Humble Love

The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, “Follow me!” (John 21:17-19)

Since two weeks, I’m fully part of the ‘universal’ (which is the meaning of ‘Catholic’) Church. Before my baptism and (albeit confusedly) already the day of my conversion four months ago in Freiburg, I understood two things: (1) the Cross is what reveals God as infinite love; (2) the meaning of our living this life is to answer this question that Jesus asks us every moment: “do you love me?” The love starts with God, we do not initiate it. It comes towards us, regardless of who we are or how worthy or unworthy we think we are. It comes as a question. Our life is the time we have at our disposal to articulate our answer. Now I start to understand a bit better why it takes at least our whole life to answer.

Another important insight that landed before my Baptism was conveyed by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: we do not progress towards God’s love by being strong and perfect, but on our knees, by realizing how weak and needful we are. This act of humility—realizing that we are not strong, but weak; we are not great, but small—is perhaps the single most important act on this path. It’s delicate, because it can go wrong in many ways. It can lead us to become defensive, hardening the heart and making us deaf; or it can make us fall in the spiral of an irrational self-dismissal and guilt complex. Yet, if one avoids both of these extremes, humility teaches a very precious lesson: if I am weak, I need help; if I am small, I need support. Children know this very well, before they forgot (or are educated to forget). It is from this position of needfulness that we open to God’s love, which is the only kind of love strong and deep enough to really and fully heal and nourish us.

I now see that there is a sort of ‘virtuous circle’ of humility inscribed in the heart of the Christian faith. Let me enunciate the four steps I discern before I explain each one a bit better: (i) by an act of humility we admit our smallness and needfulness and we ask for help, we ask for divine love; (ii) answering that act of love, God makes himself small and comes to us, through the birth, life, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s Son; (iii) through the “thanks giving” of the eucharist we too partake in Jesus’s own passion, death and resurrection; (iv) this participation in Jesus's nature, which is that of humility and love, brings us back to square one and the cycle repeats, again and again.

(i) We start with humility. The original sin was an act of pride: “I” counts more than “You”. This is the basic structure, the actual meaning of “sin”. Humility is stepping back from this structure. It is easier to invert the tendency of sin in the moments in which we face some deep failure. When we are broken, what is broken is first of all our pride. At least, this happened to me: I was open to acknowledge my need for being saved in a moment in which everything else seemed to have failed and I felt totally defeated. The major obstacle to make this first step is that everything in our society seems to work against it. We go to the gym to look strong and attractive; we compete with one another to get the better jobs, or to buy the better properties; we want successful relationships, lives, families, pets; we meditate to awaken, get enlightened, become fully dispassionate and raise above the world of suffering; it’s all over the place. Yet, all these plans fail at some point. Those failures are precisely the cracks that call us to look differently at what we are and what we do. Perhaps it’s good to be weak; perhaps it’s good to be small. But if I acknowledge my weakness and smallness, then I need to acknowledge that I need help, I need love, I need another to be by my side.

(ii) In his epistle, James says: “Come near to God and he will come near to you. … Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.” (James 4:8-10). God comes near us first of all in Jesus, God himself who, despite his infinite nature, chooses to manifest as someone small and weak. Everything in Jesus’s life witnesses this paradoxical logic: his humble family, his birth in a cave, his unremarkable life before his public teaching, his relatively unsuccessful career as a public preacher, his death on the cross (the punishment reserved to slaves).

Accepting the cross, Jesus accepts the summary of all evil and sin that can occur in the world, takes it all on himself, to show that God’s love (and love is God’s essence, see 1John 4:7) is stronger, greater, deeper than it all. This cannot be just said, it needs to be shown, it needs to be lived. God does not make a theoretical statement about the fact that “God’s love is stronger than evil”, he takes evil on his own flesh, takes it with him in the grave, walks with it through death. What is death? The complete darkness of the absence of love. Eventually, death cannot resist the power of this love, and hence, the third day, Jesus is resurrected. The resurrection is the existential, concrete, tangible, embodied demonstration (not a theoretical one) of the fact that God’s love is stronger than evil and death. This is how it works when God himself plays the logic of humility: he first shows himself in a humble appearance (the Son, Jesus), and then uses that humble appearance to reveal what is really great and breathtaking (his love)—“For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke 14:11).

(iii) The Cross is not just something that Jesus experiences for himself. In fact, we all need to experience it: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). There is no other way to God’s love, it can shine only through the cross. Even more, we do not only experience our own individual “crosses” (the various difficult predicaments in which we happen to live and move through). We must experience whatever difficulty we might face as Jesus himself did and make our own struggle part of his own passion (since he was the first to take on him our own struggles). After all, Jesus himself insists on this act of sharing in him and reminds us: “Remain in me, as I also remain in you” (John 15:4).

How? To make again this statement not just a theoretical idea but a concrete reality, he took very ordinary (humble!) things, like bread and wine used for a simple dinner, and transformed them. This is the mystery of the eucharist (which I only vaguely guessed at the night of my conversion, but now start to understand better). The night before walking up to his execution, Jesus breaks the bread and shares the wine with his disciples as his body and blood. The bread and wine are Jesus himself before, during, and after the passion, hence, his life, his death, and his resurrection. The greatest mystery of faith is how this is possible. The fact that this is a mystery cuts down on unnecessary questions—this is what you’re supposed to do with a mystery of faith, after all, you take it as a mystery and use it for salvation, more than trying to provide a theory of it. When we “give thanks” to God for Jesus’s death and resurrection, we are called to share them with him.

The night of my Baptism (with my great surprise!) I was asked to do one of the readings. It sticked with me. In it, Saint Paul explains:

if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. (Romans 6:5-8)

Paul is talking about the Baptism as a way of “dying” with Christ. The same could be applied to the eucharist too, since the eucharist is the always renewed sacrifice with which we offer ourselves on the altar (which symbolizes Jesus himself) to God (as it is read in the Eucharistic Prayer III, during Mass: “May he [Christ] make of us an eternal offering to you [God the Father], so that we may obtain an inheritance with your elect”). Walking to the communion, we’re walking with Jesus to the Golgotha; eating the bread, we’re dying with Jesus; letting us fill by love and divine peace, we’re resurrected with him.

(vi) A mundane logic might then expect that once one experiences the communion all is done, one is a saint, ready to sing forever in glory. Not quite. The daily miracle of the communion is a very humble and humbling miracle (again!): it takes away for a bit the veil of our pride and let us see how imperfect, fragile, small and weak we actually are. The grace that comes from God’s humility is itself an act of self-humbling. At the same time, precisely because we become more sensitive and more aware of our smallness and insufficiency, we desire more passionately to be helped, saved, consoled, united with the divine love that we have tasted. In a sense, we’re brought back to step (i), but our humility is just a bit stronger, hence stronger is also our desire to love and be loved by Him. Someone even said that the best and more real form of constant and uninterrupted prayer is desire itself, since when everything is moved by the desire for God, we’re constantly praying Him. Through the eucharist, we nourish our genuine desire for divine love by cultivating our humility.

This dynamical movement is well expressed again by Saint Paul:

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:10-14)

Paul’s goal is to fully partake in Christ, in his death and resurrection. It is remarkable that an apostle and saint like him describes himself as being far from the goal and not having taken hold of it. Paul saw Jesus, converted to Christianity and travelled the Mediterranean to heal, comfort and convert people in the name of Christ, his letters made it into the New Testament and became part of the Scripture. If there was someone “advanced” in faith must have been him. But his “being advanced” was precisely being advanced in humility, hence seeing himself as moving towards God, rather than presuming a sure possession of him. Paul presents himself as someone who is running towards the goal, someone who is still growing and developing. The more he strives, the more he has territory ahead to cover. This is because that very goal of partaking in Christ does not lead to uplift oneself and declaring one’s perfection, but rather leads to humbling oneself and see better one’s smallness and imperfections—not as an obstacle on the way to perfection, but paradoxically as the very means to eventually achieve that goal. There is a great dynamicity in all this movement, which goes back to Jesus himself that always calls his disciples to “follow” him, to walk, to go, to move towards yet unknown place, and ultimately to come out of themselves—never to remain comfortably where they are.

The communion with Christ does not magically teleport you into the Heavens once and forever. Rather, it let us grow in humility, and through humility it provides the “narrow gate” (Matthew 7:13) to grow in God’s love. Because that’s what matters after all. Eternal life is meaningless without love (an eternity without love is hell!). What makes life eternal is love itself and hence what makes it appealing is not the “eternity” per se, but the “love”. If we come back to the passage quoted in the beginning, the question was: “do you love me?” It’s relatively easy to say “Yes, of course!” No matter how well-intended, though, these remain words. We can even experience the feeling of divine love in certain moments, but like words, these experiences can remain just experiences. Jesus calls for something more.

In his replies to Peter, Jesus asks him first to “Feed my sheep”, namely, taking care of all those who are gathered in Jesus’s name for the sake of God’s Kingdom. Because that’s Jesus’s task, the reason why he was born: to gather the people and prepare them for the Kingdom (which is not just ‘heaven’ but the eschatological renewal of the whole of existence, to be experienced at the end of times). Where the people are gathered (“Church” means “gathering”), there we find Jesus; hence, loving him and loving the people that come together in his name is the same. If I love Jesus in my own way, in the way that makes it easy and appealing “for me”, cultivating some sort of private relationship with him that suits my agenda and schedule, then I’m already putting a boundary, a limit to my love, I’m answering: “Yes, I love you, but…”. Humility helps us taking away all these “but”, one by one.

The second thing that Jesus says to Peter is a prophecy about his martyrdom, which has (at least) two meanings: (a) by loving Jesus, we (have to) love the idea of taking up our cross (back to the third point above); (b) the phrasing of what Jesus actually announces to Peter stresses the transition from a time of youth and strength in which someone is fully autonomous and independent of doing whatever they want, to a time of old age, in which one depends on others, needs to receive care, and will have to accept doing things and being brought to places he would not have chosen. Following Jesus won’t be comfortable, it will bring us where we might not have wanted to go. It will break our prideful conception of being fully autonomous beings in control of our own lives—and this will hurt.

At the end of the scene, Jesus tells Peter: “Follow me!”, precisely as he did the first time they met in the same place three years earlier (Matthew 4:18-20). But now Peter has learned the lesson of humility: he could experience that he could not withstand his own naive promises; indeed, he renegaded Jesus, he wasn’t at the cross while he died, and despite his love, he wasn’t able to recognize him at first when he was resurrected. Peter knows, by now, that his love is still imperfect, weak, small, hence needful, he is still “running” for reaching the goal. However, precisely because of the awareness of this smallness, he’s now finally ready to follow, because he will now be able to recognize Jesus through the eyes of his humility. Only a humble heart can grow in the fullness of love.

And for those who still fear that this might be too demanding, Jesus’s words are reassuring:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Yes, we need to take the Cross (both ours and His). The magic, the paradox, the mystery, is that precisely when we accept to do this, we find relief, because whenever we accept our weakness, and thus allow ourselves to ask for help and support, we’ll receive help abundantly—and all burdens will become light in the humbleness of love.

Decorated window at the "Santuario di N.S. di Montallegro" (Rapallo, IT)