Running on Empty

Our consumer society occasionally encounters product shortages. They are usually the result of a slow-down in a supply chain, or an actual shortage of a product, or a frenzy and panic of the consumers. Often it is a combination of the three. In the opening months of the American branch of the pandemic, it was hard to find toilet paper on the shelves of the stores. People were not using more toilet paper, they were demanding it, so they could store a supply in the home, not knowing how safely they might later be able to get out and get it. It was pretty wild with that and a few other items.

When I was a young driver, there was a gas shortage. It was a complicated thing with oil reserves and the price of oil. The shortage was exacerbated by consumer panic. There were lines at all the pumps. People would routinely top off their tanks. It was not unusual for people to wait in a car line for an hour to get a quarter of a tank missing in their car. What a stressful waste of time! The uncertainty of how it would be in the coming days made people a little bit crazy.

We can think of this in two ways. We can call it a feature of practical need: better safe than sorry. Or we can think of it as exaggerated, self-serving protection. In either case, staying full is the name of the game, and a fixation on “getting” is in play across the market. One thinks, “I have some, but I want more.”

This tendency of human modes of operating is what makes the story and theology of Christ so counter-culture, even deeply subversive. We indeed have many examples and experiences of people being more “givers” than “takers” but the example of examples for us is the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Being God, he had it all; being all about love, he gave it all. The eternal and only begotten Son of the Father did not need to come to us in our material world. It was our need that brought him. He got nothing by coming, except the joy of revealing love unconditionally.

Jesus taught his disciples over and over again of “the way” he represented, and how they must be. He emphasized the so-called rulers in the heathen world lord it over them and the great ones (Alexander, Augustus Caesar, others)  have absolute power. He further said it must not be so among his followers: whoever among us wants to be great must become the servant of the others, whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. (Mark 10: 42-44) The next verse is this: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” See? Jesus gives.

Our epistle lesson in just a few days on The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday is Philippians 2:5-11. It contains some of the most profound lines in all the New Testament. Paul is giving the Christians in Philippi a lesson on how to treat each other, and pointing to Christ as the one who shows them (and all of us) the way.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,
       did not regard equality with God
       as something to be exploited,
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 obedient 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, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

New Testament theologians still debate whether Paul is supplying these lines of poetry himself, or whether he is quoting a Christian hymn already in existence. N.T. Wright asserts what is unmistakable: “Here we have a very, very early statement of Christian faith in who Jesus was and what he accomplished, which subsequent theology has gazed at in awe for its remarkably full and rich statement of what was later seen as the classic doctrine of the incarnation of God in Jesus the Messiah.“

This passage is sometimes called the kenotic hymn calling attention to the key Greek verb, “to empty”. The past tense of the verb is used, forming the Greek phrase, alla eauton ekenosen, “but emptied himself”. The idea here is when Christ came, he came not taking things but giving, emptying himself of what was his by his divine nature, his equality with God. It is not a statement the Son gave up His divinity when he took on human nature, but that the privilege of deity—being beyond material existence, avoiding suffering, and having no vulnerability or frailty—was willingly set aside. It was set aside so that what it is to be human was fully assumed by Jesus. By assuming the totality of the human condition, humanity as a whole was pulled into Christ’s divinity and thereby redeemed and healed.

As you read through the lines of this hymn or poem, you will notice a descent and an ascent. Though Christ Jesus had always been God by nature, he did not cling to his prerogatives as God’s equal, but stripped himself of all privilege, consenting to be human. He willed it: not just mortal human but a kind of slave, not just that but humbled in utter obedience even to the extent of dying, not just death, but as the death of a common criminal, that is, death on a cross.

Such is the descent of the Word, willingly moving down to the indescribable humiliation of Jesus the crucified. Then the hymn sings of the subsequent ascent. When we read the passage, we recite how God has now lifted him to the ultimate height and has given him the name beyond all names. At the end, when the name of Jesus is uttered, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess Jesus Christ to be the Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

We must all center our lives on kenosis, emptying. As broken beings, when we experience a scarcity of cleaning products or gasoline or the looming scarcity we perceive simply as frail mortal creatures, we tend to take and take, out of fear. Jesus transforms us into redeemed creatures that give and give, out of love. This Sunday, look up at the cross of Jesus. Look to him as the one who willingly emptied himself, so we can know his promise of the abundant life. He shared in our humanity so we might share in his divinity.