Jesus “Goes Low”

When I was about five years old, I remember trying to lift my dad’s bowling ball. I put my middle two fingers and my thumb into the holes of the ball and pulled up. It would not budge. My wrist hurt.  Then I remembered my dad say, about lifting something that was heavy, “Go low.” So I stretched out my hands to get under the ball in order to lift it. It rolled to the right on the rack. I just missed smashing my little finger. I was small. The ball was heavy. 

As I read today’s story of Jesus’ passion and death, it weighs heavily, like a bowling ball in my heart. What more can be said? Jesus died. Words feel too light, more like tossing around a ping-pong ball. 

At the meal, the disciples are bouncing about as they argue about who will be the greatest. They are buoyant: they still see palm branches—Jesus is famous—we are important! They do not get the weight of what Jesus is saying. His words do not fit with their ebullience. The Son of Man must suffer in order to redeem the world.  What is he talking about? 

Jesus knows. It weighs on him in the garden. He allows himself to be humbled as much as a human being possibly can be humbled:  shamed by a flogging; hung on a cross with the despicables outside the city walls. He is left to die, a nobody. Nowhere. Not important. 

On the cross, Jesus “goes low.” 

He stretches out his arms to get underneath the ball of the world,  in order to lift it, to set it free. He redeems it all, no matter how sordid, no matter how heavy, no scrap left out. The weight is heavy.  The weight is lifted. 

Consider/Discuss 

• You and I, we are too small to lift the weight of the pain and suffering, the injustices and hardness of heart of the human race. We need a Savior. Holy  Week is a good time to ponder the weight that Jesus carried. We will move liturgically through each moment of Jesus’ humiliation. Can you feel as he felt, pray as he prayed, move as he moved? What is it like to go that low? 
• How do we carry the weight of our own lives? Sages of the ages tell us that we can suffer selfishly—rebel and complain—and thus shift our own burdens to others. Or we can “go low,” bearing with our suffering as Jesus did, so that the burden may be easier for others. What does it mean, on a daily basis, to share in the sufferings of Christ, to be like him in bearing one another’s burdens?

Living and Praying with the Word 

Jesus, this feels like foolishness. Emptying yourself, taking the form of a slave, becoming obedient to the point of death—how does  that work? Why did you do that? If you were God, you could have come down from that cross and smashed the lights out of all of those politicians who maneuvered you toward death. Yet you didn’t. 

We are small; we don’t really get it. We still frolic about as though  this core of Christianity, this Paschal Mystery that “you died because  you love us,” was a light little plaything: something that we have  heard before, something that we just say, something that we take for  granted. Deepen our understanding of what it means to walk the way  of the cross, so that when we come to Easter, we see how much you  have lifted for us. You died because you love us. Show us this week,  Lord, what that really means.