When we ponder the self-centeredness and self-entitlement that seems to permeate our society today, I think it seems staggering to us that our Lord selflessly took our humble form for the express purpose of saving us through His passion, death, and resurrection. It’s almost as if our own lack of willingness to sacrifice, and that same lacking we sometimes observe in others somehow makes it even harder for us to conceive of our Lord being able to do this for us. I suspect that is part of impetus for the warning that he provided us about becoming too focused on this world, to the point that we lose sight of what is actually important. It not only leads us away from following His commands, I think it also sometimes blinds our belief in what He did for us by making such an act of love seem so alien to the way we live that we can almost no longer conceive of his doing this for us – it makes belief that much more difficult.
To be sure, it took quite a while for His own disciples to come around to His way of thinking and conducting themselves. We hear multiple references to them being caught up in concerns over who among them would be looked upon as the most esteemed. I think our Lord must have been a bit frustrated with them at times trying to get them to understand that His purpose was to serve and not to be served, and that their purpose should be the same, and in doing this demonstrate a whole new way of living to all. Of course, what the disciples could not know at that point, was that this new way of living placed more of its emphasis on living for eternal life, than for being caught up in this one.
Our high priest, Jesus, came in the form of a humble servant, and experienced all of our infirmities except sin, so that He would be able to completely empathize with our situations, and so be fully able to be our merciful judge. There was simply no other way for this to happen, He became one of us, in order to fully experience us, so that He could save us in His mercy. It’s because of this, that we can count on being able to approach our Lord in humility with all our baggage, all our weaknesses, deficiencies, and sins, without fear of rejection. He loves us and understands us better than we understand ourselves since he lived as one of us in His human form and can read the mind and heart because He is God.
As part of our recognizing all this, we do need to ask ourselves though, what do we focus on most in our daily lives? Are we still hung up on the petty vanities and desires of humanity – the money, position, and status that we are told is supposed to be so important if we wish to be considered successful? Or do we have enough functional knowledge, and more importantly functional desire, for our Lord, to pass those things by and take the way that leads us well off the beaten path, and into the seeming wilderness of true human love for fellow man that is capable of humbly serving others so that we fulfill the potential that each of our lives is meant for? We weren’t meant for spiritual suburbia; we were meant to strike out into the wilderness of the spirit and take the barely used paths that lead to salvation. We were meant to trade in giving our order at the local Starbucks for being happy to stoop down at a running stream to take our refreshment from there and then give thanks to our Lord for it. To be willing to kneel before others, and our Lord, so that we too can give of ourselves to the point that we have crushed any pretense of status or position and be fully satisfied to emulate our Lord in service to others. To travel about humbly yielding to others on the road and so demonstrate a new way of living to all, to trade in job satisfaction for life satisfaction in Christ, to take the time to spend in sharing the truths of our faith with our sons and daughters as a priority rather than an afterthought between commuting to their activities. These are the beginnings of the perfection we are each called to, and that goes completely against everything that this world has tried to engrain in us for the sake of our ruin. There is perfection only in the way of Christ, and that perfection comes at a cost, but it is one that once paid, will yield peace in this life, and hope for eternal life.
Podcast Link
The Deacons Bench 