As our country celebrates its 250th anniversary of independence, it is good to be reminded that humility is God’s way.  As a country that is wealthy and powerful, we can be too easily tempted to think that our way should be dominance.  “Get them before they get us.”  Or “Might makes right.”  We have lived those words too many times in our history as a nation.  If you came to the Holy Hour on Friday, where we prayed for an end to racism, you heard that my order, the Jesuits, also succumbed to the seduction of dominance in the 1700 and 1800’s in this country.  We actually held African people in slavery, and we did worse than that.  In 1838 we sold 272 individuals to save Georgetown University, thereby separating families—mothers from their children, fathers from their wives, grandparents from their grandchildren.  The very thing we admonish the US government for doing to immigrants, we did in a tragic and traumatic way.  We can all be tempted by power, by dominance, by riches.

The readings today remind us that God’s way is a way of humility.  The Prophet Zechariah presents the image of a king arriving in a simple way:  “See, your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, meek, and riding on an ass.”  It reminds us of how Jesus entered Jerusalem to face his humiliating death.  And in the gospel, Jesus praises the Father, not because he favors the rich and powerful, the educated, the elite.  Rather he says, “although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the little ones.”  Unlike the Pharisees, the Jewish leaders who through laws dominated people, Jesus comes to lift burdens: “I am meek and humble of heart . . . my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

My prayer for us as a country is that we can live the bold words that we wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (and women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”  We have a long way to go to make these words a reality for all people.