Back to the Basics

People put a lot of stock in significance. To thoroughly mix metaphors, we like to jump on the bandwagon of someone's rising star and go out in our own blaze of glory. We hunger to be connected with an important event or some famous person.

The value we crave in that event or person is in what worth has been added to them by the esteem of others. After all, it is only when others think something or someone famous that that someone or something then becomes important to everyone else. And so goes the chase through life as we all look for our own meaning in what significance others bring to us.

That pursuit of placing value on others by how they place value on us, however, sends us in the wrong direction. Instead of lifting us – and others – up, it brings us all crashing down, dehumanizes us and turns us into objects that are little more than step ladders for others to use to get to the top.

Jesus came and started at the bottom, resisted the impulse to climb and finally climbed on a donkey and then a cross in order to go even lower. And he called others to join him in his pursuit of the bottom. Not a race to tear one another down. Not a dash to dehumanize each other. But a steady downward move – from a human perspective, at least – to become the servant of all. To be a washer of others' feet.

Doesn't sound like much of a promo campaign – come join me and wash other people's stinking feet. I've had some low level jobs in my life, but I think the one that might have felt the lowest as a college student was as a shoe store clerk. Cleaning public bathrooms as a teenage church janitor might sound worse, but at least no one saw you do it. Taking off and putting on shoes for other people while they looked down on you could be a nasty job indeed – and it seemed those thirty-some years ago that the dirtier and smellier the feet, the more likely they were to let you shoe them.

Dutch-born author, Henri J. M. Nouwen, penned forty books in all, and his writings on spiritual life have inspired many. After years of teaching at such renowned schools as Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard, the Catholic priest closed out his illustrious career sharing his life with people with developmental disabilities at the L'Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto, Canada.

Many saw that move as a step down from where he had been. I rather think he was simply moving forward on his journey to be at peace with God in heaven and his own place on earth. He wrote: "As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their 'right' place."

I think about the urge to put people in their "right" place, we who aren't ever certain of our own. Jesus was amazingly comfortable in his own skin. Sure he was God, so why wouldn't it be easy? But the writer of Hebrews (2:18; 4:15) made it very clear that it was no easy thing for Jesus to take on that "skin" and become one of us. And yet as he learned obedience to his Father in heaven – and Hebrews 5:8 does say he learned that obedience – he came to find his peace with his place on earth.

I watched the DVD, "The Passion," with my wife and daughters Saturday evening as part of our Passion Week focus. I've seen it often enough that this time I noted things I hadn't before. One observation that struck me towards the end was that as Jesus hung dying in his last moments on that cross, he came to a point of willful resignation to all the agonizing tensions that had been building for who knows how long. It even seemed as though Father God Himself had turned His back on Jesus, the Son, and there was nowhere else to turn. Then and only then did he declare the effort over, and with his last breath whispered, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" (Luke 23:46). Total vulnerability. Total submission.

I wonder as I write and post these thoughts why I am doing so after Easter. It seems like something we should have finished with three days ago. And yet that is the truth that lives on past the Resurrection – that only in dying to self, do we really begin to live.