Monday, April 20, 2020
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Psalm 37: Meekness
The meek shall inherit the earth.
From the Beatitudes in Matthew 5: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” I always understood the quality of meekness to be sweetness and affability, not strength. Here, however, the word is used to indicate a controlled strength.
To possess the meekness of Jesus is to be teachable. Meek disciples have submitted their strength to God for God’s use. They have no arrogance. They do not seek status or fame. They do not hoard goods or information. They become fully open to God. They demonstrate that they can be trusted with God’s authority since they allow God to work through them. When we follow this thinking we begin to see a holy paradox unfold.
The story of Jesus and how we are to imitate him is a challenging one because it asks us to let go of our ego in order to allow God to take us over. It asks us to take our work as Easter people seriously. It calls us to live in the Spirit rather than in the world. All of this is difficult but when we find ourselves stumbling with this kind of attitude before God, we might explore Psalm 37 as a guide for discipleship.
The meekness of Christ is not mere submission. Nor is it a cowering before overwhelming odds. Rather, it is an emptying of self to allow God to enter and fill us. It is a putting away of personal agendas and small plans to allow ourselves to become part of God’s universal agenda and God’s immense, all-encompassing plan. The meekness of Christ is more powerful than any known force, and more enduring and dynamic than any known philosophy. And it is this gift of meekness that once received, must be polished and honed through discipleship. It is really that simple.
The MAGNIFICAT Meditation on March 7, 2009 is taken from the writings of Father Alfred Delp, S.J. who was condemned to death in Nazi Germany. Even in that ugly little room filled with hatred where men were making a travesty of justice, [the word Father] never left me . . . All we do is remember faithfully that God does not call himself our Father, that we are bidden to call on him by that name and to know him as such – and that this pompous, self-important world in which we live is only the foreground to the center of reality which so many scarcely notice in the noise and tumult surrounding them . . .The person of faith is aware of the solicitude, the compassion, the deep-seated support of providence in innumerable silent ways even when he is attacked from all sides and the outlook seems hopeless. God offers words full of wonderful comfort and encouragement; he has ways of dealing with the most desperate situations. All things have a purpose and they help again and again to bring us back to our Father.
Delp reminds us that the father who created all of us provides for us, watches over us, suffers with us and is joyful with us. It is this father who sends his son in human form to teach us how to be meek. Let us join with one another in our own humble way to encounter this meek Jesus even when we find ourselves in desperate places. Let us look for strength in one another and in Jesus even when we find ourselves in hopeless places. And let us always seek to return to one another the comfort of the Spirit, the solicitude of the Christ, and the compassion of the Father. For it is in this way that we find true meekness. It is in this way that we encounter the Christ. It is in this way that we become true disciples of God.
Tomorrow, what results when we practice meekness . . .
Image from: http://joyfulpapist.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/2384/
Cameron, Peter John. “Meditation of the Day.” MAGNIFICAT. 7.3 (2009). Print.
A re-post from April 20, 2013.
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