It is not a compliment when someone tells you, “You’ve got yourself an attitude.” It means you are stuck on your way of thinking, your way of acting no matter and you’ll bulldoze anyone in your way. Quite a surprise, therefore that St. Paul tells us to get ourselves an attitude – but the right kind of attitude: “have in you the same attitude that is also in Christ Jesus.” That sounds right. If we share Christ’s attitude we’ll be stuck on the right things. So how do we get it? “Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.” We get the attitude of Christ when we stop grasping. Why is that important? To understand that we have to go back to the very beginning, to Adam and Eve. What was their sin? Grasping after that apple. And remember how the snake tempted them to grasp that apple? He told them if they grasped the apple “you will be like gods.” So the attitude of Jesus is to reverse the sin of Adam and Eve. Our first parents grasped after being like gods whereas Jesus, who had every right to claim divine prerogatives, did not grasp equality with God.
My suspicion is that all sin is simply a replay of the first – it is about grasping. We grasp after what we think will make us happy and then we hold onto it. Just look at the story Jesus tells in the gospel. The first son grasped after using his time as he chose. He’d agree to anything but just don’t expect him to follow through. The second son grasped at his independence. “You can’t tell me what to do.” It was only after he got over himself and obeyed his father’s order that he let go of his need to be in control. Notice that this grasping is not about doing something evil. Certainly it is not bad to have your own schedule or to want to be independent. It is the grasping that makes it problematic. Again, go back to the first sin. The Bible says that when Eve saw the apple he notice that it was “good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable for gaining wisdom” (Gen. 3:6). The snake did not tempt Adam and Eve to do something evil but something desirable, something pleasing. That is how temptation plays out in our lives. No one starts out by saying, “I will now commit this sin.” No, they grasp after something that looks good. There might be a Snidely Whiplash out there who delights in tying Little Nell to the railroad track but I haven’t met him. No one has come to me in confession saying they wish to do evil. Rather, my sins and the sins I hear about are about grasping after something we perceive to be good. Once we blind ourselves to the implications of this action we then can grasp at it.
Maybe our approach to sin is wrong. We imagine it to be something like breaking the law. Sin is like going 56 miles per hour or running a red light. There are all these rules and regulations and I must follow them in order to keep traffic flowing smoothly. In approaching sin like as rule-breaking we just have to find the list of God’s rules and regulations and keep inside the lines. But what if sin is more like addiction than it is breaking some rule? No one sets out to be addicted. But indulging oneself bit by bit in whatever we crave – alcohol, drugs, smoking, gambling, shopping — and before you know it the substance is in charge of us instead of the other way around. We grasp after this that or the other and we are the ones who get grabbed. The tendency to sin comes not from seeking to commit a crime but from grasping after something attractive that we fool ourselves into believing will satisfy our aching hearts.
The way to avoid sin, the way to overcome sin, therefore, is not by paying greater attention to the rule book. Rather, it is to “have the same attitude that is in Christ Jesus.” Namely, to empty ourselves and to live as human beings. That is what Jesus did. He emptied himself of the fullness of his divinity to embrace the reality of his humanity. Think for a moment of what that means. Human beings are limited, are unable to do certain things, live as bodies which are prone to breaking down, only have a certain number of years allotted to them, experience grief and loss and disappointment on a regular basis. Yet in the midst of all that there is a sense that we are made for more. That is what we are grasping after – whatever that thing is which overcomes our frailty, our limitations, our finitude, our sorrows. How do the poet put it: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?” But Jesus had a different attitude. Instead of trying to grasp something, anything, to fill his ache as a human being, he emptied himself, he gave it all away, even to the “point of death, death on a cross.” The attitude of Christ is not about grasping but about emptying, about letting go, about giving it all away.
That is what the Apostle urges us to imitate about Jesus – the gift of self. And this is not a foreign concept, made only for a spiritual elite. No, we see examples of it every day. Parents have to empty themselves in caring for their children. Their time, their attention, their resources are all directed not to themselves but toward keeping the little ones warmed and watered. We see this every day in the food pantry. People give of themselves not so they can get anything but simply to help another human being. Often family members or neighbors go out of their way to make sure that a sick person gets the care and attention they need, not thinking about themselves but about the other. We see it every time someone coaches little league, help a fellow student with a problem they can’t solve, give extra time to a co-worker who has to finish a project. These are examples of the attitude of Christ – an attitude of service, an attitude of compassion, an attitude of love. The irony is, when we empty ourselves, it is then that we are full. So get yourself an attitude!
