Michael Kinman, the executive director of Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation, has written a reflection on Christ’s self-giving of himself for the world and posted it this Good Friday:
“Poverty and privilege have at least one thing in common — they are both about choice, or lack of the same.
This first struck me most powerfully during my first trip to Ghana several years ago. I only had to be there a few days when I realized that my most valuable possession wasn’t my laptop or my camera … but my American passport. With it I had the choice whether to stay or to go. Whether to make a life there or leave and make a life elsewhere.
The privilege of choice that my wealth and education and other aspects of my (white) American life bring infuses every corner of my life. I can choose where to send my children to school. I can choose what kind of car to drive, what neighborhood to live in. I have chosen what kind of education I wanted and have chosen and continue to choose what kind of career I want.
My whole life has been and continues to be an embarrassment of riches of choice. Even the everyday choices (‘Do you want fries with that?’) when cast against a world where nearly 1,000,000,000 people go to bed hungry every night speak to the extreme privilege of choice I take for granted.
So I have the privilege of choice. I cannot escape it. Do I feel guilty about it? What now?
What word does Christ speak to me?
That word comes crashing through in the Christ hymn of Philippians 2 — one of the most beautiful lyrics ever written. And it speaks of the events of today — Good Friday — in just these terms. Christ, the second person of the holy and undivided Trinity, was in the position of the most extreme privilege. Christ had the power of divinity — talk about extreme choice! Christ could do anything.
And look at what Christ did.
Christ let go.
Christ let go of the privilege of choice. He saw that privilege not as something to be grasped, but emptied himself — and even after emptying himself into human form, he continued to give up the privilege of choice and became obedient to the point of death … even death on a cross.”
Read the rest here.