The Saints Emptied Themselves and Were Exalted
The Solemnity of All Saints
If today were not a solemnity, our first reading would have been the famous Christological hymn from the letter to the Phillipians. We would have heard: Though he was in the form of God, [Jesus] did not deem equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. Christ exchanged the form of God for the form of a slave; and his passage happened through an act of self-emptying love.
Paul includes this hymn, which was probably already known by the Christian community, to tell them that they ought to have the same attitude. As Christ emptied himself to take the form of a slave, so should they. And so should we.
On the collective solemnity we celebrate today, we are reminded that for all that great diversity the saints possess, what they share in common is the act of self-emptying love in which they imitated Christ. Today’s feast, and every feast of the saints, is nothing other than a feast of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in the multitude of the saints wears thousands upon thousands of faces.
But this feast is also about those who transformation into Christ is still a work in progress, as we, too, are called to join their number. That may seem like too lofty a Goal for us to hope to attain. But, by grace, it is possible. We may think of the saints as those who spent every minute of every day in prayer, who never seriously sinned, who lived in and among the poorest of the poor. And we would be correct. Those people are saints. We know their stories.
But this feast is also about the saints whose stories we do not know, who went more unnoticed, and whose lives were perhaps too messy to sprout devotion. They are honored in this feast all the same. And that should encourage us and give us hope. The saints are the saints because they emptied themselves. And we can become saints if we do the same.
Emptying ourselves creates space within ourselves for the Lord to give us only what is necessary for our mission. The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar put it this way: Leaving all things means a spiritual renunciation of one’s own views, mode of life, and purposes and, on a deeper level, of one’s own freedom and reason, offering them all to the Master, and, according to his disposition, either receiving them back or not, or having them replaced by his own.1
We do not need to spend all day in prayer or live in abject poverty to become saints. We need only empty ourselves every day of the Lord. For those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Homily preached November 1, 2022 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen.
Hans Urs von Baltahsar, Explorations in Theology II: Spouse of the Word, 97.