Being Emptied

This is a computer-generated transcription that has been included to make the homily searchable.  It has not been verified by the author.

Everybody wants to be on the winning side. In the first centuries of Christianity, Christians were persecuted terribly, and so it took a lot of courage to be a Christian. But after the Emperor Constantine became a Christian, then it became the good thing to do, the prestigious thing to do, to be part of the in crowd, to be a Christian. And that caused a lot of problems for the Church, because a lot of people were becoming Christians for the wrong reasons. Those who are faithful, when the good side seems to be losing, those are the ones who are truly making the sacrifice. And in many ways today, Christians are, Christians, it’s clear even from statistics, are the most persecuted, the most persecuted religion in the world today. And even in our country, the persecution is more subtle, that it’s not a cool thing, to be a Christian. And just look, for instance, at movies and TV shows, how many good images of Christians do you see, in most of the movies and shows today. So, it’s often difficult to be a Christian today. But now is the time when those who are Christian, those who accept Christianity seems to be losing, in many ways, I say seems to be – those are the ones who will experience the great reward of the Lord – those who stood by him, not just in the triumphant moments, but in the moments of the cross. St. Paul today gives us in a very summarized form, this shocking path of Jesus, shocking.  It’s so shocking that even 2000 years later, we have a hard time believing it when we encounter it. And so, I wanted to look with you today at St. Paul’s words.  He says, “Christ Jesus, though He was in the form of God” – what he means by that is, though He was and is God – “did not count equality with God, a thing to be grasped.” And that’s difficult to translate.  What did St. Paul mean, “did not count equality with God, a thing to be grasped?” A number of scholars think that what it means, what grasping, means it’s a way of translating, when a person says, say, a government official, a corrupt government official, who wants to exploit his authority for his own personal gain. That’s such a common thing in our human experience. Already, from the very beginning, satan was trying to do that. He was trying to exploit the situation for his personal gain. Adam and Eve did, and even the apostles of Jesus did. Even shortly before His resurrection, they were trying to take advantage of this situation of apostles, even John and James, to get in a good situation. Then it’s a problem that we have to or we’re having a little advantage in a situation we want to use it for our own personal gain. And what St. Paul is saying is Jesus did not do that. He did the exact opposite. He gave up this personal, the great, the great nobility of His situation, of His divinity. And then St. Paul says, and this is the key passage, “but He emptied Himself,” He emptied Himself. The Greek word is kenosis. “He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men.” And we can’t imagine what that’s like for God, to become man, the humiliation and He remains God. But He temporarily sacrifices the use of some of His divine abilities to take on the poverty of our human condition. As God, He can’t suffer, but as man, He accepts to be humiliated and suffer. And so that’s an extremely important passage for us to know, that following Jesus means emptying ourselves, being empty. And that means the opposite of what we would expect. Shouldn’t we be filled? Shouldn’t He give us the fullness and abundance. And that’s true, that’s what heaven will be, God pouring out into us His fullness, and over abundance. But to get there, we first need to be emptied, we need to be emptied, because we’ve got a lot of junk inside of us, our ego, our vanity, our pride, all our ways of seeing and doing things, our own criteria, our own will. Jesus didn’t have that. And yet He emptied Himself. And so, we need to know that if we’re going to follow Jesus, we need to empty ourselves. And that helps us to understand so many things which happened in our life.  We say we’re going to follow Jesus, and so we’re expecting things to go well. Or we start to follow Jesus, and sometimes things start to fall apart. We start to be emptied. And so, this helps us to understand that being emptied is not a bad thing. It’s a necessary thing – to be filled. So, this is so current and contrast with the spirit of the word which has affected all of us. So, Jesus took Jesus says, “follow Me,” and His path is a path of empty. That’s hard for us to do. But a lot of times, circumstances help us out. Sometimes the circumstances of our life, and yes, when things don’t go the way we wanted them, things are stripped away from us. And so, it’s good to know that as hard as that can be, the Lord can use that to empty us, to prepare us to be filled. Very important, emptied, not to be surprised, if the path of following Jesus is a path of being emptied. And, St. Paul goes on, “being found in human form.” That is, what that means is He truly became human, He truly became man. And he says, “He humbled Himself.” So, beyond that, beyond just becoming man, He humbles Himself. That’s not a thing most of us like to do. And Jesus humbled Himself. There’s so much in us which resists being humbled. But it doesn’t just say Jesus was humbled, it says, He humbled Himself. We have a hard time accepting when life humbles us, let alone humbling ourselves.  And then comes even worse. But I say, is like a dirty word, in our society today. And he became, I shouldn’t even say this word in mixed company, it’s the O word. You know what the O word is? He became obedient. Obedient, what a terrible thing, right? How terrible to become obedient. What destroys our dignity, the process. When we don’t want to obey God, we end up without realizing, obeying satan. So many people who think they’re independent, are just obeying satan. But Jesus became obedient. And that’s good for us to hear the shock of that word, became obedient. Because can you sense the resistance in you to that word, became obedient? How obedient. St. Paul says, “unto death.” Not kind of obedient, obedient to death, even death on a cross. And so, on that Good Friday, to many people, He’s seemed a loser. Donald Trump uses that word a lot – Oh, what a loser.  And we know what that means, what a loser. To many people He’s seen a loser. And yet already, He was triumphant. Already on the cross, He was triumphant, because He had been faithful. And our own experience, because what St. Paul, at the beginning, right before he says this, he says, “Have in yourselves the mind of Christ.” So, this is the path that we’re also called to follow. And again, sometimes the circumstances in our life call us, force us to do this, to be humble. There’s so many opportunities in life to be humble. And we hate it, right. But we could accept it. If those things that we hate, being humble, if we realized that sometimes they’re unjust, when Jesus was humbled, sometimes it was unjust. But if we realize that even when it’s unjust, we can take advantage of that. How many times have you been humbled, sometimes justly, sometimes, unjustly, sometimes cruelly, like Jesus. But we can even take advantage of that, being humbled and become obedient to God. Obedient to God, that’s not a bad thing to be obedient. Jesus Christ became obedient. So, it’s not a bad thing to obey God. Obedient, and even unto death, and there’s physical death. But there’s a lot of other types of death in our life. And we have opportunities in which we are called also to be obedient unto death, accepting the cross of our own life. And so, this is the challenge to be faithful to Jesus. When it seems like it’s the losing side, when it seems like things are going bad, that’s the opportunity we have today. To be faithful to Jesus, when it’s not a cool thing, to be a Christian. That’s not a prestigious thing. A lot of people think that Christianity is heading toward the extinction. That’s the opportunity we have, to be faithful in the hard times. And then, so that’s shocking, what Jesus has done. But then St. Paul says, and this is another shock, “because of this, God greatly exalted Him.” It doesn’t make sense humanly. If you want to succeed humanly, you keep trying to push yourself to the top. That’s what a lot of people who are held up as successes do. But Jesus takes a very different path, a path of humbling himself. And then it says, “And then God greatly exalted Him.” So, there’s a Divine intervention, Jesus trusts, and then this Divine intervention. His actions draw this divine power. His actions having been obedient and humble unto death, draw this power. God doesn’t keep Him; His Father doesn’t keep Him from the trial.  But He brings Him through the trial triumphant. His very humiliation was the cause of His triumph. St. Paul says, and he says, “Because of this, because of his being obedient unto death, and Jesus said that, Himself, He says, “everyone who exalts himself, will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”  Again, it’s the opposite about our world. As our world is if you want to be exalted, you’ve got to exalt yourself. And Jesus says, if you want to be exalted, you have to humble yourself, and that God exalted because that’s the only way He can truly exalt you for eternity, any human exaltation will be destroyed very quickly. None of it lasts for eternity. None of the lasts, in fact a lot of human exultation drags a person to hell. The only exultation that lasts is the exultation that comes from God. So, the only real exultation is God’s exaltation. And the only way that that exaltation comes, Jesus says, is to humble ourselves. And He’s saying that if we follow this path of humility, we will also experience this divine action, faith, so that God Himself can act, faith so that what we cannot do, God himself will do. And it’s often we don’t always see that in this life, a lot of times, we don’t see that most of it is beyond this life, in eternity. But sometimes there’s little signs of it. And sometimes there’s great signs and the resurrection of Jesus is a great sign in this world, of what happens beyond this world. And St. Paul goes on, ”and bestowed on Him the name, which is above every name, the name of Jesus. Every knee should bow, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that,” that is even the spirits of evil, have to acknowledge the power and the truth of the kingship, the Lord, of the divinity of Jesus Christ. They are spirits of darkness, but they have to recognize this divine truth. “every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” And that’s what we are called to do now when it’s not easy. When our world ridicules Jesus, and ridicules His teaching, we are called to be faithful, in this moment of battle and persecution, to be faithful, to proclaim that Jesus Christ is the One Lord, the merciful Savior. And again, that is the difficulty, the challenge, but also the opportunity that we have of being faithful to Him, when it costs, when it’s humiliating. Faith so that God can act. And we ask she, who was strong at the moment when so many were weak. When Jesus was humiliated, she was strong and faithful, she, His mother, to help us be strong and faithful. You notice we have behind the altar, that image of the Shroud of Turin. When we are going to get a special photo taken, like a marriage photo, you want to look as good as possible, right? The one image that Jesus left of His life on Earth was when He looked as bad as He had ever looked. Humiliated, tortured, defeated it seems, that’s the image He left us. So, this helps us when it’s, this message is encouraging, when we experience being emptied. When we experience being humbled, even humiliated and we are called to be obedient, even unto death. If we have faith in Jesus, we realize that this is the path to glory. To have faith and hope that God will act and He will rejoice and exult in us. Because of this, He emptied Himself. Because of this, God greatly exalted Him.   Amen.

KEYWORDS / PHRASES:
Philippians 2:6-11
Matthew 26:14-27:66