Sermon For Holy Week

He Emptied Himself: A Holy Week Homily on the Mind of Christ

We are in the most solemn week the Church keeps. Every year the liturgy draws us back here, not because we have forgotten the facts, but because we have not yet finished learning what they mean. Holy Week is not a commemoration of something that happened once and is now safely in the past. It is an invitation to stand inside the story again, to let it read us, to let it do its slow and searching work.

The appointed readings place before us two texts that belong together the way a key belongs to a lock. The first is a hymn, ancient and compressed, from Paul's letter to the Philippians. The second is the Passion narrative from Mark's Gospel, long and relentless and almost unbearable in its honesty. The hymn tells us what happened in the counsels of eternity. The Gospel shows us what that looked like in the dust of Jerusalem. Together they make the claim that is at the heart of our faith, and at the heart of this week.

Let us hear the hymn first. Paul writes in Philippians 2:5, "Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. And when he had come as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even to death on a cross. For this reason God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

That is the whole arc of Holy Week and Easter in eleven verses. But we need Mark to show us what the arc actually felt like from the inside.

The Mind That Chose The Descent

Paul's word for the posture Christ assumed is the word translated "attitude" or "mind." He is not asking the Philippians to admire Christ from a safe distance. He is asking them to think the way Christ thought, to orient their inner lives the way Christ oriented his. And the first thing he says about that mind is this: Christ did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited.

That phrase deserves to sit with us for a moment. The Greek word behind "exploited" carries the sense of grasping, of holding something tightly for one's own advantage. Christ possessed, in the fullest and most genuine sense, the nature of God. He was not a lesser being reaching upward. He was the eternal Son, and his equality with the Father was not an aspiration but a reality. And he did not clutch it. He did not use it as a shield against the cost of our redemption.

Instead, Paul says, he emptied himself. Theologians have wrestled with that phrase for centuries, and rightly so. It does not mean he ceased to be God. It means he took on what he had not previously taken on: the form of a servant, the likeness of humanity, the full weight of creaturely existence. The one through whom all things were made entered into the fragility of the things he had made. And he did so not under compulsion, but by choice. The descent was voluntary.

This is the mind Paul is asking us to adopt. Not the mind that calculates what it can get, but the mind that asks what it can give. Not the mind that protects its position, but the mind that is willing to lay it down. That is a genuinely difficult thing to hear, because most of us spend considerable energy managing our reputations, securing our comfort, and avoiding the kind of vulnerability that real service requires. The hymn does not let us off gently. It holds up the mind of Christ and says: this is the pattern.

The Descent Becomes Concrete

Now turn to Mark. If Philippians gives us the theology in compressed and luminous form, Mark gives us the theology with mud on its boots.

Mark's Passion narrative moves with a kind of terrible momentum. There is no slowing down, no pause for reflection. Jesus is betrayed by one of his own. He is arrested in a garden while his disciples sleep. He is brought before the high priest, mocked, struck, spat upon. He is handed to Pilate, flogged, dressed in a purple robe by soldiers who press a crown of thorns onto his head and kneel before him in cruel imitation of the homage he actually deserves. He is led to Golgotha. He is crucified between two criminals. And from the sixth hour to the ninth hour, Mark tells us, darkness comes over the whole land.

Then, at the ninth hour, Jesus cries out in the words of Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"

That cry is the most searching moment in the entire Gospel. It is not a cry of despair in the ordinary sense. It is a prayer, addressed to God, drawn from the psalter of Israel. But it is a prayer from the depths. And we should not rush past it or soften it. The one who existed in the form of God, who had known from before the foundation of the world the unbroken communion of the Trinity, experienced in those hours something that we cannot fully name: a forsakenness, a desolation, that was the consequence of bearing what we had made of ourselves and our world.

Paul says he became obedient to the point of death, even to death on a cross. Mark shows us exactly what that meant. It meant the darkness. It meant the cry. It meant the centurion standing at the foot of the cross, a Gentile soldier with no theological training, who looked at this dying man and said, "Truly this man was the Son of God."

The descent was complete.

What This Exposes In Us

Here is the honest question this week presses upon us. We say we follow Christ. We say we are his disciples. But the pattern of his life, as Paul describes it and Mark narrates it, is a pattern of downward movement. He did not grasp. He gave. He did not demand to be served. He served. He did not avoid suffering when suffering was the cost of love. He went through it.

And we, by instinct, move in the opposite direction. We grasp. We protect. We avoid. We are very skilled at finding reasons why sacrifice is impractical, why vulnerability is unwise, why this particular act of service is not really our responsibility. We are, to use Paul's language, people who consider our own advantages rather than the advantages of others.

Holy Week does not condemn us for this and then leave us there. But it does name it clearly, because we cannot receive what Christ has done for us if we have not first understood what it was that needed doing. The cross is not a beautiful symbol. It is the place where the full weight of human self-centeredness, human cruelty, human abandonment of God was met by the full weight of divine love. He went into the darkness we had made, and he bore it, so that we would not have to bear it alone and without hope.

That is not a comfortable truth. But it is the most important truth this week holds.

The Exaltation That Follows

Paul does not end the hymn at the cross, and neither does the Gospel end at the tomb. The hymn moves from the descent to the exaltation: "For this reason God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name."

The resurrection is not in today's reading, but it is the horizon toward which every line of this week points. The cross is not the final word. The cry of dereliction is not the end of the prayer. The stone rolled across the tomb is not the permanent condition of things. Paul's hymn was written by a man who knew the resurrection had happened, and he wrote the descent and the suffering into it precisely because the exaltation gives them their meaning.

This matters enormously for how we live through our own dark passages. The pattern of Christ is not simply a moral example, though it is that. It is a promise about the shape of reality. The way down is, in the economy of God, the way through. Humility, service, suffering borne faithfully: these are not dead ends. They are the road that leads, in God's time and by God's power, to something the world cannot manufacture and cannot take away.

That does not mean every act of faithful service will be rewarded in the way we expect, or on the schedule we prefer. The New Testament is not selling us a transaction. But it is telling us that the one who emptied himself was not abandoned to emptiness. God raised him. And the same God who raised him is the God in whom we place our trust.

The Invitation Of This Week

So what does Holy Week ask of us, practically and concretely?

It asks us to slow down enough to let the story land. Not to consume it as liturgical background noise, but to stand inside it. To read Mark's Passion narrative this week, slowly, and to notice where we see ourselves in it. In the disciples who sleep when they should be watching. In Peter who denies when he should be faithful. In the crowd that calls for crucifixion. And then to notice that Christ went to the cross for all of them, and for us.

It asks us to examine the places in our lives where we are grasping rather than giving, protecting rather than serving, and to ask what it would look like to adopt, even in some small and ordinary way, the mind of Christ.

And it asks us to come to the Table. Because the Eucharist is not separate from this week's story. It is the place where Christ himself gives us the bread broken and the cup poured out, and says: this is my body, given for you. The one who emptied himself feeds us from his own fullness. We do not come to this Table because we have managed to adopt his mind perfectly. We come because we need him to form it in us, slowly, over a lifetime, by grace.

He emptied himself. He humbled himself. He became obedient to the point of death. And God exalted him.

That is the story this week tells. May we have ears to hear it, and hearts willing to be changed by it.

Sources Consulted

Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2017.

The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Church Publishing, 1979. Especially the liturgies for Holy Week and the Great Vigil of Easter.

N. T. Wright. Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

R. T. France. The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

Rowan Williams. Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.