based on Philippians 2:1-11
“What are you guys talking about?” “Nothing.”
“What do you want to do tonight?” “Nothing.”
“What did you learn in class today?” “Nothing.”
Of course, we never mean nothing, but rather something less. We were talking about something less than you should know, or tonight I want to do something less than usual, or in class today I learned something less than you might hope for based on your contributions to my TMS payments.
As people, we consider ourselves to be "something" – maybe even a big "something." We work tirelessly at our jobs and our studies, we invest in our relationships and portfolios, we establish our households and our corporate empires, all in an effort to “make something” of ourselves.
But Christ saw it fit to remind us where we really fall in the scheme of things.
When He, who is in very nature God, came here – to join our world that is aimed at success and pleasure – he considered it becoming nothing. See, what we think of as "something" God sees as something less.
“…but made himself nothing taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”
To be a human was, for Christ, to be nothing. But wait, there’s more! Christ (who is naturally God) did not just make himself something less. He made himself less than something less.
“And being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross!”
God – became a man – and died. That’s not exactly nothing, but He had to become nothing to get there.
We, as the “somethings” that we think we are, are told to have that same attitude. To look at the nothingness that Christ took on, to dwell on the less than nothingness to which he humbled himself, and to see that to be something less really shows something much, much more.
From "Sacred Poems"
What did the Lamb that he should need,
When the wolf sins, himself to bleed?
Why should his unstain’d breast make good
My blushes with his own heart-blood?
O my Savior! make me see
How dearly you have paid for me;
That lost again, my life may prove
As then in death, so now in love.
~Richard Crenshaw
