Holy
Week – An Exploration of the Meaning of Kenosis
copyright 2010 by Sea Raven, D.Min.
Palm Sunday
Luke 19:28-40; Luke 22:14-23:56;
Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11 (Readings from Year C)
Palm Sunday is also known as “Passion Sunday.” The minister has
the choice of concentrating on Jesus’s triumphal entrance into
Jerusalem, hailed as a conquering hero by the fickle crowds (the
“Liturgy of the Palms”), or telling the entire “passion” story.
The Abingdon Press edition of The
Revised Common Lectionary of 1992 (RCL) admonishes worship
planners that “whenever possible, the whole passion narrative should be
read.” As a result, the liturgy on Palm Sunday can run the
dizzying gamut from adulatory parade to Pilate’s death sentence in an
hour.
In Year C, the RCL offers for consideration Luke’s descriptions of
Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and Pilate’s decision to grant the demand
of the crowd and sentence Jesus to death, along with a portion of
Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The traditional view of both
the Jerusalem procession and Philippians 2:9-11 is that this is the
imperial Christ triumphant. “Therefore God highly exalted him and
gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of
Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the
earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (NRSV).
Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan suggest that Jesus’s “entrance
into Jerusalem” on a donkey during the festival of Passover is a parody
of Pilate’s procession into the city at the same time. Jesus’s
“peasant procession” came from the east, down the Mount of
Olives. Pilate’s “military procession” came from the west, in a
show of force for law and order. (See The
Last Week,
Harper SanFrancisco, 2006). While they
base their study on the Gospel of Mark, Luke’s Gospel uses Mark, but
adds details. A very telling detail – never read if the RCL is
followed – is Jesus weeping over the consequences that will arise
because of the inability of the people to recognize their visitation
from God and the “things that make for peace” (Luke 19:41-44). The Palm
Sunday parade is a political protest. If Borg and Crossan are
also correct in their theory that Luke’s birth story was meant as a
counter to the birth stories told about Cesar Augustus (see The
First Christmas, Harper
SanFrancisco, 2007), then Luke’s gospel appears to be threaded (albeit
subtly) by subversive imagery.
In addition, as these commentaries have suggested,
based on Jesus Seminar scholarship,
Paul’s theology is not one of domination, but of transformation; not of
violence and political victory, but of non-violent
justice-compassion. Despite the use to which these verses in
Philippians 2:9-11 have been put throughout Christian history, the
Apostle Paul was not establishing Jesus as the new commander-in-chief
of the military might of the known and unknown universe. The hymn
was probably not written by Paul. Instead it is probably one of
the earliest used by followers of Jesus’s Way, and quoted by Paul.
The portion of the hymn to the Christ that Paul quotes may be seen to
fulfill Isaiah’s expectation of deliverance from injustice. It is
an ecstatic, mystical declaration that the Emperors of Rome, living and
dead, who declared themselves and their ancestors to be “god” and “son
of god” and even “very god of very gods” would have to acknowledge that
Jesus’ name was above even theirs. Jesus was the one chosen by
God to be the one to restore God’s distributive justice-compassion, in
place of the Emperor’s retributive justice. In place of law, the
Christ establishes radical fairness. The servant of God gives up
the power associated with the usual systems of imperial
civilization (See Luke 4:1-13) The servant
of God is not interested in pay-back or
retribution, nor in reward and glorification. The servant of God
works with God to establish God’s distributive
justice-compassion. The servant does the work for the glory of
God, and is vindicated, delivered from injustice and death.
Luke’s scene where Pilate condemns Jesus to torture and death, along
with Philippians 2:7-8 (Jesus “humbled himself and became obedient to
the point of death – even death on a cross” – NRSV) has been
interpreted to mean that Jesus agreed to submit to the orders of a
violently vengeful god and to accept the death penalty on behalf of
sinful humanity. Without that payment, humanity cannot be saved
from hell. This is the “ransom theory of the atonement.”
It is the earliest of the atonement theories, probably beginning with
the writer of Mark’s gospel in the 60s to 70s C.E. Since the 12th
Century, St. Anselm’s substitutionary atonement has
defined the death of Jesus at the hands of the Roman Empire. Mel
Gibson’s 2004 film, The Passion of the
Christ, is perhaps the penultimate illustration of that
theology. God required that Jesus not only die in our place, but
should suffer in order to pay for the sin humanity inherited from Adam
and Eve. The greater the sin, the greater the vicarious
suffering, the greater Jesus’s love for us.
But the first part of the hymn to the Christ is about neither ransom
nor substitution. It is about personal kenosis – the act of disregarding
petty human desires, and defeating the temptation to revel in being the
equal of God. “[A]lthough he was born in the image of God, did
not regard 'being like God' as something to use for his own advantage,
but rid himself of such vain pretension and accepted a servant’s lot”
(Scholar’s Version,
forthcoming October 2010. For more
information contact the Westar
Institute).
Because Isaiah 50:4-9a is part of the Palm Sunday liturgy, the words of
that hymn might be seen as a kind of midrash
– a
retelling or reframing of that portion of sacred story. As the
hymn restates the nature of the ultimate servant of God, the suffering
servant described by Isaiah becomes the suffering messiah, who “emptied
himself, taking the form of a slave” (NRSV). The servant is
obedient to God’s law of justice-compassion to the point of death on a
cross – the ultimate symbol of imperial law and order. “That is
why God raised him higher than anyone and awarded him the title that is
above all others . . .” (Scholars
Version).
Isaiah 50 is not some kind of foretelling of the fate of the future
Jesus. It is a model for those who would teach the nature of
God. “Morning by morning [God] wakens my ear to listen as those
who are taught” sings Isaiah. When we let go of self-interest –
ego survival – we “think in the same way that the Anointed, Jesus, did
. . .” (SV). We think
and act kenotically
in a constant, evolving struggle of spirit for justice-compassion
against the normalcy of civilization. The “suffering servant”
trusts God’s vindication, that God will prove the servant to be right
in the end: “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher,
that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word . . . God has
opened my ear, and I was not rebellious. . . . I did not hide my
face from insult and spitting. . . . Who will declare me guilty?
All of them will wear out like a garment.”
The cherry–picking of Paul’s writings, which are scattered throughout
all three years of the Revised
Common Lectionary, means that the Palm Sunday verses from
Philippians are separated from the context in which Paul wrote
them. When that happens, Christians can easily ignore or dismiss
the action that is called for in 2:1-5,
just before the hymn to the Christ. Paul urges the community in
Philippi to have this same kenotic
mind that Jesus had: “regard others as better than yourselves. . . .
look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others”
(NRSV) With those words, Paul invites the 1st Century Philippians
(and anyone in the 21st Century) to a radical abandonment of
self-interest. Paul is talking about creating the realm of God on
earth. In such a realm, greed has no place, and debt has no power. Creating such
a realm requires the kind of obedience that
comes from total commitment to distributive justice-compassion, which
can (and often does) lead to death at the hands of imperial systems.
Later in the letter (3:8-9)
Paul writes “Indeed, I now regard everything as worthless in light of
the incomparable value of realizing that the Anointed, Jesus, is my
lord. Because of him I wrote off all of those assets and now
regard them as worth no more than rubbish so that I can gain the
incomparable asset of the Anointed and be found in solidarity with him,
no longer having an integrity of my own making based on performing the
requirements of religious law, but now having the integrity endorsed by
God, the integrity of an absolute confidence in and reliance upon God
like that of the Anointed, Jesus. This integrity is endorsed by
God and is based on such unconditional trust in God” (SV). Here
is the basis for kenosis at
all levels:
• a kenotic foreign
policy – in which crushing debt carried by nations such as Haiti is
summarily dismissed;
• kenotic business
practice – in which profits are secondary to safety, reliability, and
sustainability; where debt is not leveraged in order to amass fortunes
that seduce others into debt they cannot afford;
• kenotic
management – in which suggestions for improvement, or whistle-blowing
corruption are valued;
• kenotic relationships
– in which the well-being of the other is foremost.
In the 21st Century CE, some are calling for punishment of the
speculators and managers who seem to be responsible for the global
financial melt-down of 2008-10. Others are holding individual
people responsible for making poor choices, or for not having the good
sense to avoid the deal that seemed too good to be true. But this
is pious revenge. If justice is distributive, there is no need
for punishment beyond the consequences already befalling all of us who
are caught in the system.
Luke’s Jesus weeps over the inability of the people to recognize the
coming of the kingdom, and the consequences that will result from that
inability. Christians today are too busy getting ready for the
Easter Bunny. We don’t want to hear how our failure to keep the
promises we made during Lent to give up chocolate or stop smoking
somehow make us personally responsible for the death of the Son of God
two thousand years ago. Somewhere deep in our post–modern brains,
we know that just isn’t true. But what is true is that as soon as
we abandon justice-compassion, or ignore the consequences of our
actions that lead to unjust systems, we are caught in the powerful
currents that propel civilizations into empires. This is not an
indictment of human nature, as John Dominic Crossan is careful to make clear.
Empire can happen when people begin to organize themselves into
societies, but the good news is that Empire is not necessarily
inevitable. If we truly turn from our destructive, unjust habits,
the old patterns will not be repeated. Sign onto the
Covenant. Pick up your Blackberry and start making sustainable
deals that ensure that no part of the interdependent web of life on
this Planet is compromised. That is the promise and the hope of
Palm Sunday. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
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