Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:5-7).

I was in the woods a couple evenings ago sitting with my back against a tree propped by my heels dug into the decaying duff of the Michigan forest floor.  Hearing this spring’s first wood thrush song, I soon found myself more interested in my surroundings than in the book I’d brought.  The wood thrush makes music a bit like the theme of Beethoven’s Fifth, only upside down: instead of “da, da, da, dum” with the final note lower on the musical scale, it goes “dum, da, da, da” with the first note lower on the scale.  It repeats the theme with variation, and, after a brief rest, sounds out a final staccato of high-pitched chirps—done, of course, with a God-given solo instrument more resonant than a man-made flute.  Like the Fifth Symphony, the wood thrush’s theme with variation are repeated over and over. [Hear the wood thrush call here.]

Rivaling the sounds of the thrush and the wood were the smells—a floral fragrance I couldn’t identify, the overall odor of green thrown into the air by new life unfurling from soil and branch. Strongest, however, was the scent of soil—the humus disturbed by my heels.

Humus.  What a rich substance.  What a rich meaning.  It’s the Latin word for soil or earth.  Out of the Latin humus we get the English words humility and humble, which essentially mean lowly or on the ground.  So being humbled means brought down to the very substance from which we were materially derived: dust, soil, humus.  Being “low as dirt.”

But that’s not the end of the word history of humus.  Out of it we also get the Latin word for man: homo, as in homo sapiens (“wise man”—the creature that uses tools).  Perhaps history’s most famous use of this word is from the Latin Vulgate translation of John 19:5 where Pontius Pilate brought the humiliated Jesus out to the mob and said, “Behold, the man”—or “Ecce homo. “  It’s my belief that the crown of thorns on Jesus’ head at that moment also indicated His suffering for the curse His Father placed on the earth when Adam sinned—making Jesus’ humiliation even more meaningful as a sign that as human sin would be atoned for in His death, so also the curse would be removed (Revelation 22:3).  Jesus suffered for human sin and the earthly curse. From the Latin homo we get the English human—which entomologically circles back around to “being of the earth or soil.” [Ecce homo, Lovis Corinth, 1925]

Humus.  Humility.  Human.  How earthly they are.  This link of man to earth, however, goes beyond both Latin and English.  They’re also linked in Hebrew: In the Bible the name for the first human is Adam, which means man.  And man was made out of the dust of the ground.  The Hebrew word for ground is adamah.  Many Bible scholars, both Jewish and Christian, believe the similarities come from a deliberate play on words: Adam came from adamah—the ground (as did all other creatures).

Adam, the wood thrush, you, and I all received our material atoms from the soil of the earth, and when we die, our souls go into our Creator’s keeping and our material atoms return to the soil (“dust to dust”) to be used over and over again in future living creatures.  Our Creator assigns great value to both material atoms and immaterial souls.  How do I know that?  Today’s Bible passage is one answer.  The Creator Jesus humbled himself to become human and “became obedient to death.”   The immaterial God took on material atoms.  The one who formed Adam from adamah and humans from humus experienced the confining, humiliating, subservient earthly life and suffered an earthly death.  But He rose again from the grave and is waiting at His father’s side to be sent back to reign on the refreshed and restored earth (Acts 3:19-21).  This gives great meaning to my childhood prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep/ I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep/ If I should die before I wake/ I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.”  I can trust the Maker of atoms and the Keeper of souls.

If I live long enough to die before He comes again, I know that when He does come, He’s going to stoop again to take up some atoms from the humus and return my lovingly-kept soul to a human body that will be like the glorified body He had when He rose from the grave.  What that will be like I can only vaguely know from the biblical account of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances (1 Corinthians 15).  And I can only wonder at the possibility of renewed human sensory delight in ages to come: again feeling the strength of trees and tasting their fruit, smelling the fragrances of the forest, seeing the green of reborn plants and leaves, and hearing the call of the wood thrush.

Blessed eternal humility!

[Praying child source]