Humility makes me curious. It’s a foreign way of being for everyone but God. As gigantic as Jesus’ life was, He was small in it. Or to say it another way, in the Gospels, you see the Creator of everything willfully minimizing Himself to the point that He is sometimes unnoticeable.
Take his first miracle for example. There’s a wedding. Jesus is there with His disciples. His mother too. Wine is poured, drunk, then all gone. Mary asks Jesus to help, and He does, but not in the way anybody might expect. The servant fills jars with water at Jesus’s command. Then they are told to draw some out and deliver it to the master of the feast. The water, now wine, is tasted and praised as being better than the first.
But have you ever noticed who was praised and how it wasn’t Jesus? The master of the feast has no idea he just swallowed a miracle. Most of the party doesn’t either. For all they know, the bridegroom was being an excellent host. All the goodness they drank poured out of them and toward the one for whom it didn’t belong. Meanwhile, the maker of the wine and the world stood in the room completely content.
When was the last time you did good without expecting, hoping, or suggesting it be noticed? When you gave, served, prayed, fasted, studied, rejoiced, taught, died to, wiped, cooked, cleaned, labored for, organized, plucked out, cut out, built up anything, did you expect a parade? When it didn’t come, how did it leave you? Bitter? Discouraged? Both, maybe?
Could it be that the expectation belongs to an invisible pride? The kind that leaves us unsatisfied by the gaze of God. The kind that makes us the “they” in John 12:43: “For they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. “
How much of our “goodness” is, if we really took the time to dig it up and look, grown out of the soil of an insatiable need to be loved and liked by the people who didn’t create us?
Read Jesus’s words and believe them: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” ( Mathew 6: 1-4)
Beloved, Jesus commands us to do as He does. Turn the water to wine, let them drink, watch them rejoice in it and if they leave your name out of their song, that’s okay.
There’s better praise awaiting you.
– Upon Waking, Jackie Hill Perry
