bridegroom and his message, for Jesus himself will empty himself. Thus where we begin we will end. All is about the emptying of oneself.

Transcription

1 2 nd Sunday A man is coming after me who ranks ahead of me. The reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be made known to Israel. I saw the Spirit come down and remain on him. In these and other similar words the fourth Gospel makes it abundantly clear to us that John the Baptist was second to Jesus and not his rival. If historically there could have been confusion about the relationship between John and Jesus, by the time this fourth and last Gospel was written in the late first or early second century, the confusion has disappeared. Indeed, in this gospel John does not baptize Jesus, as he does in Mt and Mk and also, it seems, in Luke. In Luke Jesus is baptized, but it is not stated explicitly that John was the baptizer. But here in the fourth and last Gospel John simply points Jesus out to his disciples and then lets them, indeed, it almost seems, encourages them, to follow Jesus. And two chapters later (3:22-30) John describes himself as the best man who rejoices in the good fortune of the groom, who is Jesus. Then he speaks his final sentence ( He must increase; I must decrease. ) and disappears from the Gospel stage. A lesson in self-effacement, a lesson in humility, a study in what is called kenosis, the emptying of oneself that is what this fiery preacher of repentance has become in this fourth Gospel. And in being such he anticipates the

2 2 bridegroom and his message, for Jesus himself will empty himself. Thus where we begin we will end. All is about the emptying of oneself. In eastern religions there is great emphasis on the need to strip away the self-identities which we all build up during our life times. One way of doing so is to look at oneself as another person. In reviewing or even living events one practices looking at oneself as if one were looking at someone else: look at John or Jane now doing this, now doing that. Through this distancing of oneself from oneself one can begin to strip away the different masks that cover the really real, the self. And eventually one comes to the realization that the individual self is also a mask which must be stripped away so that only the great self or reality remains. This last step is hard for us westerners to accept. The individual is so important to us that we cannot imagine its disappearance. It seems to go against our understanding of everything in our religion. Why would God make us in order to destroy us ultimately? We cannot buy that. And yet the Jesuit scientist Teilhard de Chardin claimed that his own personal immortality did not matter to him. I suppose he saw it as a last bit of selfishness, that the eternal banquet or party cannot take place unless I am there. But don t we have to allow for that much selfishness, that we want to be there, that we

3 3 want to pray to Jesus in the words of the Good Thief: Jesus, remember me when you come into Your Kingdom? Yet we have to admit that at the eternal banquet our eyes will not be focused on ourselves but on God. We will be praising God and not looking at ourselves. We will be so in love with God who is Love that we will forget ourselves. And that is why we have to say that even here in this life we have to grow in this habit of self-forgetfulness, of not looking at ourselves but looking instead at God. And of course the way we do this is by looking at our neighbor, for in Jesus God has identified himself with our neighbor. Neighbor here stands for everyone who is not myself. Our first neighbors of course are those who are closest to us, but the circle is not a closed one. Everyone can be and in some sense must be enclosed in it eventually. Couldn t we say that God has built reality in such a way that we are led to this self-forgetfulness by the very structures of life? Children are naturally self-centered, and growth for them means becoming aware of the fact that they are not the only realities in the world and are not the center of the world. Therefore, when we meet a self-centered adult we are seeing a child who has failed to

4 4 grow up. Sadly, we are all more or less childlike in this bad sense. Only those we call saints are really adult. Adulthood demands that we grow up. People who fall in love learn to place the interests of their beloved before their own. If they don t, their love is not really the love of the other person but selflove. To become a parent is to enter the school of self-sacrificing love. Being a parent is being concentrated on the good of one s children. Religious life as it is known in our church is supposed to be the embracing of this way of self-forgetfulness. That is the meaning of the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. People taking these vows hope in this way to remove from themselves the major ways in which one can aggrandize oneself: possessions, family, power. But unfortunately it also deprives them of ways in which people are forced to go beyond themselves, namely, the needs of spouses and children. Religious can become very self-centered, very childish. But ordinary life is also a challenge to living this way of life. How can a person succeed in business without promoting him or herself? Doesn t our society, both politically and economically and

5 5 socially, force us to toot our own horns? How can a person get ahead without pushing himself or herself ahead? These are questions which must be asked and answered as best we can if we want to embrace the way of life which John and then the Lord himself model for us, the life of self-effacement and self-sacrifice, the life of self-forgetfulness in the love and service of the other. And whatever the answer is to these questions, this much is clear to all of us. We know a child in an adult s clothing when we meet one, and it s not a pleasant experience. We know the child in ourselves too. When we experience it in ourselves, all we can do is ask for forgiveness and divine help to grow up a little more the next time.