A Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Zechariah 9:9-10 Romans 8:9,11-13 Matthew 11:25-30
Humility does not open a path to God. It allows us to exit ourselves.
A helpful lesson in this regard comes from American history. Craig Fehrman’s This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark (2026) tells more of the story than we have typically heard.
About half of the 30-some members of the expedition were U.S. Army. Half were civilians. A young and physically imposing black man, identified only as “York,” was a slave of William Clark, one of the expedition’s captains, who came from a Kentucky family of slave-owners.
As small boys, Clark and York would have played together, but that stopped “once York turned nine or ten.” Eventually Clark inherited the black man as one of his slaves, someone he could, and did, whip when expectations were not met.
It was York’s intelligence rather than his young owner’s kindness that eventually gave him a new role in Clark’s life, that of body servant. This “was a slave who stayed close to his owner and prioritized his comfort, laying out his clothes, serving his meals, packing his saddlebags, and riding alongside him.”
Even before the famous expedition,
Clark toured the country by horse and by boat, stopping in St. Louis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, where on one trip he reported that he “became acquainted with the president, Mr. Jefferson”—and surely spent time with his old friend, the president’s secretary, Meriwether Lewis.
When Lewis later invited Clark to co-captain Thomas Jefferson’s expedition, searching for a waterway to the west coast of the continent, York accompanied him.
But Fehrman corrects those who might think that York’s role was preferable to field labor.
As a body servant, York enjoyed more privileges but more pressure. While Clark trusted him to run errands alone, he fixated on his slave’s attitude and actions. The orders came fast and inflexible: Brush my coat, kindle my fire. In Clark’s writing, York’s name tended to fade out, as if he was becoming an extension of his owner—“my man,” “my servant,” “my boy.”
Fehrman estimates the price York must have paid in humility by retrieving the voice of an anonymous Kentucky body servant who wrote: “Favorite slaves are most to be pitied of all. They are obliged to cringe a little lower than any of the others.”
A favorite slave received extra scrutiny, but it was worse than that. The more a favorite slave succeeded, the more an owner wanted to humble him—the more an owner needed to humble him, even though he was the one who’d elevated the slave in the first place. “The brighter a slave,” the Kentucky man wrote, “the more the master is jealous of what’s working in his mind.”
This may indeed be how humility has worked out in our history as a nation, but it is not the virtue the Gospel extols.
God does not require or seek our abasement. Indeed, as the fullness of life and love—which is how we might define God even while never having fully encountered him—God already opens himself to us, pours out upon us that life and love that he is.
Humility does not open a path to God. It allows us to exit ourselves. It makes us ready to receive God. This is more than theological musing. It is the testimony of the Scriptures.
See, your king shall come to you;
a just savior is he,
meek, and riding on an ass,
on a colt, the foal of an ass (Zech 9:9).
And it is the witness of Jesus. We do not humble ourselves to find him. He humbled himself to find us.
For us, humility consists in laying aside the false self, the burdensome self, the self that obscures its own origin and destiny.
Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am meek and humble of heart;
and you will find rest for yourselves.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden light (Mt 11:28-30).
York was indispensable for the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition even if he remains a largely forgotten figure. He is also a helpful reminder that abasement is an impoverished understanding of humility. Humility does not open a path to God. It allows us to exit ourselves.
York was born into slavery. He did not choose to accompany his master into the unknown West. He did, however, choose the way in which he would do this. He went out of himself and opened himself to God.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts