(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
Let me say right off the bat–this poem is sarcastic. I suspect that many people identify with what they think of as good morals and right thinking NOT to please God, but because it puts them in a position of privilege and power over others.
The reason I titled the poem “unkenosis” is that the drive to attain POWER and PRIVILEGE from being “right” is the opposite of the “kenosis” that Jesus undertook in becoming a man and dying on the cross.
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!
Philippians 2:3-8 (NIV)
And why did Jesus’ “making himself nothing” (also translated “emptied himself” from the Greek ekenōsen heauton) result in death on a cross?
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21 (NIV)
It was for our advantage that Jesus was willing to die, taking on the mantle of guilt. We must imitate him, not power-hungry pretenders.
See a very closely-related poem: Cross-Shaped Lie.