trials and gifts
The Lord has permitted that trials would attain those who had obtained gifts, in order to keep them from pride.
Let us take the apostle Paul as an example:
He had many visions. He saw the Lord when He reproached him and called him while he was on his way to Damascus (Acts 9). The Lord appeared to him in Corinth in a vision by night and said to him: "Do not be afraid, but speak, and do not keep silent; for I am with you, and no one will attack you to hurt you; for I have many people in this city" (Acts 18: 9-10). And He appeared to him in the temple in Jerusalem, and said to him: "Depart, for I will send you far from here to the Gentiles" (Acts 22:21). The Lord appeared to him another time and said to him: "Be of good cheer, Paul, for as you have testified for Me in Jerusalem, so you must also bear witness at Rome" (Acts 23:11).
It was that Paul who in the service "laboured more abundantly than they (the apostles) all" (1 Cor. 15:10), and who spoke with tongues more than all (1 Cor. 14:18), and who was a man of revelations, and who lastly said: "such a one was caught up to the third heaven" (2 Cor. 12:2), "And least I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure" (2 Cor. 12:7).
God permitted Satan to buffet Paul with a thorn in the flesh, lest he be exalted.
This thorn remained with him in his body, making him feel his weakness, lest his heart be exalted because of the exceeding spiritual glory which he attained, in spite of his supplication to God three times to heal him. But the Lord said to him: "My grace is sufficient for you" (2 Cor. 12: 8-9). Because the strength of God is made perfect in the weakness of that apostle.
Another example is the prophet David:
David, the man of the flute, the guitar, and the harp, who possessed gifts in poetry and in music, who was a man of war, "a mighty man of valor" (1 Sam. 16:18), who defeated Goliath (Sam. 17), and before that courageously killed a bear and a lion, and was not afraid of them (1 Sam. 17: 35,36), that David, with the gift of prophecy which he possessed, who had become the anointed of the Lord, after being anointed by the prophet Samuel, and the Spirit of the Lord had come upon him (1 Sam. 16:13).
That David with all his gifts, God permitted that king Saul would most violently raise against him and mortify his life
and chase him from desert to desert, and plot to kill him ..... David lived humiliated before Saul, and said about himself that he was a flea, a dead dog (1 Sam. 24:14).
God rather permitted that David would fall and sin. His fall was then a reason for the humility of his soul inside himself, and for a life full of weeping and tears, so that he said: "I am weary with my groaning; all night I make ny bed swim; I drench my couch with my tears" (Ps. 6:6). And he said to the Lord: "It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I may learn Your statutes" (Ps. 119:71).
Yes, that subservience in which he lived, was better for him. It made inside him, an equilibrium with the glory of prophecy, the luxury of the king, and the music of the flute and the harp......!
We learn from this psalm a deep spiritual lesson: God permitted that subservience would subdue a prophet of His sons, because that was better for him, in order to subdue his heart, and not to be drawn to pride by the glories which encircled him.
A third example is the just Job.
God permitted servility of another kind, in which there were poverty, sickness, and the disdain of Job's friends ...... that man of whom God testified twice that he was "a blameless and upright man" (Job 1:8), (Job 2:3), and "that there is none like him on the earth ...... who fears God and shuns evil" (Job 2:3).
Besides his righteousness, he was surrounded by magnificence from every side "so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the East" (Job 1:3). People respected him very much. "The young men saw me and hid, and the aged arose and stood ......... When the ear heard, then it blessed me, and when the eye saw, then it approved me" (Job 29: 8,11). He "delivered the poor who cried out, the fatherless and the one who had no helper ........ "I was eyes to the blind, and I was feet to the lame. I was a father to the poor" (Job 29: 12, 15-16).
God permitted trials for Job because of all this. The trials were severe but necessary for him in order to deliver him, so that he would not be righteous in his own eyes. (Job 32:1).
God is much preoccupied by the soundness and safety of His sons from pride which destroys the soul. Therefore He protects their souls with trials and tribulations, or with sufferings and sicknesses, so that they would not be hurt by the glory which surrounds them, or by their feeling of the life of righteousness which they live.
A fourth example is the patriarch Jacob.
God loved him before his birth (Rom. 9: 11,13). It was said to him in his benediction: "Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you. Be master over your brethern, and let your mother's sons bow down to you" (Gen.27:29). That Jacob to whom God appeared at the top of a ladder which "was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it", and God blessed him and said to him: "Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go" (Gen. 28: 12:15). That Jacob who "struggled with God and with men" and "prevailed" (Gen. 32:28), to whom God gave the benediction, and granted him a new name, and saw God face to face (Gen. 32:30).....
God "touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jacob's hip was out of joint as He wrestled with him" (Gen. 32:25); and Jacob went out "and he limped on his hip" (Gen. 32:31).
May be you ask saying: "Why, O Lord, do you strike Jacob on his hip, and then he lives as a cripple all his life? The answer would be: because that is profitable to him, and it is better than to be striken by pride and to perish ...... The same situation applies to the apostle saint Paul who was given "a thorn in the flesh" lest he "be exalted above measure" because of the abundance of the revelations. Likewise the just Job who was struck "with painful boils from the sole of his foot tot he crown of his head", lest he be righteous in his own eyes......
God cares primarily for the destiny of His sons in eternity. If blows which attack them on earth, are profitable for their eternity, since they let them reach the mortification of the heart, then there is no objection to that. The apostle saint Paul says about that:
"Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Cor. 12:10).
Weaknesses and tribulations impede pride, and lead to the humility of heart. Also during these tribulations, when man feels his weakness, he leans to God and takes strength from Him. Therefore the apostle saint Paul said:
"Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me" (2 Cor. 12:9).
That will be enough for the time being, and we shall meet with the same subject in the next edition if God wills by His grace, and we live.