Today’s instruction from the book of Sirach isn’t very interesting. It’s that same old message about humility that we see all over the wisdom literature, and not even just the wisdom literature, of the Bible. But the trouble is that we can hear the message over and over and still forget it—hence the need for Scripture and Tradition to remind us over and over again about the two most basic truths: God is not we, and we are not God.
Our Lord’s parable about higher and lower places at the wedding feast is another reminder about humility, another statement of the obvious that we all the same must hear. The Pharisees would not have gone around asserting that they were God. Far from it! Yet Jesus observed, it seems, a pattern of behavior suggesting that their actions revealed more of their true theology.
The scenario, and his comments, further complicates the dynamics of humility, for right there, front and center, is the possibility of acting humble in order to appear great. Choosing the lower seat, after all, could just be a clever trick to get the higher status that you really want. Surely, this is not what the Lord thinks we ought to do.
The second part of the parable, the command to invite all the poor and the lame to the feast, demonstrates a less self-serving kind of humility. But even this humble action could be done for the wrong reasons; we could be simply hedging our bets, avoiding status in this life only to achieve it in the next. This, again, is hardly the purest intention, even if it is a little better than using humility to acquire worldly fame or status.
The main point is neither just a simple “be humble” nor a crafty “be humble in order to be great,” but rather a reminder that ultimately, true status is judged only by God. Appearances never tell the whole story, which is why the Lord reminds us in Luke 13:30 that some of the last will be first and the first last. The statement isn’t just a contradiction of the visible norm, but rather an assertion that the real accounting is what God sees, not what we see or what we think we see. In fact, some of the first probably will be first, and some of the last last. So we dare not, for example, reduce true virtue to a kind of excessive show—the kind of false humility where, for example, a priest, bishop, or pope goes around refusing to act like a priest or a bishop or a pope because he lacks the humility to allow his office to be more important than his individual personality.
The call to discipleship means moving from falseness and vice to truth and virtue, but not necessarily all at once. It is in fact better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than it is to do the wrong thing for the wrong reason, or even the wrong thing for the right reason. The imitation of virtue isn’t true virtue, but it can form us for virtue. Performative humility can develop into real humility, and it is still usually better than unrepentant pride, because there is at least some higher degree of truth-recognition.
To put it another way, proper humility, which is to say a right recognition of who we are in relation to God and one another, can include its own proper ambition for great things—not ambition for power or worldly status for its own sake, but ambition for the things of God, ambition for virtue, ambition for the kingdom.
The Catholic moral tradition wouldn’t put it like that, exactly, though we can probably get away with it in modern English. For the Angelic Doctor, “ambition” is always a vice, a disordered desire for honor. But what we might today think of as a virtuous “ambition” is really what St. Thomas would call magnanimity: the desire for greatness. Literally, it means being “great-souled.” It’s not a desire for greatness in itself, but a desire for great good. Another term in the tradition, magnificence, further names the virtue of actually accomplishing great things. In both of these the great goods desired or accomplished are true goods, which is to say not merely the boosting of one’s own ego, but the increase of beauty, truth, and goodness in the world in witness and service to the kingdom of God.
I hope it goes without saying that it is good to desire heaven, to desire eternal life. Yes, it is possible to desire it for the wrong reasons—as we say so often in the act of contrition—such as merely avoiding pain or punishment. It is also possible to want the right thing but to fool ourselves into thinking we can acquire it by the wrong means. This too is a temptation: whereas a good act with defective motivation may be a middle step toward virtue, and toward God, an evil act, no matter the motivation, is always a step away.
Desiring eternity, though, has a particular form in the economy of salvation, and that form is our Lord Jesus Christ. The author of Hebrews, in today’s passage, distinguishes between the Old Covenant and the New, Sinai and the heavenly Zion, the old sacrifices and the new. “We have an altar,” he writes in the final chapter, just beyond today’s passage, “from which those who serve the tabernacle have no right to eat” (Heb. 13:10).
In the old way, proximity to the holy of holies was proximity to God. There was, then, almost inevitably, the possibility of a competitive quest for honor, and understandably so: who would not want to be closer to God? But here at banquet with the Pharisees, the incarnate Son hints at this new reality: no matter where you are at the table, you receive the infinite gifts of the host.
The reason why we should not seek honor, some kind of superficial elevation, is that the only true and lasting honor is the honor available to us where we are now, no matter who we are—the honor that comes only from being united with Jesus. The great things that we should desire and do are the things that honor him, that glorify him, that bring us closer to him. The truest humility is not worrying about our place at all but only delighting in the fact that our place will always be, thanks to his love and generosity, in his sacred heart.