Sam Bush “How Low Can Jesus Go?”
Happy New Year to all of you, although our church calendar, which often marches to the beat of its own drum, celebrates today not as New Year's Day but as the Feast of the Holy Name. Don’t worry if you forgot; it tends to be a day that really sneaks up on people. It’s a day meant to recognize the name of Jesus which is given in this morning’s gospel reading. Luke says, “He was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”
The meaning of names has lost its power in our day. Do you know what your name means? My name, Samuel, means "God has heard" (pretty good!). The name Calvin, on the other hand, means "bald." The name Mallory means "unfortunate.” Now, I have a friend named Calvin who has a full head of hair and a friend named Mallory who has had a fortunate life so clearly meanings aren’t everything. But God has specific instructions for what to name His son. It’s not a family name, nor is it trendy, but it is packed with meaning. The name Jesus means “God Saves.” It translates to savior, rescuer, deliverer.
Throughout the New Testament, even speaking Jesus’ name evokes his power. In the book of Acts, Peter encounters a crippled beggar who asks for some spare change as Peter’s walking into the temple. Peter replies, “I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” It says “immediately the man’s feet and ankles were made strong.” One chapter later, Peter says Jesus’ name is the only name which brings salvation. He says, “There is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”
So Jesus lives up to his name: Savior, Rescuer, Deliverer. And yet, how exactly does Jesus save? This is what I actually want to focus on this morning. I want to pivot to the passage we heard from Philippians which beautifully describes how Jesus lives up to his name.
Here, the Apostle Paul beautifully encapsulates the nature of Jesus. This passage reads like poetry; it’s known as The Christ Hymn. He says, “Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself.” Paul says, “He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross.” Since we’re already on an etymological kick, think of the meaning of the word humility. The word derives from the Latin root humus or “earth” and can be translated to “being grounded” or “from the earth.”
Jesus is, by nature, God. He is divine. And yet, he willingly gave up his power as king of the highest heaven to become grounded, “from the earth,” born as an ordinary baby.
This kind of humility is in direct contrast to our own kind of humility. People rarely ever speak humbly of humility. Nine times out of ten, we exploit humility for our own gain. You know the term humblebragging, like when someone complains about how slow the internet is in the Bahamas. For us, humility is only valuable as a means to greatness. The poet, David Budbill, put it best when he said, “I want to be famous so I can be humble about being famous. What good is my humility when I am stuck in this obscurity?”
Jesus, on the other hand, willingly enters into our obscurity. This is the audacity of Christianity which asserts that everything you and I believe is actually wrong. Somehow, the esteemed are to be pitied, the despised are to be revered. Likewise, Jesus lives up to his name Rescuer by turning our idea of what a rescuer ought to look like on its head.
I’ll give you an illustration. At the end of our neighborhood, there is an abandoned brick farmhouse that has stood dormant for decades. The other day, a hawk somehow found its way inside. It peered down on us from a second-story window in a state of panic. It would flap against the glass over and over again. There was something pitiful about this bird of prey, this natural born killer, being trapped so helplessly. My boys and I tried to persuade it to go back the way it came, but it turns out it’s very difficult to reason with a hawk. Nothing would lead it away from the window.
The poet Robert Bly writes about a similar situation. He begins one of his poems by inviting you into an empty farm granary - picture an old barn that’s been swept clean of any oats or wheat. He points you to the strips of sunlight that shine through the cracks between the wall boards and then he points to a bird that’s trapped inside. It flutters up the walls toward the bands of light but falls back again and again because it can’t fit through the cracks.
“The way out,” Bly says, is not through the strips of light. Instead, the way out is“where the rats enter and leave; but the rat’s hole is low to the floor.”
What’s he talking about here? Well, our modern attitude is centered around upward mobility. We reach for the stars, we climb the ladder, we pull ourselves up, all in the name of striving to be a better version of ourselves. What do people say if they hurt someone or make a mistake? Something like, “I wasn’t being my best self.” What’s implied here is that our ideals are the way forward.
And this, Robert Bly argues, is dangerously naive. It works in theory but not in practice. Trying to climb our way toward a better version of ourselves often yields the same results as trying to fly through a closed window. It is precisely our ideals that imprison us.
Now, you may be thinking, “It’s New Year’s Day for crying out loud. What’s so wrong with trying to be your best self?” Well, to that, Robert Bly says when we chase after a light that we don’t have access to, he says we “may end as a mound of feathers and a skull on the open boardwood floor…” (What an inspiring message for the new year, right?) In other words, chasing after the way things should be, rather than dealing with the way things are will get you nowhere. Unless we crawl through the hole where the rats enter and leave, we will risk wasting away in dark confusion. We may never experience what it feels like to bask in warm sunshine. In other words, the way to hope is not to reach for the sky. It’s to get low.
What does this mean for you on this New Year’s Day? It means that the actual way forward is not to climb the ladder one step at a time but to descend to what lies beneath. Our escape route from the bondage of sin leads us downward. In other words, rather than striving for our best selves, the first step toward freedom comes from examining ourselves at our worst. Soon we will gather together at the Lord’s table, the only table that bids us not to bring our best selves. Bring your worst selves to the table, Jesus says! “Bring your anger, bring your resentments, bring your loneliness, bring your jealousy, your pettiness, your despair, that I might redeem it,” he says. “Bring whatever is in you that needs saving that I might save it, the parts of you that you cannot change that I might deliver you and forgive you all your sins.
Because here’s the thing: none of us have the smarts to crawl our way out. We are all birdbrained in that sense. The promise of New Year’s Day is ultimately a false promise that you can fly through a glass window. We keep trying; we can’t help ourselves. Our hope, therefore, is not that we will find the trap door at the bottom, but that someone from the outside will come to our rescue. Our hope is that, despite our vain efforts to escape, God Himself did what we could never have done ourselves.
You might be wondering what happened to that hawk. Well, after a few days of futilely flapping at the glass, we were finally able to contact the owner of the house who, later that day, came and opened all the windows. Soon after, the bird flew out on its own. We see it flying around our neighborhood and throw our hands up to cheer it on. Make no mistake: that bird is alive today, not because it solved a riddle, but because it was rescued.
So it is with us. From his birth in a manger to his death on a Cross, Jesus chose to enter through the hole where the rats enter in order to set us free. Even in this Christmas season, we see that the manger and the Cross go hand-in-hand. We see that Jesus Christ was born to die.
When the Apostle Paul says that Jesus “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross,” he is saying that Jesus was not only driven to a position of humility but of humiliation. No other form of death could have matched crucifixion as the absolute destruction of a person. Nothing could be farther from divine majesty. And as he was buried, he embodied humility itself, becoming “of the earth.”
How low can Jesus go? As low as the lowest point in your life right now. As low as the grave! The Apostles Creed says Jesus descended into hell! Lower than you and I would ever be willing to go.
For this reason, the Apostle Paul says God “highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name.” His authority is the same as that of Yahweh, the personal name of God himself, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.
In the name of Jesus, you are safe. In the name of Jesus you are no longer a slave to sin because you have been rescued from your false humility and your false hopes. In the name of Jesus, you are not merely a better version of yourself, but a new Creation. Just as Jesus changed his form from God of the universe to that of a slave, so are you changed from a captive slave into God’s righteous and beloved child.
G.K. Chesterton once said, “The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose, new feet, a new backbone, new ears and new eyes.” That kind of newness is much more eternal than the kind that New Year’s Day will offer you. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians, “If anyone is in Christ they are a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” Amen.
