Descent

30th Week in Ordinary Time - Saturday (3 November 2018)

Philippians 1:18-26

Luke 14:1,7-11

“Go and take the lowest place.”

Christianity is all about taking the lowest places. To follow Jesus would mean to willingly descend into humiliation and insignificance. It would mean to willingly enter the belly of the beast, i.e., to willingly enter into meaninglessness, and be ready to live without meaning for days and days together. This might also mean to make our plans and agendas secondary, and give more importance to God's plan or others' plan.

Dorothy Day (1897-1980), the foremost American social activisit-mystic of the 20th century, puts it beautifully, “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us. When we begin to take the lowest places, to wash the feet of others, to love our sisters and brothers with that burning love, that passion which led to the cross, then we can truly say, ‘Now I have begun.’”

I wonder if we as Christians have missed the central message of Jesus: “descent.” We really don't want to hear about this message of descent, vulnerability, humility, non-violence. We really have not accepted this major point as a pattern of our life, or as a path of our own liberation. This descent is the way of the cross, a process of embracing pain and suffering.

For many of us the way of the cross looks like a way of failure. In fact, we could say that Christianity is about how to lose and win, how to let go creatively, how the only real ascent is a true descent. But we have concerned ourselves with worshipping this way, rather than walking the way. In the gospels Jesus tells us seventeen times to “follow” him (=the Way), and never once tells us to “worship” him.

As good news to us, more and more people (irrespective of their backgrounds or religions) are recognising the importance of the way of descent, as these themes or titles would suggest: The Power of Vulnerability, The Triumph of Failure, In Praise of Chaos, Spirituality of Contradictions, Falling Upward. In today's first reading St Paul gives his authoritative signature, “For to me life is Christ, and death is gain.”

Of course, this is an earth-shattering statement, if we truly understand what it implies. Here are some implications (thanks to Fr Richard Rohr): God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures. God is everywhere and always and scandalously found even in the failure of sin. Jesus undoes religion by doing the most amazing thing: he finds God among the impure instead of among the pure!

In a similar vein writes Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan in his Testimony of Hope, “Jesus died outside the sacred walls, outside the city gates – extra muros. Hanging from the cross, Jesus made himself present where all the cursed lived, there where the sinful world lived far from God. Precisely in this way, he offered reconciliation and salvation to all. The cross of Jesus is planted in the midst of a sinful world. Therefore, if we want to discover the Lord’s face, we have to look for it among those who are furthest away. The Crucified One embraces every person, even the most wicked and desperate. Through the torn veil of Jesus’ body, the boundaries between the sacred enclosure and the world without God are destroyed. Jesus waits for us in every human being, whatever be his or her situation, his or her past, his or her state of life.”