Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 25 · January 25
Let This Mind
“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:”
In May 1873 a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Joseph de Veuster stepped ashore at Kalaupapa on Molokai, a peninsula walled off by sea cliffs where the Hawaiian kingdom had been depositing people with leprosy for a decade. He had volunteered. He built coffins, dressed sores, and stayed. In 1884 he was diagnosed with the disease himself, and the account that has followed him ever since is that he opened a sermon afterwards with two words he had never used before: we lepers. He died there in 1889.
Paul is writing to a church with a squabble in it, and just before this verse he asks that nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Then: Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. What follows is the most famous descent in Scripture. Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
Six steps, and every verb is his own. Nothing in the passage happens to him.
Be exact about what the mind is, then. It is not a low opinion of yourself; the first line of it is a clear-eyed knowledge of exactly who he was. It is a willingness to spend that on people who could not come up to where he stood.
Damien went to Molokai and in time could not have left. He belonged there by then in a way he had not chosen. Christ was never trapped, at any stage, and he went down all six.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 25 is Refuge from the Storm (Isaiah 25:4).