When Life Empties Us

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“Jesus emptied Himself.” This is this famous passage of St. Paul that we have today. Jesus emptied Himself. And the scholars speak of this as the kenosis of Jesus, referring to the Greek word that’s used in Scripture for emptying, the kenosis. Is this something that you experience in your life, an emptying? It’s something that it’s worth touching here a great mystery, because we don’t want to be emptied. We want life to fill us, right. You know, say we began as very little, little children. But we then grow up, our body develops. And we try to acquire skills and knowledge, make friends, develop, and maybe enter into relationships. Maybe developing good contacts and people, knowing people who are influential who can help us, trying to create a good reputation, and making money because we need money in this world. And gathering possessions, maybe getting a house, and hopefully also growing in virtue, becoming wise. And hopefully, becoming happier, right? That’s what we want to become happier and happier. We want to be, we want life to fill us up. But often, we experience the opposite. This passage talks about Jesus emptying himself. Sometimes, in our own experience, it’s not that we’re trying to empty ourselves, but it seems like life and circumstances are emptying us. Maybe our health takes a turn for the worse, it’s not what we would have wanted. Maybe we don’t find the success that we were hoping for. Maybe we don’t find the partner that we wanted, or maybe our marriage isn’t all that we had desired. Maybe someone that we care very much about passes away. Sometimes after a certain point where we kind of, our lifetime is getting fuller and fuller. But then almost inevitably, we enter a stage in which we seem to be being emptied. Certainly, it happens physically, if a person lasts long enough, our body grows, but then our body begins to lose a lot of its faculties and our mental faculties. And so in life with these different ways that we can be emptied, some of it is the work of the devil. Like Jesus on the cross, the devil is always trying to attack us, to humiliate us, to destroy us, sometimes through the attacks of others, and sometimes by leading us into sin. The ways that our own decisions, bad decisions have hurt us and hurt others. So some of it is the work of the devil, but some of it is more mysterious. Because we could think well, at least in my spiritual life, I should be able to be getting fuller and fuller.  If not in my physical life, maybe not in my financial life, at least in my spiritual life. And often at the beginning, when a person when the person begins, if a person is making an effort, a new effort in their spiritual life, often there is a lot of graces to help them. But as that path continues, and when we receive those graces, wow, this is so great. They began a whole new life. This is so amazing. And we kind of expect those graces to continue, to just grow, grow more and more. But oftentimes, the experience as we progress in spiritual life, is at a certain point it begins to get not easier, but harder. Even though we’re still trying. We don’t maybe sense that same boost that we had at the beginning. It seems to be getting harder. We might begin to feel weaker, spiritually weaker. And instead of feeling holier we would expect if we’re trying to follow Jesus that we would get holier and holier, we would feel holier and holier. But oftentimes we can have the experience of feeling less holy. And then at the beginning, oftentimes, a lot of things begin to make sense, we begin to see life with a whole new light, a whole new understanding. But as we progress, oftentimes, we begin to enter into things which have become more mysterious, often more obscure. The saints, the mystics talk about the experience of the desert, the dryness, the desolation of the desert, and they speak of the Dark Night, that the soul experiences that is the obscurity that the soul enters into. And when the soul is, feels, instead of feeling fuller, and fuller, it feels poor, an emptier one or that want to famously express this as the great mystic Saint John of the Cross, talking about this emptying of the soul, and part of it can be the emptying account from our own efforts, that is maybe our efforts to be detached, detached from earthly things. That part of it comes directly from God, in which our soul seems to feel stripped of what it had before even annihilated. St. John the Cross says, “the journey the spiritual journey, then does not consist in consolation, the light and spiritual feelings.” The spiritual journey does not consist, and consolation, the light and spiritual feelings. I wish it, I wish it did. But he says, in the living death of the cross, sensory and spiritual exterior and interior, in the living death of the cross, …(and we thank the Lord for this rain. It’s always grateful for rain here with that we need so much rain, which is like a sign of the greatness of God, the grace that God showers down. So thank you, Lord for the graces.)… So he says, in the living death of the cross, that’s what St. Paul says. He says, “Every day, we are being handed over to death.” As St. John of the Cross says, sensory and spiritual. The sufferings which can be sensory suffering, but also spiritual sufferings, exterior sufferings that can come from the outside, but also interior sufferings, like the interior desolation that we can experience. So St. John of the cross spoke very much about this the experience of instead of nada, nada, nada, nada, which is nothing in Spanish, that the experience of being instead of being filled, being completely empty, nada. God often let’s, permits us to experience our weakness, to help us be humble to protect us from pride, which is the big danger in spiritual life. And so what the impression that we have is that we feel that we’re getting farther and farther away from God, we’re feeling less spiritual, because we’re not feeling those same lights or consolations or feelings. But actually, God is humbling us. God is emptying us, so that He can fill us. God is emptying us, so that He can fill us. It’s hard for us to understand that. So that’s why it’s helpful to look at this passage from St. Paul, that we have today, this great passage, which and just a few lines. St. Paul expresses such great mysteries, he says, “have in you the same attitude that is also in Christ Jesus.” So he’s saying that this is talk that he is talking about, it’s not just for Jesus, it’s for you. He says, this is the path that you’re supposed to follow. This is your path too, it’s not just you’re just a normal human person so this has nothing to do with you because Jesus is Jesus, but this is for you. This is what you’re called to do. And so what is it he says, “Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.” That’s the way it’s often translated, something to be grasped. Is this a difficult Think that translator one, one scholar Tim Gray says that he feels like grasp is not a very good translation. He says, rather it has that what the word means here, he says, the sense of using a position for their own personal advantage, like a corrupt government official, he says like a corrupt government official, who has a special role, say like, that’s why the Jews hated the tax collectors like St. Matthew, because they took advantage of their position to be enriching themselves. Of course, that doesn’t happen anymore, right? In our world today. We don’t have to worry about bribery and corruption in our world. Thanks be to God, but that’s what he’s talking about. The danger that always that I mean, I remember I was in a commune, I used to belong to that one point I was in a monastery, a pretty big, it’s about, we had about 100 of us and friars are monks. And you know, like when one would be in charge of the kitchen, one would be in charge of the vehicles, one would be in charge at the library, one would be in charge of, I don’t remember, of all the different areas, but it’s even a danger in the monastery, that you have your little position, and you can use that to help those you like, not help those you want, kind of bargain for stuff. And so it’s always a danger. As soon as we have that ability, that we want to hold on to our little power and make the best use of it. So that’s what he’s talking about. So Jesus doesn’t have a little power, He has the ultimate power, the power of God, but instead of holding on to it, to make use of it for His own, for His own benefit, He gives it up. So that’s what it means that not equality with did not deem equality with God, something to be held on to and taken advantage of. It says rather, this is what we’re talking about. Rather, He emptied Himself. He emptied Himself. And how did He do that? Taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness. So by being God, He became man when he says, taking the form of a slave, because He became man. And then He humbled Himself. To what point not just becoming man, but becoming obedient, becoming obedient. We don’t like that word, right? Obedient, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. So we have the example, Jesus becoming man, emptying himself becoming obedient, even to death on a cross. And then what happens? St. Paul says, “Because of this,” so that’s the way people saw Jesus and in His human life, He ended His human life, in annihilation, and condemnation, and rejection and abandonment and torture. That’s what they saw as the end of His life. And, but what, but there’s, that was that look like the end. And that’s what a lot of people thought, that’s the end. That’s the end of Jesus. But that was just the beginning. That’s what St. Paul says, Yeah. And that’s important, because we can’t see what happened afterwards. It’s beyond our human eyes. And so we need to, we need to learn by faith. He says, “Because of this, God, greatly exalted Him,” greatly exalted Him, “and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, that is the name of Jesus, every knee should bend of those in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.”  That is St. Paul’s, and even the spirits of evil and darkness, have to bow down before the name of Jesus “and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” So notice, that St. Paul has not just when St. Paul says that we have to have the mind that Jesus follow the path of Jesus is not just saying that, that will mean also learning to be humble, to be obedient, to empty ourselves. He’s saying, so that God can also exalt you. God wants to exalt you. Is it wrong, to want to be exalted? Is it wrong to want to be exalted? It’s wrong, to want to be exalted when it’s not God’s will, when it’s my pride and my ego. And that happens a lot, right? That’s why Jesus refused that human exaltation. That was opposed to submission. They wanted to make him king. They thought, wow, He’s gonna want to be a king. Not many people, we want to be a king, but He’s so great. We’re gonna make Him a king, and how can He resist that, to be the king, and they wanted to exalt Him as King. But Jesus didn’t want that, the human exaltation. So it’s wrong to want to be exalted when it’s not God’s will. But St. Paul is saying here that it is God’s will to exalt those who follow the path of Jesus. God wants to exalt you, not to a little human glory, like Jesus didn’t want to just be a mere human king. God wants to exalt you to full, eternal, everlasting glory. He wants to exalt His children. He rejoices in glorifying and exalting His children. As St. Paul says, to the Ephesians, “He created you for the glory of His grace, to manifest in you the glory of His generosity, if is pouring out His grace into you.” God wants to exalt you and make you an example of how much He loves. And what it is when someone opens their life to God’s love. So God wants to exalt you, not less than you, than you want. It’s not like us and no, no, I want to put you down. God wants to exalt you way beyond the exultation that you could even imagine, to share His glory forever. Another miserable exaltation? How many people you know, maybe they’re famous, that maybe they have a statue built to them? Or maybe there’s a university or part of the university named after them or something, but what’s that gonna matter in eternity? They might, some of those people might be nothing, they might be in hell. But what matters will be the eternal exaltation, and God wants to exalt you. God wants to glorify you, God wants to manifest His goodness and His love in you. But to do that, we need to empty ourselves of our human stuff, of our human ego, so that He can fill us with what is His divine glory. So this is very encouraging, because a lot of this earth is empty, and a lot of this earth is hard and troubling. So this gives us hope in Jesus, that if we live this life of being emptied with our faith in Jesus, it becomes the path, this this path of which humiliate us often, life often humiliate us. I mean, just our poor body if we get sick, if we get old, it’s just very humiliating. This life often humiliates us. But it can become the path to exaltation, to freeing ourselves from what is human, to be exalted by God. The more we are emptied, the more He can fill us. Maybe that’s when why as we get older, our mind begins to empty out. I experienced that a lot, of can’t remember anything. And so that God can fill a big our human stuff out and begin to fill us with His. St. Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed.” Then he says, “for the slight momentary affliction is preparing for us, an eternal weight of glory, beyond all comparison, and eternal weight of glory,” of glory. God wants to give you an eternal weight of glory, beyond all comparison. Jesus emptied Himself, because of this, God highly exalted Him. So this is your path, to this is the mystery of your life. And this gives us hope, when we are experiencing many forms of having been emptied. And so we ask our blessed mother’s help. She who had to empty herself as so many, so much even emptying herself of the son, that she had to sacrifice for the salvation of the world, that she can help us with, be humble, to trust. This takes a lot of trust, a lot of faith because we don’t see it. Just like they didn’t see Jesus exaltation that was, that’s beyond our human eyes. So we often only, we just see the human results. This is beyond. This is the reality that’s hidden from us. And so it takes a lot of faith. That’s why faith is so important to humility, faith and obedience. So that God can greatly exalt you too.  Amen.

KEYWORDS / PHRASES:
Phillippians 2:1-11