Finding Justice in the Call to Meekness and Humility
By Christina O’Brien
“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” Matthew 11:28-30
We are all labored and burdened, especially now as we feel the weight of societal oppression and social sin, and we desire this rest that Jesus offers. Yet, as we challenge ourselves to continue deepening our understanding of the diseases of racism and marginalization in America, we find this rest elusive and we feel irresponsible for wanting it. Perhaps it’s because we skip over or misunderstand a crucial clause in the verse:
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for yourselves.”
This was the Gospel reading on Juneteenth, the celebration of the death of slavery in America. Tragically, I imagine that “Christians” have used verses like this to justify the forced subjugation and humiliation that they imposed on the marginalized. But we know that this oppression is not what Jesus desired when he asked his disciples to be “meek and humble of heart,” and we know that those who wrought such oppression will be held accountable for their active rejection or willful ignorance of Christ’s call to their own humility and meekness.
In my own weakness, when I read this Gospel, it spoke into the exhaustion I was experiencing as a white-presenting biracial woman after only a few weeks of the re-awakened discussion of racism in America. “Yes,” my heart responded, “I am tired, even though I’ve barely suffered.” In Jesus’ response, there is no condemnation, nor is there a pat on the back for a job well done. It’s simple: “learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart.”
Meekness and humility are the way to rest, even in the midst of oppression, as Christ showed us when he was crucified and tortured as an innocent man. We resist meekness and humility for a variety of reasons. I know I fear that these qualities will allow people to wrongfully condemn and humiliate me. More nobly, I worry that they will block the path to justice, giving oppressors excuses to continue their patterns of forced submission. But perhaps I’m afraid because I don’t understand what meekness and humility as Jesus taught them actually are. This is unsurprising because American culture privileges power and status over humility every time. But even if human power is limited, perhaps we will discover the power of God is at its greatest in the meek and humble person.
Meek
Meekness is often made synonymous with weakness. How can that be if Jesus promises us that the meek will inherit the earth? A simple Google search of “meek” yields the result: “quiet, gentle, and easily imposed on; submissive.” But if we use Jesus as the yardstick of meekness, this definition does not suffice. Certainly he was gentle, (and in fact, the Greek word for “meek” in Matthew 11:29 translates more closely to “gentle”) but he was selective about when and how he was to be “quiet,” “easily imposed on” or “submissive,” so much so that there was power in his silence and submission, as demonstrated on the Cross, even if his enemies, blinded by worldly vices, could not see it.
Aquinas, quoting Aristotle defines meekness differently. According to Aristotle, meekness moderates anger. In his definition, the meek person is “undisturbed, and not carried away by passion, but...feels anger according to the dictates of reason, on the proper occasions, and for a proper length of time.” This definition of meekness would suggest that our lack of rest could stem from either a lack or an excess of righteous anger in the face of injustice, racial and otherwise.
Anger, as defined by Aristotle is “the desire for vengeance,” and according to Aquinas, it is a passion that is not necessarily sinful, but becomes sinful when it desires to “wreak vengeance upon one who has not deserved it, or to a greater extent than it has been deserved, or in conflict with the dispositions of law, or from an improper motive.” An unknown early Church writer said in a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew that “without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable, crimes unchecked,” so anger is not always evil, and it is not opposed to being “meek and humble of heart.” Aquinas says, “it is praiseworthy to desire vengeance as a corrective of vice and for the good of justice.” Anger should be experienced in response to authentic injustices, especially in response to injustices against the lowly and marginalized with whom Jesus tells us he commiserates especially.
This means that in fulfilling Jesus’ call to be meek and humble of heart, we must examine our anger. While I am not suggesting that Aristotle, a western philosopher with plenty of moral flaws of his own, is our moral compass, I am suggesting that the heart of God is. Guided by the Holy Spirit, we must ask ourselves what God’s heart is for a situation. Is God, the perfect Father and the source and essence of all love, angered by this situation, and does my anger follow his? If it doesn’t, we must recognize the weakness and hard-heartedness that could lead us to disordered rage or sinful apathy, enlightening our eyes and responding to his invitation to see as he sees and allow what wounds him to wound us.
Humble
This definition of meekness is empowering in many ways, but Jesus doesn’t stop there. He goes on to identify himself as “humble” of heart. Many of us are more familiar with humility as the virtue that allows us to regard ourselves in the light of truth in our paradoxical identities as painfully limited, yet infinitely valuable and loved. According to Aquinas, humility is certainly the more extreme and challenging of the two traits. He defines the virtue as, “praiseworthy self-abasement to the lowest place” as a result of an “inward movement of the soul” and “inward choice of the mind.” Furthermore, Aquinas says that humility “consists in keeping oneself within one's own bounds, not reaching out to things above one, but submitting to one's superior,” recognizing God as the supreme superior.
Again, this virtue has been misused to perpetuate submission to false superiors, but at its heart and in tandem with authentic meekness, it is the antidote to injustice. Humility does not ask the oppressed to accept their maltreatment as deserved. In fact, if humility tells us that in our brokenness, God still loves us each infinitely and it particularly highlights how intrinsically opposed it is to the will of God to claim superiority over another. When humility is combined with meekness, we should experience righteous anger upon recognition of systems that treat mere humans as God, the superior to us all. We have a responsibility to respond to such injustices, especially when they are being inflicted on others.
Meekness, Humility, and Justice
We fear meekness and humility because we don’t want to become soft or despondent in the face of injustice. But there is nothing in these dispositions that opposes justice; in fact, they remove the obstacles to justice. How much suffering and marginalization could have been avoided if those in power would take on Jesus’ call to meekness and humility? What if our Founding Fathers had taken this call seriously and followed Jesus in his lowliness? Casting themselves into the lowest place, angered by man’s power hungry tendency to take and kill, instead of subjugating all “others” in direct opposition to Jesus’ call.
This is often the heart of the problem: that those in power reject meekness and humility and instead regard these as signs of weakness. Whether they know it or not, the rejection of these qualities is a rejection of Christ himself.
The fact is that humility opposes any motive to seek out power for the sake of itself. It also opposes the tendency to view oneself as the most intelligent, knowledgeable, informed or holy. This does not mean that the humble person cannot take on a position of authority or educate the misinformed, but it does mean that they cannot do so from a place of perceived superiority or abasement of another. The humble leader must accept as an awesome gift their opportunity to be a vessel of the truth, never assuming that they are all-knowing, never fearing being corrected or humiliated, and judging statements based on the opinion of God, not the opinion of men. In this way, meekness clears the obstacles to justice: namely pride, vainglory, and greed.. As the Gospel teaches us, these deadly sins have no power over a person who is meek and humble of heart, because this person is a vessel of the Holy Spirit himself.
So what do we do when we are fighting either for our own rights or the rights of others? First, we take on authentic humility and meekness. We do not assume that we know best, nor do we assume that those in power know best. We examine everything in the light of Spirit-led humility that affirm both our smallness and importance, and condemn systems that are built on the subjugation of the lowly, knowing that they are opposed to the heart of our God. If we in our sin have been perpetuating those systems, humility allows us to have no trouble bowing our heads and repenting, rejoicing in the opportunity to grow closer to God’s heart by reaching a new degree of humility. It also allows us to receive false condemnations without becoming indignant or inordinately wounded by the opinion of another.
All of these interior and exterior actions are taken without any hint of pride. There is no sense that “I have the truth” and “ou should listen to me.” Instead, it is a conviction that Christ has the truth, and a certainty that he calls us to examine our world against his vision for human relationships as he taught in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) and throughout his ministry. This contains an assumption that another could easily have a deeper understanding of these truths, but also unwavering confidence in what Christ has made clear.
With humility and meekness, our eyes can be enlightened to reality and how God himself sees it, it is through this that we can become true ambassadors for the Kingdom on Earth. When we are meek and humble of heart we are unafraid to speak truth, but we are also unafraid to be corrected. These dispositions oppose the prideful motivation to be seen as one of the good guys or to maintain the status quo, which I expect almost all of us fall prey to sometimes, and which rob us of the rest Christ desires to offer us even in the face of injustice. In meekness and humility, we’re able to see the ugly reality of disregard for human lives that is steeped in our culture, and step into the freedom to fight it without becoming agitated and restless. We’re able to break from the bonds of political allegiance, recognizing the reality that powerful parties and systems rarely came to be as a result of humility and meekness. Furthermore, we’re liberated from divisive tactics of the enemy, freed from disdain for those who do not see as we see, relinquished from the fear of what will happen if we are proven wrong.
It is then that we will hold a real reverence for our fellow humans, especially those who have been marginalized, their suffering, and the truth. We can let go of the need for control and affirmation, and, in this vulnerable submission, find true rest. Here, we can join the mission to build from the rubble God’s Kingdom on Earth, and invite all of God’s beloved to rest in his meek and humble heart, where even the heaviest burdens are eased.
