Are you meek and humble of
heart?
We tend not to associate
meekness with power, perhaps because we aren’t always clear what the word meek means. Yet, when Zechariah predicts the coming of a king who is meek, and riding on a humble
ass, the prophet also points to the immense power this king will have when
God works through him: the warrior’s bow shall be banished, and he
shall proclaim peace to the nations.
Zechariah points to a time without war or weapons, because humankind’s
true king will be self-possessed rather than vengeful, grounded in the face of
adversity rather than belligerent.
Indeed, this is the meaning of the word meek: meekness is a virtue
that allows us to maintain our self-possession when faced with misfortune;
meekness allows us to respond to evil with good from a place of grounded
calmness. As such, it goes hand in hand
with humility, a word that comes from
the Latin humilis, literally, on the ground, or grounded. To reign from a place of meekness and
humility, then, suggests that the king of whom Zechariah speaks is calm and
collected, looking always toward peace rather than war. That king lives in intimate
relationship with God, lives grounded in God’s covenant love, a love that is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of
great kindness (Psalm 145), a love whose very meekness bespeaks might.
It is not surprising that
all of these qualities can be found in Jesus, as the Lord himself tells the
disciples in Matthew’s Gospel: Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for
I am meek and humble of heart, Jesus says.
Of course we know Jesus is not weak, but he is meek, that is, self-possessed, grounded in the love of the Father
with whom he enjoys an intimate relationship: no one knows the Son except the
Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son
wishes to reveal him. Moreover, as
Paul tells the Romans, if the Father’s Spirit now dwells in them (as well it
should since the death and rising of Jesus), they too are called to live according to that Spirit, from that same
place of meekness and self-possession that governed all that Jesus himself did
while he was on earth.
Are we meek? Perhaps meekness is a virtue we must learn
from Jesus himself, that we might live our lives according to the Spirit of God.
This post is based on OLMC’s
Scripture class.
Image source: Wordle
No comments:
Post a Comment