I’ve been thinking a bit about how biblical humility could help us to live well in relation to others.  If our cultural conversations over the past year and a half have hinted at anything, it is that Christians need to know how to faithfully respond to injustice, especially racial injustice, in our communities.  We need to know what justice is and how to rightly pursue it. 

Yet justice cannot remedy or prevent all wrongs; justice is limited in a fallen world.  We saw this reality during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s: even though the laws demanded that civil rights be afforded to African Americans (laws such as the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution as well as the Civil Rights Acts), the effectuality of those laws was limited by the individual prejudice and pride of citizens in the states. Harper Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman portrays some of the social tension during this time; tension between what the law said and the habits or mores of the people.  Laws establish the norms for our actions, but they have no power over our thoughts.  They can coerce, not convince.  Justice can be enacted legally but lag socially.  Thus, while justice can formally right wrongs in our society, it is limited. 

Like justice, humility deals with our relationships to others rather than our relationship to self.  It is a “social virtue.”  Humility represents our ability to rightly see our place in the world.  If we possess humility, we can properly value ourselves and see who we really are in relation to God and other people.  And that valuation of self helps us to value other people, even people who are different from ourselves.

Flannery O’Connor’s short story, Revelation, gives us a taste of how humility can be a social virtue.*  In the story, the main character Mrs. Turpin experiences spiritual blindness.  Her view of reality is particularly blinded by her pride; she has an unnecessarily high view of herself (a pig farmer), and an extremely low view of others.  While she waits at the doctor’s office, Mrs. Turpin internally categorizes the fellow patients based on wealth, land ownership, race, and manners. 

Mrs. Turpin also proclaims some pretty proud sentiments during her wait and is suddenly hit in the forehead (as Karen Swallow Prior astutely notes—nearly in the eye) by a book flung at her from a nasty girl across the room.  As Mrs. Turpin is lying on the floor, the girl indicates that she thinks Mrs. Turpin has come from—and ought to return to—hell.  The event is humiliating.  It is a means of God’s grace to begin a process of moving from blind pride towards clear-sighted humility.

The problem of pride is that it relies on lies; lies about who we are, about who others are, about who God is.  The way out of pride comes through suffering. Humility is the product of humiliation, of suffering and affliction.  Mrs. Turpin is afflicted by social degradation in the doctor’s office, but that affliction is the first step towards gaining true sight and removing the blinders of her pride.  At the end of the story, Mrs. Turpin sees a vision of heaven.  Her spiritual blindness has been replaced with spiritual sight.  Through the newly gained vision, Mrs. Turpin undergoes a reversal of her understanding of self. Whereas she thought she was first among the social classes, her vision shows her last in a line to heaven.  Yet she still gains entrance to God’s kingdom.  The woman who came “from hell” has reversed course. 

Mrs. Turpin’s humiliation was her salvation; it is the same with us. Only by humbling ourselves before the cross–by seeing and loving God for who He is, and understanding our place in relation to Him–can we begin to gain humility towards others (Romans 12:3). We are given the grace to see ourselves for who we really are: equally sinful, equally saved if we accept Christ’s atonement, equally enabled after salvation to pursue true virtue, including justice. 

As Christians, we are best equipped for humility because we have the example of Christ.  Christ Himself endured humiliation.  Philippians 2:5-8 reminds us that Christ “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”  Hebrews 4:15 tells us that Christ was tempted in every way while He walked this earth; He knew temptation from Satan, poverty, frustration, weariness, disappointment, rejection, sorrow, ridicule, and loneliness.  He was tempted because He was humbled.  If Christ Himself—the Son of God—went through a process of humiliation, how much more do we need to, since we are creatures afflicted with the sin of pride? Not one of our humiliations can ever be worse than what Christ endured on the cross.  

Humility helps us as individuals within our particular communities respond to injustice with hope.  There is a peculiar kind of hope that emerges through the process of humiliation. The “paradox of pride” is that the highest have the furthest to fall (Luke 14:11, Psalm 147:6).  The inverse is also true.  Through humility, the lowliest are raised to new heights.  Christ himself was exalted through his humiliation to “the highest place” and given a name “that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9-11).  James 4:10 tells believers of this hope: “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you” (See also I Peter 5:6). The rewards of humility are honor, grace, riches, and life (Proverbs 18:12, 22:4, I Peter 5:5, James 4:6).  In following Christ’s example, we have a similar hope of exaltation.

This hope spurs us to seek peace in our communities. Humility doesn’t mean thinking less of ourselves so much as it means not thinking about ourselves as much.  That absence of self-absorption enables us to love and honor the particular people God places on our path.  By practicing sober judgement about who we are, especially who we are in the eyes of God, we gain the ability to be gentle, patient, forbearing with people who are different from us.  We are eager to seek unity and peace (Ephesians 4:1-3).  Humility is the beginning towards developing and practicing the virtues we need to bring reconciliation between the people in our communities on an individual level. Additionally, humility helps us to start from a position of commonality that is needed to have a conversation. We are prepared to persuade, rather than coerce.

Humility, then, is a second key virtue in faithfully responding to injustice.  Justice is limited, but love is not.  Love covers a multitude of sins, and insofar as we have the humility to love our neighbor as ourselves, we can perhaps begin to overcome the shortcomings of justice.  

* I am indebted to Karen Swallow Prior’s discussion of O’Connor’s Revelation in her excellent book On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books (Brazos Press, 2018). Highly recommended reading.