Beware the lure of arrogance and hubris

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/030518.cfm
II Kings 5:1-15
Luke 4:24-30

What happened to the folks of Nazareth that turned them against Jesus? I believe it was hubris. Merriam-Webster defines “hubris” as the stuff of exaggerated pride and uncensored self-confidence, based upon a failed yearning to be admired and adored. We can tell when our pride and self-confidence reach exaggeration; when our language consists primarily of insults, abusive criticism, and cussing. 

The Greeks were the first to categorize the behavior. They named it “hybris,” and declared it a wanton violent thing — a poorly chosen path filled with anger laced arrogance. 

Like avid pot users who build up a resistance to emotional pain — both their own and the pain of others — a finely tuned arrogant demeanor soon becomes immune to its own foibles and turns into hubris. A hubrist (if that was a word) sees the world as bigoted, evil and stupid. A helpful comparison of the arrogant turned hubrist might be marijuana connoisseurs who too often waft into illogical dalliance with opiates. They unwittingly, but willingly, go from bad to worse. The decision to cloak oneself in arrogance will also naturally escalate toward a desire for a deeper ugliness. It’s the allure of hubris, a professional upgrade for the arrogant novice to shift into the more concentrated concoction of hubris. 

Greek philosophers calculated that hubris will reach a fatal cliff when it finally offends the gods. Unbridled hubris inflates, bursting in teeth-bared anger at the divine after tiring of attacking everyone else and seeing no improvements. The gods are the problem! 

What we’re saying here is that a practiced arrogance acts like a wicked drug. It inevitably turns us toward hubris, which if left unchecked will likely culminate into an imagined heroic martyrdom, like Superman heading skyward, fist first, intent on punching God in the nose. It won’t work. We don’t fly. Hubris is murderous, and cares nothing for its martyrs. We will swan dive off a cliff. Our sense of wielding an imagined steady carriage of justified correctness is false. We carry no actual superiority over God, much less against God. What made us think we would, or could? Hubris makes us think that.

Arrogance starts simply, with understandable incredulity over fairly identified bothersome stuff. Then slowly, if nurtured, arrogance can intensify. When we chafe at rather common words that trigger an uncontrollable anger, our diagnosis may well be late stage arrogance. Hubris is often terminal. Arrogance can be cured.

Some of us think that arrogance is innate. It is part of our nature, we surmise. Then we jump to the assumption that we are arrogant for good reason. We have rights and privileges (a strange list of things are these rights and privileges) that must not be infringed upon. 

Arrogance, though, is not innate. It’s imbibed, like learning to smoke or drink whiskey. We cough and reject the smoke and penetrating alcohol, but keep at it until we like it. Arrogance, like a repulsive drug, eventually fogs our ability to think clearly. We imagine incorrectly that we are admirable people, more important, intelligent, and independent than the common man. Most telling, the hubrist imagines authority over some ill-defined but necessarily defensible domain.

We step into hubris hesitantly, after a long-suffering period of unsettled suspicion that results from our fine-tuned arrogance about, well, just about anything. Tiny justifications of our disdain for this and that soon stand like enlarged statues along our daily walk. We then open the hubris door and set off into the public square, finding satisfaction from regular and loud outbursts against a cacophony of offensive activities that we believe surrounds us. It is our task to defend our domain.

Friends, and even strangers, who have followed a similar course of calumny and snarky behavior gravitate together, like magnetized bowling balls. At one moment those of us who practice arrogance (soon turned into hubris) are repelled by others who speak with similar arrogance. As we spin around in our negatively magnetized circles we are suddenly attracted positively at the same time! We slam together, amazed that common areas exist in our arrogant hubristic agreement. Pity the fools who disagree with us and get caught between our slamming and cussing and abusive exchanges. We will crush their ankles with our bowling prowess.

People wonder at how the folks from Jesus’ home town could shift so quickly from adulation to attempted murder. Following upon our hubristic conversation, we now know. It isn’t a quick shift at all. It takes years. The story in Luke 4 tells a tale of practiced arrogance taken to its inevitable conclusion. An entire town in an undercurrent of hubristic, seething rage. They held onto a decades long grudge based upon lies and innuendo. 

The story of their unhinged rage begins in Nazareth as Jesus read aloud from the scriptures, Isaiah 61:1. He probably did the same as a young man. Nazareth was his hometown. The townsfolk had heard of Jesus’ recent exploits, and even spoke among each other about how he should come back and also heal the blind and the lame in Nazareth. “Why doesn’t he heal our ill and damaged?” When they heard he had come back they crowded into the temple to hear him speak from the book of Isaiah. As they watched him they listened with pride. Home town boy all grown up. One of theirs could be the Messiah? Could it be true?

And then, someone reminded them that Jesus was that very same son of Joseph whose mother claimed to birth him while she was still a virgin. Jesus saw the wheels turning in their heads. He was just the stepson of a carpenter, not of rabbi lineage. Jesus should cure his own ill reputation, a peon of bastard heritage, certainly not upstanding enough to perform the miracles that others allowed him to do. Before the rabble could rise in unison, Jesus stopped them.

And he said, “Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.”

Jesus — no longer a young man, but an upstart, a challenger to their notions of who he was — pointed out that Elijah and Elisha, both prophets of Israel, found willing hearers of God’s word only outside of Jerusalem. God told these holy men not to perform miracles or heal the people of Israel. God sent Elijah to attend to a widow in the land of Sidon, leaving the local widows behind. He did similarly with Elisha, telling him to cure Naaman the Syrian. God even had Naaman come to Israel and wash in the local Jordan waters. No Jewish lepers were healed, just Naaman. Jesus explained to the people of Nazareth who surrounded him that they were just like the Jews at the time of Elijah and Elisha, dismissive of two holy prophets. Jesus, the one whom the scriptures had written about, would also never be accepted in his home town.

Rather than hear Jesus’ words as a warning and an admonition from God, the arrogant and hubristic bowling balls of Nazareth ushered Jesus out of the temple. And furthering their disgust at Jesus’ infuriating description of them as hard-hearted and dismissive, they hardened their resolve, rolled him out to a cliff to dismiss him over the edge.

As predicted by the Greeks, the hubris of the Nazarenes eventually aimed their vindictive hearts directly at the God they should have recognized. Level heads did not prevail and the witness of the Holy Spirit held no sway. Vilification and name-calling kicked up the dust, and their triggered tempers swirled into a tornado. 

John reports a similar story to that heard in Luke about the Nazarenes. 

So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered them, “I told you and you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify to me. But you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me.”

The Jews tried to stone him, and failing that they then tried to arrest him. Scripture says, though, “He escaped from their power.” In Luke, after attempting to throw Jesus off a cliff he similarly, “passed through the midst of them and went away.”

The Jews in Nazareth, like the later Jews in Jerusalem, lived a practiced arrogance based upon their righteousness. They believed in a God that Jesus could not be. They had no recourse but to kill the unrepentant offender. In both situations, Jesus was forced to expose his hand. He was one with God the father and filled with his Holy Spirit. His miracles, cures, and very person exclaimed Jesus as the Messiah, powered by divinity incarnated rather than insurrection wielded. Their boxed God and formed hubris could not stomach such apostasy, because their religious convictions had already described who God must be. 

At different points in my life, I am ashamed to say, I have been cruel to someone to whom I should have shown respect, and even obedience. In most cases a friend has stepped up to point out that I said something wrong. My immediate response shocked me. “Who do they think they are?” I would ask. In truth, they think they are who they have been called to be. Why did this bother me? Because I had become practiced in my incredulity. This behavior creeps up periodically, whenever I elevate my importance, intelligence, independence, and domain. What makes us resort to cruel statements, gossip, and even confrontation toward someone whom we should respect? Practice.

Arrogance followed by cruelty when identified may sound familiar to you. The difference about Jesus’ response to the Jews of Jerusalem and Nazareth and our similar behavior today is that Jesus was forced to walk away from those who tried to harm him. He passed through the midst of them. These events were not yet his time to be physically and fatally attacked. That would come later. Today, our elevated anger aimed at God when all others have already been vilified has been addressed at the cross. We do not add to the whipping of Jesus when we cross into hubris. We just affirm that he should have been so treated. If that doesn’t drop you to your knees, then nothing will.

Practiced arrogance will repeatedly lead us to hubris’ threshold. Do not cross over. If we did not know that hollering at the divine comes after walking through the hubris doorway, we do now. Why step into a path that will force us to desire the elimination of God? Try as we might, we cannot usher God out of our lives. Even by choosing death to escape him here we will still face him there, later. There is a there, by God.

In Jesus we have God explaining to us that hubris is more than just cruelty on parade. It is a firewall of prevention against allowing God to correct us through others, to guide us upon the narrow path, to bring us in from the wolf pack and be among those who love and serve him.

What good we think we are doing in our hubris (and most of us know we’re really intent only in doing bad) returns to us nothing. We can only do good by tethering ourselves to God, not by shaking our fist at him. Hubris plummets us into an eternally ludicrous and fogged series of moronic defiance. 

The finality of hubris helps no one, hinders others, shuns God, and leaves us alone only in our minds. Even in oblivion, no matter what we imagine, we will eternally exist, scriptures tell us, within some confine of God’s existence. 

There is no promise of non-existence. Why would we want that anyway? If we practice letting God form us then this and the next existence will be the real joy behind our yearning.