The path descending

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…. Jesus had only one “operational mode.” Everything he did, he did by self-emptying. He emptied himself and descended into human form. And he emptied himself still further (“even unto death on the cross”) and fell through the bottom to return to the realms of dominion and glory. In whatever life circumstance, Jesus always responded with the same motion of self-emptying—or to put it another way, of the same motion of descent: going lower, taking the lower place, not the higher.…

 

He certainly called us to dying to self, but his idea of dying to self was not through inner renunciation or guarding the purity of his being but through radically squandering everything he had and was

                     Cynthia Bourgeault

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Bread

Mountain

Temple

 

Wealth

Power

Fame

 

sitting there among the rocks

Jesus battled with himself

 

we sometimes think that in that barren wilderness

as he wrestled for 40 days

Adam and Eve redux

 

that Jesus was empty

that this was indeed paradise lost

no garden but wasteland

a place of want

 

but this was the Beloved Son

confirmed, affirmed, and blessed

the heavens had opened wide and Creator love

had spilled from heaven

 

he carried the Sacred

all that power and love

all that capacity for the miraculous

within that human frame

 

he had wealth and power and

that charisma that draws people

and binds them

 

perhaps the question was not whether he would seek those things

but how he would use them

 

for self or for others?

was this going to be a ministry of ascension or descent?

would he build an Empire through the use of his charisma

and by the accumulation of power and wealth?

or would he build a Kingdom by

“squandering everything he had and was” (CB)?

 

he chose the path descending

he emptied himself (Philippians 2)

walking dusty roads

breaking bread with the unsavory

challenging Empire

dying

 

but dying to rise

from dust to dust

from dust to resurrection

descending to rise again

 

what do we do with our wilderness yearnings?

our hunger, our need for respect

our desire for power?

 

what do we do as we seek the reasonable?

a full belly, a friend, a bit of autonomy?

 

where do our desires take us?

into that mad climb to the mountain top

to fame

to affluence

 

where we are controlled and seek to control?

 

or can we hold our gifts lightly

using them for others

having the mindset of Jesus

knowing the last shall be first

those who give shall receive

those who die shall live

those who are humble shall find glory?

 

what are we doing to do

with the whispers in our ears?