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5 min read

Humility is just plain weird

Can leaders be humble?

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

The Pope, wearing white, kneels, crades a bare foot, and kisses it.
Pope Francis kisses the foot of a woman inmate of the Rebibbia prison.
Vatican Media.

Last week I met the Pope. You don’t often get to write a sentence like that but despite the shameless name-dropping, I mention it because it got me thinking about something that shed light on our political and social life.  

It wasn’t just me and him. I was with a group of Anglican bishops and Archbishops and we had an hour with Pope Francis in one of the grand reception rooms in the Vatican. When you enter the Vatican, you can’t but be impressed by the sheer grandeur and size of the place. Long corridors with statues and huge windows, large reception rooms with elaborate frescoes of biblical scenes, Swiss guards with their brightly coloured uniforms saluting as you walk past.  

The grandeur is perhaps not surprising, and perhaps even modest for an institution that that has 1.4 billion followers – that’s about the population of China – and one of the greatest patrons of the arts in western history.  

We filed into a long elaborately painted room with marble floor, and decorated ceiling, took our seats and waited. Finally, a frail, white-robed figure hobbled in, aided by attendants in suits and white bowties. Pope Francis was a bit unsteady on his legs, but sharp, mentally alert, and with a smile that broke out over his face from time to time. 

If the Vatican felt like the palace of an ancient city state, the headquarters of a global network, like the Kremlin or the headquarters of Google, something else felt very different. The difference was brought to mind by a picture I saw a few weeks ago. 

... but Keir Starmer or Donald Trump kissing blistered, calloused, guilty feet? Hardly. This was a display of humility that stood out as plainly weird. 

Just before Easter, the Pope went to prison. In case you are wondering how you missed this extraordinary story, it wasn't of course that he had been convicted of some terrible crime, but on this occasion, he went to visit the Rebibbia prison in Rome. While there, the 87-year-old, increasingly frail pontiff, stepped out of his wheelchair, and bent down to wash the bare feet of twelve women prisoners, many of whom were in tears as he did so. There is an extraordinary picture of him with his eyes closed, kissing the right foot of one of the women, clothed in her grey prison tracksuit trousers, as if it was him who had the privilege in the encounter and not her.  

When I saw this picture, it struck me how truly extraordinary this action was.  Here is the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, performing an act of such staggering…. well, meekness, is the only word I can find for it - kissing the sweaty feet of criminal women, feet that had presumably led them into decidedly questionable places in the past, while doing so not reluctantly but gladly, thinking this was the most wonderful thing he could ever do.  

I tried to imagine other world leaders - the American President, the UK's Prime Minister, the leader of the European Union, the President of China, or the CEO of Google doing something similar. And couldn't. I could imagine politicians visiting a homeless centre to dole out food for the social media coverage, but Keir Starmer or Donald Trump kissing blistered, calloused, guilty feet? Hardly. This was a display of humility that stood out as plainly weird.  

If I had been the Creator of all that exists, I would have made sure that the credit went where it deserved. Yet the world around us has precious few explicit reminders of God.

Yet was not entirely surprising, because humility is a distinctly Christian virtue. The Greeks were decidedly lukewarm about it. Aristotle wrote: “With regard to honour and dishonour the mean is proper pride, the excess is known as a sort of ‘empty vanity’, and the deficiency is undue humility…” Humility was appropriate for slaves but not for noble-born people, certainly not for political leaders, leaders of multinational giants – or popes for that matter.  

Yet Christians have always valued humility. One of the New Testament writers says: “Clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because, God opposes the proud but shows favour to the humble.” So why does God show favour to the humble? 

The answer is, I think, surprising. It is not that God is majestic and demands humility from us measly creatures. It is that, in the Christian understanding, God is humble. Even though he appears to have not that much to be humble about. If the phrase that captures the understanding of Allah in Islam is ‘God is Great’, the main claim of Christianity is that ’God is Love’. And love cannot be proud or arrogant. It has to be humble. 

The God Christians believe in doesn’t draw attention to himself, and doesn’t shout about his own qualities. Instead, he leaves it to others to do that for him. That fits with the way the world is made. If I had been the Creator of all that exists, I would have made sure that the credit went where it deserved. Yet the world around us has precious few explicit reminders of God. There is no signature written in the sky, billboards or flashing neon lights saying ‘Made by God, just for YOU!’. In fact it is quite possible to go through life and completely miss God altogether.  

If there is a God, he seems oddly reticent, unwilling to advertise his existence, or as the prophet Isaiah put it, perhaps in a moment of frustration many centuries ago, “Truly, you are a God who hides himself.” This theme, of the ‘hidden God’ has fascinated theologians and philosophers from St Paul to Martin Luther, from Blaise Pascal to Søren Kierkegaard.  

Even when God does reveal himself, in the arrival on the human scene of Jesus Christ, even then he is oddly hidden. Jesus was perplexingly reluctant to identify himself as God. He didn’t by and large go around saying “Look at me, I am divine!” It was possible to meet Jesus of Nazareth face to face and go away thinking he was just another Jewish rabbi or teacher. In fact, he was more likely to be found acting out the role of a servant, washing the feet of his friends, providing them with food, living a wandering homeless existence, dying on a criminal’s cross, than doing important things like wearing robes, exerting political power or living in palaces.  Nowhere does God appear to us unmistakably. He is not an in-your-face kind of God. He seems, odd though it is to say it, quite shy. Or perhaps the best word is simply: humble.   

So what the Pope did in that Italian prison may have been unlike any other ruler. Yet on another level it was just like the ultimate ruler of all things.  

Snippet
Creed
Easter
Eating
3 min read

Simnel cake and the power of forgiveness

All-encompassing mercy can be hard to swallow.
A close up of a Simnel Cake shows 12 balls on top.
James Petts, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Simnel cake, yum – I love it. Though because it’s a rich heavy fruit cake, quite a lot of people disagree with me. It also has a layer of marzipan running through the middle which is an equally divisive issue, at least in our household. 

Anyway, like it or loathe it, Simnel cake is a traditional Easter delicacy that’s been eaten in Britain since at least medieval times. And the way it links with Easter is that it also has marzipan decorations on the top, in the form of eleven ballies placed around the edge – one for each of Jesus’s loyal disciples. The twelfth, missing, one represents Judas Iscariot, who forfeited his place on the cake by betraying Jesus to the Romans. Famously he accepted a bribe of 30 pieces of silver to lead the soldiers to Christ as he sat with his friends in the Garden of Gethsemane, and marked him out as the one they were after by greeting him with a kiss. It was the act, in short, that precipitated the events that subsequently resulted in Jesus’s trial and crucifixion. 

Such treachery, clearly, brands a person as the worst of sinners, and history has consequently judged Judas as exactly that. Literature too. Dante for example, in his Inferno, has him being chewed eternally in the mouth of Satan (along with Brutus and Cassius, betrayers of Julius Caesar) down in the lowest circle of Hell, specifically dedicated to traitors. It doesn’t get worse than that. 

But last Easter something interesting happened, which has made me feel rather differently about Judas. We had a new vicar arrive in our church, who came into the nave at the start of one of the Easter services holding a Simnel cake – minus the decorative ballies. He also had a pack of marzipan. He handed both cake and marzipan over to the children of the Sunday school, and sent them off to go and make ballies (along with suitable instructions on handwashing) for the top of the cake. They reappeared proudly at the end bearing their handiwork… one festive looking Simnel cake, complete with disciples. Eleven of them. 

Only what was this? Lo and behold, the vicar had another marzipan ball – a twelfth one, that had been lurking in his pocket. He held it up between finger and thumb. 

‘Uh oh children,’ he said. ‘I’ve just found Judas. Now I want you to imagine for a minute that I am God. What do you think I should do with him?’ 

One little girl, round-eyed with alarm, gasped, ‘Are you going to eat him??’ 

Chuckling from the congregation – and a few approving nods here and there, it has to be said. 

But the vicar just smiled. ‘I think the whole point of Jesus’s death was to give all of us a second chance… everyone that is, no exceptions,’ he said. ‘With God, forgiveness is universally available, particularly if someone is sorry – and in Matthew’s gospel, it says that Judas tried to give the money back because he knew he had done something terrible. I think that God would say Judas belongs back with the other disciples. And I also would like it if we could be the sort of church that says all are welcome, whatever they have done. So let’s put him on the cake with the others shall we?’ 

I thought of all this as I was making a Simnel cake this year ready for Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent, when they were traditionally produced. And yes, my cake has twelve ballies on it… Peter, Matthew, James, John et al, with Judas alongside. I keep pondering this idea of all-encompassing mercy. It was completely and utterly revolutionary in the violent period of history that Jesus lived in, and I’m not sure things have changed much. The thought of every person being offered forgiveness, no matter what, sounds mad in these days of cancel culture and moral indignation. Imagine what the Twittersphere would say.

But actually, I think the vicar was right: I’m pretty sure God would want Judas to have a spot. And let’s face it, as a very small side benefit, it’s also much easier to space twelve disciples evenly around a cake than eleven. 

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