26th Sunday 2023
Ezekiel 18:25-28; Philippians 2:1-11; Matthew 21:28-32
Just to confuse you, I am not going to talk about the Gospel today. Instead, I want to focus on that Second Reading.
After urging upon us a spirit of humility and of mutual love-do we have that spirit, by the way? Do you have it, do I have it?—it launches into a glorious hymn in praise of Jesus the Christ. It tells of His total self-emptying; His identification with us; His suffering, death, and Resurrection; and finally the honour due to His name.
There is a huge amount of material there for our contemplation. Firstly, let us think about the self-emptying, the “kenosis” as it is called, of the Son of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Son. Enjoying total union with the Father in the Holy Spirit, total bliss, everything desirable, He shed all of this, and became one of us. Why?
This wasn’t a question of slumming it, of getting down with the plebs out of curiosity. I recently read George Orwell’s “Down and out in Paris and London”, in which Orwell describes how he, the Eton educated Eric Blair (his real name) went to live, first among the poorest paid workers in the Paris catering industry, and then as a tramp in London.
Why did he do this? It seems partly as if he was looking for himself, trying to discover his own identity and that of people whose lot was very different from his own. What he did was impressive, and yet, in a sense, unreal. His upper class accent always set him apart from those among whom he tried to immerse himself, and he knew that he could abandon this way of life at any time, which indeed he did.
For the Son of God, the situation was very different. In becoming the man Jesus, He became truly, irreversibly, and totally human. He had no escape route. He was entirely one of us, born in a particular family in a particular place and time. Nor was He acting out of curiosity: God’s self-immersion in the human race was purely an act of love, assuming human nature in order to redeem human nature, and to make it divine.
This entailed plumbing the depths of human suffering, undergoing mental anguish, physical pain, humiliation, and a death which effectively put Him into the power of evil; all of this purely out of love for the human race. We could reflect on this for a lifetime, and I do invite you to reflect upon it.
The second half of the hymn praises the name of Jesus. I don’t know about you, but I was brought up to use the Holy Name sparingly, and always with a bow of the head. That approach seems less popular today, which is fair enough, but being an awkward so-and-so, I continue to use it.
Devotion and respect for the name of Jesus provide a bond with Evangelicals, who speak of “lifting up” the name of Jesus. We are also reminded of the power of a name. “What’s in a name?” ask the cynics. “A great deal” we would reply. Moses wanted to know God’s name at the burning bush, but God had no name. “I am who am” was His reply: “I am pure existence”. There was no possibility of the Israelites claiming power over the living God, as the nations around them had power over their false gods through having named them. Incidentally, this makes a nonsense of the now forbidden practice of calling God “Yahweh”, which nullifies the very point which God was making.
To illustrate the power involved in knowing someone’s name, I would sometimes suggest in homilies that, if you could provide a description of a burglar, it might be of some help to the police, but not a great deal. On the other hand, if you knew his name, that would give you power over him, until an occasion when what I had suggested as an illustration became a reality, as I encountered a burglar in my presbytery in Morecambe. As he ran off down the road, I was able to ring the police and tell them “A bloke called such and such has just broken into my house. Would you like his address?”
“No,” came the reply. “We know his address. We will go and sit outside his flat until he comes back.”
In taking human flesh, and giving Himself a name, God has given us power over Him. He has allowed human beings to use that name, even to abuse it. Above all, He has given us the power to call upon Him in that name. “Anything you ask the Father in my name, He will grant you” says Jesus. This is a name of power which gives us power. Let us use it always with awe, respect, and adoration.
