Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle C
Reflecting on Luke 14: 1, 7-14
It’s shocking, the number of life lessons I’m still learning. Aren’t we supposed to reach a point where we know enough to get through the day without making huge, embarrassing mistakes?
My most recent revelation is that I must always assume that every person in the room knows at least as much, if not much more, than I do. I’m noticing this about the great friends I’m making in my Senior Exercise Class at the gym.
We’re all around the same age, with the same aches and pains. But ask just any random person how she completes a particular exercise so effortlessly, and chances are she’ll share about her award-winning college career in soccer, or softball, or where she ranks in the neighborhood pickleball league.
I have a little job, speaking to medical students about how to diagnose ovarian cancer. This disease strikes women of every background, yet every woman I’ve ever been on a panel with is as comfortable speaking in front of large audiences as I am. It’s a huge mistake to think that we are more important, more experienced, more knowledgeable about anything than anyone in the room.
Jesus was swaddled in humility from the day of his birth. Though he was in the form of God, even when confronted by the terrifying Roman soldiers, he did not deem equality something to be grasped at, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave (Phil. 2: 6-11).
How embarrassing to take a place of honor at a banquet and find out that other, more accomplished people were meant to sit there. If we’re honest, we admit that being humble isn’t a virtue; it’s just acknowledging the obvious.
How is humility the most valuable trait in your spouse or friends?
Kathy McGovern ©2025