As we begin the culmination of this year’s season of Lent—what Catholics call “Holy Week” which begins with the celebration of Palm Sunday and concludes with the celebration of the Paschal Mystery of the Triduum (Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday)—today’s scripture readings speak to us about “emptiness.” St. Paul pointed directly to this idea in the Epistle, writing to the Philippians that Jesus “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (2:7).
This focus upon “emptiness” and “emptying oneself” reminds us that Holy Week is the primary time of the Church’s annual calendar to recall and reflect upon how God emptied Himself to save humanity from iniquity, in general, and each and every one of us, in particular.
How different this reflection is from how we oftentimes reflect upon the celebration of Holy Week! Aren’t we supposed to be the ones who serve God—creatures who pledge themselves to and spend their lives serving their Creator?
The scripture of Holy Week flips that narrative upside-down and turns it inside-out: God freely chose to serve humanity, first, and by so doing, to demonstrate His mercy and love for each and every one of us, second.
The lesson? We demonstrate mercy and love for others by serving them first.
Why might that be?
Experience has taught us this important moral and spiritual lesson: Who among us has been the first to love others? The simple fact is: We learned to serve, first, from those who served us first: Our parents.
As infants and toddlers, our parents served each of us in ways we quite likely don’t remember. Our parents continued to serve us in many ways when we were youngsters, teenagers, and young adults. Some of those lessons we remember well, for better and for worse. Modeling for us that love meant and required serving others, first, we learned to serve others and, in serving them, we hopefully have all learn to demonstrate selfless love for others.
But, there’s something more to this moral and spiritual lesson.
Anyone can serve others by sacrificing self-interest to promote their good. First responders, social workers, and public defenders, for example, provide this service. But, “WOKE” Catholics recall that God emptied Himself, first, to save humanity from their iniquity, especially as that evidences itself when people betray and abandon them. Recalling this teaching of the Catholic faith challenges “WOKE” Catholics to keep in mind each and every day the critical importance of emptying themselves to promote the moral and spiritual good of others...irrespective of how they’re treated in return.
Not only that.
“WOKE” Catholics do this because they also recall the Latin root of sacrifice—“sacrificium”—which means “make holy.” In other words, these Catholics work assiduously to transform what would otherwise be a form of natural service into a pathway leading to holiness of life. In contrast, “sleepy” Catholics may pay lip service to this goal but, in the facts of their daily lives betray and abandon those good intentions.
Recalling this truth of our Catholic faith, our parents taught us that serving others isn’t a burden—a heavy yoke laid upon our shoulders, as many people believe. Instead, their self-sacrificing service motivated by unadulterated love lessened the burden’s weight—transformed it into what Jesus called a “light burden”—which they willingly bore upon their shoulders. In this way and along their pathway toward holiness of life, our parents modeled for us Jesus as he bore his Cross on the way to Calvary.
If you think about it for just one moment, this is an absolutely astonishing teaching, one that the world has neither understood nor appreciated across the millennia: God served humanity, first, by sending His only begotten Son in order to save humanity from its moral and spiritual iniquity. Without griping or complaining, but with the humility, patience, and obedience of a servant—and motivated solely by selfless love—the apex of God’s serving humanity was exhibited as Jesus accepted the weighty burden of sin that the people for whom God had emptied first Himself intentionally willed to execute God’s only begotten Son.
In this way, God’s service taught humanity a new way of life—emptying oneself by serving others selflessly—that overcomes sin. That self-emptying and serving others ends only with last breath, as Jesus exemplified from the Cross.
What the world has failed to understand and appreciate about this truth of our Catholic faith is what Jesus taught about serving others: It requires experiencing and bearing patiently not simply with those whom we serve but also with the more painful situations they cause us. As for Jesus, so it is for us: This requires personally experiencing betrayal and abandonment by those we served to the point that we wondered whether God has also betrayed and abandoned us, crying out with our last breath as Jesus did from the Cross:
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
In contrast, when we’re betrayed and abandoned by those for whom we’ve emptied ourselves and served them selflessly—whether great or small is only a matter of degree not of fact—we experience profound disappointment and dejection. This is attributable to the fact that our fidelity—evident as we persist by bearing patiently with those whom we serve—makes what Jesus taught to appear meaningless, as if God has betrayed and abandoned us...or, more likely, perhaps there is no God. Then, focusing solely upon ourselves, we no longer consider that God served us first by sending His only begotten Son who was betrayed and abandoned by everyone around him in his day!
The suffering caused by betrayal and abandonment points not to the futility of serving others, the meaninglessness of life, or whether or not God exists. Instead, it can cause us to reflect upon suffering as a gift, one reminding us about how God created us to be served, first, and through that experience, to serve others, even when they betray and abandon us.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve not been faithful to God who served us first. Instead, we’ve been hypocritical and duplicitous by not imitating God’s fidelity. For example: How many good intentions to become “WOKE” Catholics have we betrayed and abandoned? How many resolutions have we left unfulfilled? How many promises have we not kept? And that’s not just how we’ve responded to God, but also characteries our response to others whom we claim to love! Yet, despite this hypocrisy and duplicity, God has emptied Himself and took upon Himself those who betrayed and abandoned His only begotten Son, serving humanity by forgiving the infidelity evident in all those betrayals and abandonment across the millennia.
How many of us fail to appreciate this lesson? Then, when others betray and abandon us, how many of us attempt to fill up our emptiness by seeking to possess more and more of everything we believe will bring happiness?
Take a moment to consider the logic: As we amass more and more of those created things, we assume that doing so will make us increasingly happy.
But the simple fact is that following merrily along this pathway actually leads us to become increasingly less grateful. Why? If we possessed everything we wanted, what’s there for which we would be grateful?
In the end, this false belief and the pathway to the end where it leads is constructed upon the sand of godlessness—we sell out our need for the Creator for the transient happiness of the created. Instead of emptying ourselves and serving others, we spend our days seeking to fill up the interior moral and spiritual void we’ve created with the things God’s creatures have made. Knowing this, God emptied Himself, first, to teach us that that it is by being grateful for all we have, we will experience the immense joy God experiences in doing so.
That represents our challenge from scripture on this Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion: To learn to empty ourselves so we might selflessly serve others.
How might we do that and make it a more authentic “Holy Week”?
Upon awaking each morning, conduct a memento mori by recalling what St. Paul wrote in today’s epistle:
[Jesus] emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.
Then, experiencing the promise of Christmas Eve—“he shall be named Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us” not as an idea but as a living, personal reality—when someone you’ve served mistreats you during the day, if not betrays or abandons you, resolve to recall “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Then, as each day comes to its inevitable conclusion this week, the proof that we’ve emptied ourselves—our sacrifice and holiness of life—will evidence itself as we left being “sleepy” Catholics behind and have become more of a “WOKE” Catholic of whom it can be said: “[You] relied on the LORD” who rescued you because the LORD emptied Himself for you, first, because the LORD loved you.”
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