PEAKNESS TO WEAKNESS

We are entering into the week of holiness, a week of humility, a week of emptiness, a week of passion, a week of suffering and a week of summit of our Christian faith. The fear, anguish and distress that have aroused in us due to Covid-19 pandemic is making us to acknowledge our limitations as human beings. The current global crisis with thousands dying each day and lakhs contracting the deadly virus is a call for us to come to our senses that we are week and to reflect on the importance of human life.

There were days when Man was busy in studying the possibility of building houses in Mars, booking tickets to have a tour to Moon, crafting robots to substitute human labour and devising nuclear bombs to protect one’s own country. Human being was in peak with his intelligence and abilities. Now, with the rise and spread of Covid-19 he is thrashed, horrified and exhausted. The peak which Man considered that He has attained is under a question now. Man in his peakness made humbled to realize his weakness. O man! Where is your peakness? Setting ourselves in this situation, it is a right time to focus on a Man named JESUS who acknowledged: Yes, I have my weakness. The holy week acknowledges our human weakness and there by seeks God’s grace to overcome it. Jesus as the hero of this holy week, teaches us that the real peakness of life consists in humbly accepting one’s weakness.

When Jesus suffered His passion and death, He was fully human. In spite of His miraculous powers to heal the sick and raise the dead, He endured all His suffering as an ordinary human. On the night, before He was arrested, He acknowledged to God the Father in prayer that He was weak and in need of His grace to drink this cup. He suffered in His human weakness. Yet God the Father with His grace raised Him on the third day. The disciples who shout today ‘Hosanna in the highest’ in their peakness of enthusiasm would run away from Jesus after few days because of their weakness of fear. Today we are living in a similar situation. We are afraid, we are weak, we are helpless. But, still we can become strong by emptying and humbling ourselves to the Lord in prayer.

The second reading of today, taken from Philippians 2:6-11 speaks of two great acts of Jesus: emptiness and humility. As God, He emptied himself to become human, a nature that of slave. As a human person, He humbled himself to obey God the Father by accepting a death upon a cross. It is because of these two acts that Jesus has become what He is of today. With simple acts of emptying and humbling, He overcame the human illusion of peakness. As we sing ‘Hosanna’ from home, let us humbly submit our empty hearts to the Lord that He may fill our human weakness with His grace to overcome our illusion of peakness.