Lucas 14
Bernard of Clairvaux
Lucas 14:9
For if we could clearly know in what state God holds each one of us, we should neither depart above nor below, acquiescing in the truth in all things. But now, because this counsel has placed darkness as its hiding place, and the word is hidden from us, so that no one knows whether he is worthy of love or of hatred, more justly and more safely surely, according to the counsel of Truth itself, we choose for ourselves the last place, from which afterward we may be led up higher with honor, than we presume a higher place, from which we must soon withdraw with shame. There is therefore no danger, however much you humble yourself, however much you think yourself less than you are, that is, less than the truth holds you to be. But it is a great evil and a dreadful danger if you exalt yourself even slightly beyond the truth, if in your thought you set yourself before even one person whom the truth perhaps judges to be your equal, or even your superior. For just as if you were passing through a doorway whose lintel, to speak so as to be understood, were too low, it would not harm you however much you stooped; but it would harm you if you raised yourself even a finger's breadth more than the measure of the door allows, so that you would strike and be bruised with your head battered; so in the soul there is plainly no humiliation however great to be feared, but rather the slightest self-exaltation rashly presumed is to be dreaded and exceedingly feared. Wherefore do not compare yourself, O man, to those greater, nor to those lesser, nor to any, nor to one. For what do you know, O man, whether that one person whom you perhaps consider the most vile and most miserable of all, whose most wicked and singularly foul life you shudder at, and on that account you think him to be despised not only in comparison with yourself, who perhaps already trust that you live soberly, and justly, and piously, but also in comparison with all other sinners as the most sinful of all -- what do you know, I say, whether by the change of the right hand of the Most High he is to be better than both you and them in himself, and indeed in God already is? And for this reason he willed us to choose not a middling place, not even the second to last, not even a place among the last, but: sit down, he says, in the last place; so that you alone sit as the last of all, and do not, I will not say place yourself before anyone, but do not presume even to compare yourself to anyone. — Sermons on the Song of Songs, Sermon 37
Lucas 14:10
For if we could clearly know in what state God holds each one of us, we should neither depart above nor below, acquiescing in the truth in all things. But now, because this counsel has placed darkness as its hiding place, and the word is hidden from us, so that no one knows whether he is worthy of love or of hatred, more justly and more safely surely, according to the counsel of Truth itself, we choose for ourselves the last place, from which afterward we may be led up higher with honor, than we presume a higher place, from which we must soon withdraw with shame. There is therefore no danger, however much you humble yourself, however much you think yourself less than you are, that is, less than the truth holds you to be. But it is a great evil and a dreadful danger if you exalt yourself even slightly beyond the truth, if in your thought you set yourself before even one person whom the truth perhaps judges to be your equal, or even your superior. For just as if you were passing through a doorway whose lintel, to speak so as to be understood, were too low, it would not harm you however much you stooped; but it would harm you if you raised yourself even a finger's breadth more than the measure of the door allows, so that you would strike and be bruised with your head battered; so in the soul there is plainly no humiliation however great to be feared, but rather the slightest self-exaltation rashly presumed is to be dreaded and exceedingly feared. Wherefore do not compare yourself, O man, to those greater, nor to those lesser, nor to any, nor to one. For what do you know, O man, whether that one person whom you perhaps consider the most vile and most miserable of all, whose most wicked and singularly foul life you shudder at, and on that account you think him to be despised not only in comparison with yourself, who perhaps already trust that you live soberly, and justly, and piously, but also in comparison with all other sinners as the most sinful of all -- what do you know, I say, whether by the change of the right hand of the Most High he is to be better than both you and them in himself, and indeed in God already is? And for this reason he willed us to choose not a middling place, not even the second to last, not even a place among the last, but: sit down, he says, in the last place; so that you alone sit as the last of all, and do not, I will not say place yourself before anyone, but do not presume even to compare yourself to anyone. — Sermons on the Song of Songs, Sermon 37