Many people know Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean but he’s better as a speaking comedian. In one of his speaking episodes he plays the Devil welcoming people to hell. His task is to sort the people out and he starts by grouping them. “Murderers, murderers over here please. Thank you. Looters and pillagers over here. Thieves if you could join them. And lawyers, you’re in that lot”. [1]Last week, we heard a parable of a Pharisee and a Tax-Collector in the Temple. We are told that what separates the two of them is humility. The tax-collector was humble and as a result, he ended up at right with God. This week, we hear an incident instead of a parable involving a Tax-Collector named Zacchaeus. Just like lawyers being grouped together with thieves, looters and pillagers, tax-collectors are by common prejudice often grouped into the same category. Furthermore, all descriptions seem to point him out as an unjust man. He was a senior tax collector, a wealthy man and the crowd complained that Jesus had gone to stay at a sinner’s house. The prejudice against him was overwhelming; never mind the fact that the name Zacchaeus is formed from a Hebrew word which means clean, pure and innocent.
So today, perhaps Zacchaeus, “clean, pure and innocent” can deepen our understanding of humility. He is humble because he stands his ground. They deem him rich, greedy and a sinner but he claims to give half his property to the poor. The tense used in our gospel is “I am going to give”, a future tense, but in Greek the tense used is present suggesting that he customarily and repeatedly helps the poor. And to further substantiate his claim, he makes conditional statement that IF he had cheated anybody, he would pay back 4 times what he had cheated. Torah itself only decrees that thieves should repay 120 percent. Roman Law dictates that convicted criminals should repay 400 percent of what had been stolen. Here we have someone who’s not convicted except by prejudice, a man who more than fulfils the criteria of Jewish Torah and Roman law.
A person like Zacchaeus is able to stand his ground only if he has a healthy sense of self-esteem. In order to be humble, like the unnamed Tax-Collector last week and Zacchaeus this week, we need a healthy sense of self-esteem. But, you know what? Unfortunately poor self-esteem or the lack of it is often mistaken for humility—a mistake which sometimes produces deadly results. People who are bullied may just brush if off because they don’t think that they need to defend their dignity and they think (especially Christians) that it is humility not to fight back. But underneath it all, the person who has no measure of self-esteem/self-worth to defend himself or herself grows greater in depression and self-hatred. The incidences of “going postal” that we read about in the USA[2], like Columbine High or Virginia Tech (this April where a Korean student massacred many) have some connexion with the fatal lack of self-esteem.
There are many reasons but a reason why many of us have such poor self-esteem is because we are a generation seemingly obsessed with success—material success. But that is not actually our fault because our self-esteem is consistently assaulted or battered by the constant barrage of suggestions that we do not have enough to be happy. This is what I can afford to drive: a run-down car but I am constantly buffeted by winds of “not safe enough, not prestigious enough, not big enough”. A society (race or community) that constantly tells us that we need to market ourselves—to project ourselves—is a society which is also at the same time insecure or suffers from poor self-esteem. Perhaps that explains why the Keris or Malay native dagger needs to be unsheathed and waved year after year and cultural justifications are given, as if we were stupid.
We instinctively shy away or react against people who are selfish. The problem is that when people are not comfortable with themselves, they tend to focus more on themselves: their needs, their true identity, their search for meaning and satisfaction. A selfish society, an ego-centred world is rather symptomatic of a society that is not at home with itself. Selfish people are usually people with poor self-esteem. It is a vicious cycle.
Self-esteem thus consists of knowing, accepting and in a sense being at peace with who you are. It is easy to say: know, accept and be at peace with who you are but it is not. We are afraid that we are never good enough, what we have is lacking and is not acceptable. A healthy self-worth, that is to stand one’s ground, also demands that we dare look at the ugliness of our sins because being at peace is not an excuse to remain in a state of sin. If you like, self-esteem is really the measure of our worth before God. I stand before God as I am… not as I would ideally like to be or want to be. [3] It takes a lot of courage to believe that God can accept this “me”, all warts and pimples. That realisation is the stepping stone of self-esteem. That is why after confession, I tell the penitent: “For your penance (actually penance, in this case, is really an insult to God)… rather for your prayer, go to the Blessed Sacrament. Self-esteem is best cultivated or nurtured before the one who, in the first place gave it back to us… If you want to measure your true worth, stand before God because true self-worth is not a construct. It doesn’t come through self-help programmes.
You know, every Jesuit is invited to embrace the 3rd Degree of humility where one embraces insults for the sake of Christ. Humility presupposes a crucial and important element of accepting who we are. To give up honour, prestige, entitlement and to accept insult presupposes that you give up something valuable. Teresa of Avila says that humility is living the truth. This means that unless you own yourself, that is, live and accept the truth of who you are, it is hard to give up what you don’t have and own in the first place. A person cannot suffer insult for God if he or she doesn’t know even how to love himself or herself the way God does. Therefore, it’s not possible to be humble without a healthy sense of the self. And it’s not possible to embrace the will of God without humility.
Footnotes:
[1] Fornicators if you could step forward. My God, there are a lot of you. Could I split you up into adulterers and the rest? Male adulterers can you just form a line in front of the small guillotine in the corner there? Then he proceeds to insult the French and the Germans. The English, French and Germans have a history…
[2] The term originated from the cases in the US Postal Service where employees who, due to job stress or other traumatic influence, have murdered co-workers on the job, usually with a firearm. Now it means general insanity that includes violence through firearm. The incidents in Virginia Tech and Columbine High are two good examples.
[3] After the Fall, human history consists of running away from a God who dares to face us in our nakedness. We are constantly trying to cover ourselves with fig leaves. Fig leaves represent the “ephemeral” search for the “self” bolstered by “wealth or honour”.
