The Great Emptying (Palm/Passion Sunday Year A)

 

Vaginni, one of four murals in the Franciscan Church 

at Bethphage, the start of the Palm Procession

“The Great Emptying”
Palm/ Passion Sunday A
13 April 2014 8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Isaiah 50:4-9a ; Philippians 2:5-11 ; Matthew 26:14- 27:66 ; Psalm 31:9-16

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When my second son David was about nine, he asked me a hard question: “Why did God have to kill his Son Jesus off to pay for our sins? Doesn’t that make him a very bad Father? Why couldn’t he have just been bigger-hearted and forgiven us when we’re sorry? Isn’t that what he expects from us?”

I tried to give an easy answer, something like that of the Evangelical Alpha Course:  God is just and fairness demands that sin be punished.  We are sinners.  It was God’s mercy and love that demanded that he send Jesus to suffer such punishment in our stead if only we have faith in him.   

David would have none of it: “If God is really boss of everything, he can make things any way he wants. So why did he make them so that he had to kill his own Son?  It just isn’t fair, and it certainly isn’t loving.”   

I replied that Jesus and the Father enjoyed unity in the Godhead, and this meant that actually God himself was volunteering to die for us on the Cross because of his love.  No go: “Then why does Jesus pray, ‘Please don’t let this happen to me?’” 

David was thinking of the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane in today’s Passion Gospel.  He wasn’t alone in seeing the problem.   John’s Gospel, alone among the four, drops any reference to Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane from the Passion story it has received.  Rather, just after Jesus arrives in Jerusalem in the triumphal parade of palm branches, Jesus baldly declares, “What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?  No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!’ (John 12:27)

As we go into Holy Week it is important to remember that many of the images, affirmations, and thanks we express in these stories are symbolic and metaphorical efforts, limping and imperfect, to express what is beyond our ability to conceive of, let alone express.

From the beginning, we Christians have seen the death of Christ on the cross as not simply a case of miscarried justice or persecution, but something much more.   St. Paul, writing just 20 years after Jesus’ death, quotes the apostolic tradition that he received from others and affirms, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3-5) and “in Christ, God was reconciling the world unto Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).  But he never says exactly how this was so.  And neither has the Church. 

The idea that the Cross was transferred punishment, Jesus tortured and put to death in our stead to satisfy the honor of, or placate the anger of a Deity demanding violence and blood, is never taught as such in the New Testament, nor defined by any of the early Councils of the Church.   The idea first arose in the late Middle Ages in the writings of St. Anselm of Canterbury.

The New Testament uses many differing metaphors to try to get a handle on what Christ accomplished for us and in us:  

·      justification (declare or make morally upright),

·      salvation (rescue on the field of battle),

·      reconciliation (restoring a personal relationship),

·      expiation (driving away ritual impurity or 
            ‘covering over’ guilt),

·      redemption or ransom (purchasing someone 
            back from slavery or prison into freedom),

·      liberation to freedom (restoring full-citizenship 
           to someone)

·      new creation (being made anew)

·      sanctification (being made or declared holy)

·      transformation (changing shapes)

·      glorification (being endowed with the light 
              surrounding God)

None of these are completely adequate descriptions of what “Christ died for our sins” means.   But they all agree that Jesus’s death and resurrection is the great victory over what is wrong with us and the world, a mystery just too glorious to reduce to a single image.  

The fact is, the “wrath of God” describes more how our relationship with God feels to us when we are alienated from God than it describes God’s heart.   And it is we human beings who tend to think that violence can make things right, not God. 

In this light, our belief that Christ “died for us” takes on deep meaning. In Jesus on the Cross, we see God suffering right along with us, dying as one of us; in Jesus in Gethsemane, a human being alongside us, praying fervently with us, and, with us, not getting what he asks for.  

Today’s reading from Philippians is one of the earliest passages in all the New Testament. Paul quotes an early Christian hymn describing Christ lowering himself. Such emptying, kenosis, understands the Cross as part of the same act of God we call the Incarnation. 

Though Christ was in the form of God,
he did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped at,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became heedful to the point of death--
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name...

Paul quotes this hymn to say we must cultivate the same mind that Christ had.  Kenosis is something we too must make a lifetime practice.  Empty ourselves, humble ourselves, become heedful and attentive in all things, even when it may lead to the worst possible outcome.  It is in emptying ourselves that we are filled, in being heedful that we find empowerment.   It is in losing ourselves that we find ourselves, it is in dying that we are born to life.

When it says that Christ was “obedient, even to the point of death on the cross” it is not saying that God willed the death of Jesus.  It is simply saying that Jesus accepted the inevitable.   The Greek word hypokuo means “to listen attentively” under the authority of someone or something other than ourselves.

During this Lent, we have been reading about St. Francis of Assisi.  We have seen that success and competence is not the hallmark of a saint, but rather life-long conversion:  failing, and picking ourselves up again and again, and continuing on.  This is what heedfulness, attentiveness, humility, is all about. 

Francis, trying to follow Jesus, worked with lepers most of his life.  In his final years he bore on his own body the incipient lesions of leprosy that mimicked the wounds of Francis’ crucified Lord.   Attentiveness and kenosis means accepting hurt.

But it is not about the suffering or the horror.  It is about the continued heedfulness through it all.   As Paul writes, it is about the mind of Christ: the Christ who emptied himself and left the realms of light to become one of us, and then beyond that, actually lowered himself beneath us all. 

Kenosis says God emptied himself to become human, and then further emptied himself to descend far below what most of us humans expect.  Christ himself went beneath all things so that no matter how far we might fall, he is always there beneath us to catch us. As St. Athanasius said, "God became Man so Man could become god," or according to 2 Peter, that "we might become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).    

Let us follow Jesus to dark Gethsemane and stark Calvary.  May the same mind and heart that was Christ’s be ours.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.