January 13, 2012
The Christian Journey
Sacrifice of Jesus leads to Habitat assistance
BY FATHER JIM SAUER
Imagine that you and your spouse have scrimped for years to visit Hawaii. Finally you have accumulated enough cash for a two week dream vacation on Maui. This once-in-a-lifetime trip is now a reality!
Three days into enjoying the sand, ocean breeze, and amazingly blue water, you receive word that one of your siblings has died. Funeral arrangements are planned three days hence. Now you and this sibling have not spoken to each other in 30 years! Emotional ties no longer exist. With 11 days left in your dream vacation, would you leave “paradise” to attend your sibling’s funeral when neither of you had one second of time for each other in this life?
I doubt if anyone would fly home in that situation. It would seem to be hypocritical to show up after 30 years of silence. What could be set aright now? Your sibling’s family might even be outraged by your presence. This scenario might help us understand the deep love Christ shows us by his birth.
God’s eternal Son freely chose to leave “heaven’s glory” to live our human life with its joys, as well as its sorrows and even the most negating experience — death. Already in his birth, Jesus’ life as a sacrifice on our behalf begins.
Luke artfully describes Jesus’ identification with the poverty of our human nature in the gospel of his birth. His parents are portrayed as being among the poor. They are transients, equivalent perhaps to the homeless of our contemporary city streets since they lacked adequate shelter. Jesus was born in an unsanitary stable with shepherds as his companions who were among the lowest-esteemed laborers.
Jesus left heaven’s glory for this! There certainly was nothing glorious in the circumstances of the Savior’s birth. Yet, how often do we find God even when the appearances seem to disguise God’s presence or power?
Jesus shared in the total poverty of human existence, not just physical or financial; but spiritual and emotional as well — as St. Paul proclaims in 2 Corinthians 5:21 — “For our sake God made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”
Again in Philippians 6:6-8, Paul cites an early Christian hymn about Christ, “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”
As an itinerant preacher, Jesus never owned a home, trusting his friends to provide for his needs. Even in death, Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus in someone else’s tomb” which was close at hand” as the Sabbath was beginning.
Recognizing Jesus’ sharing in the poverty of human life and that we are all poor in some way, our school children and parishioners used cardboard habitat houses (like the rice bowls) to collect money for Habitat, which a local corporation matched in 2011. We then constructed a village with the Habitat houses around the Christmas crèche upon removing the $1,500 collected. Our project was one more way our parish was able to connect Advent and Christmas with life today.