HE EMPTIED HIMSELF

 

April 14th, 2019: Palm Sunday. Philippians 2:6-11.

AIM:  To show that Christ’s self-emptying is the model for us in our search for self-fulfillment.

          The celebrated English convert, G.K. Chesterton, called the cross “that terrible tree, which is the death of God and the life of man.” Chesterton’s phrase evokes a similar one in the Church’s public prayer for the Feast of the Holy Cross on September 14^th: “You placed the salvation of the human race on the wood of the cross, so that, where death arose, life might spring forth, and the evil one, who conquered on a tree, might likewise be conquered through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Preface).

          We read about the tree of death in the third chapter of Genesis. The writer tells us there that the man and woman whom God placed in his the garden “to till it and to care for it” (Gen. 2:15) were not satisfied with being God’s friends. They wanted to be gods themselves. Believing the devil’s lie, that eating the fruit of the one tree in the garden forbidden to them will make them “like gods” (3:5), they grasp at the opportunity to become divine, and experience instead shame, guilt, and banishment from the garden which symbolizes God’s peace, beauty, and order.

          That simple childlike tale describes the origin of sin in every form: rebellion against our human condition, the desire to be “like gods.” The Genesis story is not just about two individuals. It is the story of Everyman and Everywoman. It is, in short, our story.

          We find it difficult to accept our human limitations. We are not what we would like to be. We long to be in full control of our lives, masters of our destinies. Many people today express this by saying that they want to be beautiful, strong, successful. The Bible says it more simply and more directly: we want to be “like gods.” The result of every attempt to fulfill this desire is the same as in the Genesis story: loss of innocence, shame, guilt, and banishment from the garden of beauty, order, and harmony that God, our Creator, intended for us.

          Jesus, today’s second reading tells us, was made like the man in the Genesis story, “in the form of God.” Unlike that man, however, Jesus “did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.” Instead Jesus accepted the human condition with all its limitations. “He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave ... He humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

          “Because of this,” Paul writes, “God highly exalted him.” The desire to be god-like is not in itself evil. It comes from the spark of the divine in each of us, put there by a bountiful Creator when he fashioned us in his own image. The desire to be “like gods” leads us astray only when we seek its fulfillment in the wrong way: through getting rather than through giving; through power rather than through service; through self-sufficient strength rather than through the weakness of dependence on God and others. The German Protestant theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who gave his life for Jesus Christ in the closing weeks of Adolf Hitler’s tyranny, writes: “The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard.”

          The gospel is good news for those – and only for those – who are willing to follow Christ in accepting weakness, suffering, and defeat. To those who accept the inner poverty of the human condition without rebelling against it, God reveals his secrets. One of them is this: God can fill with his love only those who are empty. Jesus, our second reading tells us, “emptied himself.” He invites each of us to do the same. Only when we are empty can God fill us with those things we all long for yet never find on our own: his peace, his happiness, his joy.