Last Sunday’s Second Reading — for the Exaltation of the Cross, which preempted the 24^th Sunday of Ordinary Time — was St. Paul’s great hymn of Jesus’ self-emptying, his kenosis (Phil 2:6-11). One of the key texts in that hymn is verse 6, where Jesus is presented as treating divinity as not something to be “grasped” (ἁρπαγμὸν).

Jesus is God. But Jesus does not “cling” to that divinity, “but rather emptied Himself … [taking on] the likeness of men.” Jesus is not jealous that His Incarnation “diminishes” Him — even though it involves an “emptying.” Indeed, if we read the hymn, we see how Jesus makes multiple self-emptyings: becoming man; becoming a servant; becoming obedient; becoming obedient “unto death;” becoming obedient to death by one of the most brutal, painful, and prolonged methods of dying. Because of these progressive emptyings, Jesus receives multiple exaltations: being raised; being given a Name above all others; being given a Name confessed by all reality; being given honor that goes “to the glory of God the Father.”

The Philippians hymn shows us, through Christ’s example, a fundamental truth of the Christian life: that one finds one’s true self by letting go of one’s self, by emptying one’s self, by refusing to “grasp” what one is. Jesus exemplifies this truth by His assumption of humanity although He was divine. He reminds His disciples: “He who seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will find it” (Mt 10:39). Whoever grasps his life will lose it; whoever treats it not as “something to be grasped” will find it. He shows how humility is essential to the spiritual life.

Jesus is divine. In emptying Himself, He does not cling to the greatest good, the Summum Bonum: Himself.

What do we, as fallen human beings do? Something even more senseless. While Jesus did not “grasp” divinity, we foolishly cling to the “old man” (see Eph 4:22). If Jesus does not cling to divinity, why do we grasp a fallen humanity, the “old Adam,” the sinful self? This insight is critical in the midst of a mindset in the contemporary Church that seems to prefer a half-truth: the theology of “accompaniment.” Yes, the Church is called to walk with all people of all times. Her task is to bring everyone (“tutti, tutti, tutti” as Pope Francis put it) to Christ. But that task is not fulfilled by “affirming” people “where they’re at.” It is rather carried out by challenging them not to grasp their current ways, not to cling to but put aside the old Adam, to “put on Christ” (Rm 13:14).  It is not “affirming” their lifestyles but transforming them.

As I repeatedly note, the first command of Jesus is one of repentance (Mk 1:15), the Greek for “repent” being metanoiete. The literal meaning of that word is “to change one’s mind.” But metanoiete is not some superficial change of mind, like yesterday I disliked blue but today I like it. Metanoiete is to think differently, to change one’s outlook, to look at reality, the world, and my life differently, under the impulse of God’s grace. “To think differently” about human life is to put away “the desires of the flesh,” the “old Adam,” the “old man” of sin. It means to stop clinging to those realities, to stop “grasping them,” to empty one’s self of what — unlike Christ’s Divinity — is objectively not good for us.

Yet the “mystery of iniquity” (Rm 7:19) is that we in fact grasp the old self. That, of course, leads to an inversion of moral values and truth itself, so that we pretend that the “Church” is “alienating” because it summons us to stop grasping an old way of life and to change our minds about the truth of human life. That — not some superficial “I’m OK, you’re OK” pop psychology illuminated with strobe lights and laser shows — is what real “accompaniment” and “fraternity” involve. It’s the failure to speak those truths to the end which makes what’s often on offer under those terms half-truths. It gives us a counterfeit Christ — a therapeutic mascot who blesses your sins and never asks for your conversion. That’s neither mercy nor humility. It’s cowardice.

Conformity to the world and its values (or, rather, anti-values) is not genuinely human or humanistic. As Pope St. John Paul II never failed to repeat, the degree to which a human being becomes more genuinely human and to which he follows Christ stand in direct, not inverse relationship. And to follow Christ means putting aside — to stop “grasping” — the old man. Jesus, who “fully reveals man to himself” (Redemptor hominis, 8) already shows him that path by not “grasping” Himself but taking the form of an obedient servant.

So, why are we clinging to the old man, the spiritual poison, the sin?