St. Thomas on Humility

“If you seek an example of humility, look on the Crucified.  Although He was God, He chose to be judged by Pontius Pilate and to suffer death….  The Master chose to die for His servant; the Life of the Angels suffered death for man.”

St. Teresa of Avila famously said that the three most important virtues in the spiritual life are:  humility, humility, and (you guessed it) humility.  St. Thomas Aquinas, in the quotation above, holds up for each of us the greatest model of humility that we can ever have, that of our Blessed Lord himself in His Passion and Cross.  It is a very good thing for us to meditate regularly on the Passion and Death of our Lord, to consider the humility that He shows:  in embracing His Passion during the Agony in the Garden (“not my will, by thine be done”), in allowing Himself to be mocked and slapped by the servants of the high priest, Caiaphas, in His scourging at the pillar and the crowning of thorns, and finally, in suffering the mockery of the priests, soldiers, people and the thief dying beside Him upon the Cross.  Here we have the eternal Son of God, the creator of heaven and earth, being mocked and spat upon by those who are His creatures, who are slaves of sin, and He accepted their mockery and scorn out of love for them, and for all of us too!  May we embrace the little humiliations that we face in the course of our day, and offer them in union with the Humble Lord Jesus, so that we too will become humble!