Year B / Lent / Palm Sunday
Readings: Isaiah 50.4-7 / Psalm 21.8-9, 17-18a,19-20, 23-24 (R/v 2a) / Philippians 2.6-11 / Mark 14.1-15.47
What a week it has been. Mr Lee Kuan Yew passed on. A family grieves and a nation mourns. Ordinary citizens tear and thank him. Nations praise his achievements. Political rivals acknowledge his life’s work: a metropolis Singapore from the mudflats. (Some still nitpick the aged old criticisms.) The media broadcast his humanity: love for wife; concern for family; care for the poor and ordinary; and zeal for country.
Tens of thousands stoically and slowly marched in the hot sun and through the humid night toward Parliament House to pay their heartfelt respects to Mr Lee. And I see something I had not expected to see. You have seen it too.
The sight of overflowing generosity: of hotels and shops giving out free water and food; of volunteers helping the aged, handicap and young along the way; of strangers shielding each other from the heat; of our army and police personnel attending them with care; of a concern for one another as one united people walking not in grief but for life. Perhaps, these express Singaporeans being the best we can be.
For me, these surprising gestures of charity are about a self-giving of one to another.
Our Palm Sunday and Holy Week readings also speak about one like us, Jesus, who gives of himself for us and our salvation.
Jesus did this by reaching out in care to save us from sin and death; he did this by an act of self-giving on the Cross. All his healing, preaching, teaching and being in friendship with his disciples prepared him for this moment: they expressed his continuous and bounteous self-giving of his love of God and love for neighbor.
Paul captures this truth of Jesus’ self-giving nature with these lines from our second reading from Philippians:
Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Our Holy Week readings echo Paul’s lines: they remind us that Christian hope in Jesus is rooted in a self-giving action. In Jesus its form is complete self-emptying of oneself for another. This form has a divine origin: it is rooted in God’s compassion that moves God to give us God’s only son. And it has a divine destination: it is meant for God’s delight that in Jesus’ “yes” to the Cross humankind is saved from sin and death.
Jesus’ self-emptying is the Christ-like compassion all humankind is called to embody when interacting with one another. He shows us how to do this: by keeping the proper Christian- perspective on what self-emptying is really for. Not only for care and share, or for support and lifting up. Not even for forgiveness and. But simply this: self-emptying for another’s salvation.
Compassionate self-emptying is the most Christ-like of all human actions we can do.
Isn’t self-emptying however about giving up, putting aside, letting go, going down? But where can we go after going down but up? Indeed, there is no other way to eternal life but through death, as there is no other way to be raised into Easter life than by self-emptying.
Self-emptying ourselves completely for the love of God for another’s salvation: this is how you and I can reclaim our rightful name, “Christian.” This name expresses the truth that we are made in God’s image, as it also calls us to the work of attaining God’s likeness in Jesus. This is why following Jesus’ action of compassionate self-emptying, especially on the Cross, is how you and I can let Jesus lift us up with him into eternal life.
For many, self-emptying is about giving themselves to others. Singaporeans have been doing this for one another these sad days. Mr Lee did this for us all his life: “At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.”
As Christians however we have to give something more to others than ourselves: we are to give them God’s love and life. Jesus’ self-emptying on the Cross teaches us how to do this: by imitating God’s total compassion for others to the very end.
The week ahead will be as momentous, as this past week was. We will watch the unfolding drama of Jesus’ self-emptying: his faithfulness to God’s will; his sacrifice, suffering and death for us; the grief of his mother and his disciples. And we will experience the goodness of Jesus’ self-emptying: the glory of eternal life in him whom God raised from the dead.
Let us enter Holy Week then as we have passed through this past week mourning Mr Lee’s death and celebrating his life. What binds both weeks? The invitation to self-empty ourselves for others.
When we can recognize this invitation to be God’s gift for us to be a lot more human by acting a little bit more divine, we will then better enter Holy Week, like Jesus did when he entered Jerusalem: to stay the course to the Cross where God awaits to meet us and redeem us.
Yes, the week ahead will be far more significant for our Christian life and faith. But we can only experience this if we but empty ourselves to be with Jesus in whose self-emptying all of us have eternal life.
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: from the internet (indianarepublicmedia.org)
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