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You empty, I empty

What does it mean for God to become man?

This is what I’ve been wrestling with for days now. I put the finishing touches on a paper late last night that dealt with Kenotic Christology, based on the hymn in Philippians 2:

⁵Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
⁶Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
⁷but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
⁸And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
⁹Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

“Kenosis” speaks to the Greek word that meant “emptying” or “pouring out” alluded to here in this passage. What I found in my research was an unfortunate history of bickering and posturing about whether or not Christ could really “pour himself out.”

But is the point of the passage? To come up with a perfect metaphysical description of the essence of Jesus’ ontology? I doubt it.

The hymnic form of this poetic piece means that the author is using 10 words when 2 will do, so to speak. There’s something bigger and deeper that can only be expressed in the meandering beauty of poetry.

Because that’s what we do when we can’t quite nail down some pervasive truth, right? We wax about it, or we put it in a song, or we pray, or we write poetry, or we use a metaphor that doesn’t quite do the job but it may be close enough. History is filled with poems and songs of poor schmucks who, when at their exasperated wits’ ends at their loss for words, resulted to ancient practices that have soothed the soul since time began.

So the author of this hymn in Philippians comes to this place in his writing where he can’t quite systematically get down what he wants to say.

And I don’t blame him—putting words to the collision of glorious Divinity and broken Humanity can’t be an easy thing.

But that’s exactly what this poetic moment in the passage is doing. It’s giving us an insight into what happens when God stoops.

When God, like a loving Father, bends over and helps his child up.

It momentarily breaks the towering posture of the adult. But when the kid is back on their feet, not perfected but hopefully headed in the right direction, then the Father takes joy in the moment but ultimately continues to operate as a Father: ready to help his son grow into something more.

As weird as it is to say, the kenotic event is not about God.

It’s about us.

And God being humble enough to move our direction; because we’re helpless to move towards Him.

The “emptying out” of the Trinitarian God is not about defining a new reality for God; it’s about opening up a new reality for us.

And sometimes, all we can do is paint that new reality.

Or sing it. Or write prosaicly about it.

But we ultimately must learn to let it burst forth and consume our kingdoms.