Yet, at times such as Holy Week, in particular this Holy Week, there is not much to be written that would be useful and good, and an occasion of spiritual growth, and not deleterious - for our readers, and also for our own souls. The words of the Apostle to the Philippians, also repeated on Palm Sunday, keep coming back: semetipsum exinanivit, "He emptied himself", "he made himself nothing". He was born for this, he took our mortal form to be obedient, "obedient unto death", "mortem autem crucis"...
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| Luis Salvador Carmona Jesús recogiendo sus vestiduras (Jesús flagelado) Church of the Holy Spirit (Clerecía), Salamanca |
How beautiful to say that He emptied himself, for the empty is opposed to the full! For the divine nature is sufficiently full, because every perfection of goodness is there. But human nature and the soul are not full, but capable of fulness, because it was made as a slate not written upon. Therefore, human nature is empty. Hence he says, He emptied himself, because He assumed a human nature. (St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Philippians)
"If the Word emptied himself taking the form of a servant," it was that He might make His brothers according to the flesh partakers of the divine nature, through sanctifying grace in this earthly exile, in heaven through the joys of eternal bliss. For the reason why the only-begotten Son of the Eternal Father willed to be a son of man was that we might be made conformed to the image of the Son of God and be renewed according to the image of Him who created us. (Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi)
There is so much that is disturbing going on, including in ecclesiastical environments, but we must not get distracted. With the graces made available by the Lord through His Church, especially the Sacraments, it is each one of us - and not anyone else - who must "work out" our "own salvation", with "fear and trembling", without "grumbling and hesitation", "in the midst of" this "crooked and perverse generation": "he that shall persevere to the end shall be saved” (Mt. xxiv, 13).
