Love in Phlippi
Text: Philippians 2:1-13
Lutherans are notoriously comfortable with paradox. We claim, for example, that we are saints and sinners at the same time. We find it reasonable that the infinite might be found in the finite. And we are especially adamant that Jesus was 100% human and 100% divine at the same time.
Not God in human clothing. Not a godly human. Not sometimes human and sometimes divine (this was once described to me as the peanut butter and jelly sandwich heresy—divine and human in layers, or side by side).
Yet we sometimes act as if there were in Jesus two natures, competing with one another. As if Jesus and God were at odds with one another. Especially in hearing texts like this passage in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, in the middle of which is a famous hymn (author: unknown) where it says that Jesus emptied himself.
Not wishing to exploit, as it says in our Bible, equality with God, he was born in human likeness. It sounds as if Jesus purposely sets aside his godly part, leaving it back home, so to speak, while he fraternizes with the riffraff. As if his divinity could be so easily separated from the 100% human 100% divine being that we claim him to be.
Be of the same mind, Paul writes. The same mind as each other, is the idea, and a bit later, the same as Christ Jesus. Though our Bible says the same mind that is in Christ (a mind which we should perhaps put in ourselves), it could also say be the same mind that you [already] have in Christ (which we are living). If this is so, Paul does not exhort us to adopt the mind of Christ, thereby imitating him, but rather to attend to the mind that we share already, thereby participating with him in our lives.
But what kind of mind is that? Paul has already told us. Christ’s mind is full of encouragement, consolation, fellowship, empathy, mercy. Which part of Christ is that? Is it the human part—these are surely the most human goodnesses—or the godly part—these are surely the parts that we inherit from being made in God’s image.
The question is a non-starter. The human and divine Christ embodies these good human, and also divine, attributes. Human Christ has them because God has them. And human Christ is divine Christ. We have them, too, at our best.
Our Bible begins this hymn saying “Though he was in the form of God.” But there is no word “though” in this passage. It just starts out saying “being in the form of God…” Our translators reveal their prejudice about the theology of Christ here, thinking of him as a creature who willingly denied his own nature. But Christ was in the form of God and that is why he did not have to steal or grab (a better translation than “exploit”)—not have to grab God’s nature. He already had it. Christ reveals God—the nature of God that is in him, not something he has to throw away to be human.
The story of the Bible is a story of a God who throughout our history together intentionally and constantly empties himself for the sake of humans. This amazing, powerful, universe-creating God speaks to humans, guides them, exhorts them, blesses them, weeps for them, argues with them, gets annoyed with them. Jesus does not differentiate himself from God when he refuses to exploit God’s power, because God refuses to exploit God’s power.
Perhaps we like to think about Jesus as a kind of lonely oddity because it fits our idea of an individual hero acting against the forces of convention. And there is for sure some of that in Jesus, who from the point of view of the politically powerful seems to be a radical extremist.
But Jesus, and certainly so in Paul, and especially so in this passage, is part of a community of others. Paul is not so much talking about “me” as about “us.” It is God who is at work in you-all, he says. Second person plural. God is in us all, and only as corollary in us each. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but the interests of others, Paul says, which is an amazing thing for us to hear. Disregard your own interests. There is nothing enlightened about self-interests. Regard others as not just equal to you but as better than yourselves. It is not only about “us” but about “them.” Or more broadly, we-all.
It is the essence of God that we know, revealed via Christ, to share in the spirit. What we would usually call fellowship. It is the community of the spirit which serves God and one another. It is the community of the spirit in which God’s goodness is looked for. It is the community of the spirit in which God’s forgiveness is announced and, we pray, practiced. The community of the spirit is itself a means of grace, a vehicle that bears God’s blessing.
This passage is not about a battle of wills, ours against God’s. And not about giving in to God’s will against our own will. Rather it is about a gracious and happy alignment of hopes and interests. God is at work in you-all, Paul writes, not forcing God’s will on us, but on the contrary both enabling our will as well as enabling our work.
We can read this passage as sympathy for Jesus, stuck in a backwater of humanity, purposely bereft of his powers but dutiful nonetheless. Or we can read it with joy, as I think Paul intends it.
It is a love story. Between Jesus and humanity. Between God, revealed in Jesus, between God and humans. A God overwhelmed with affection, crazy for us, who therefore gathers us together, forgives us, and guides us. Who resides in us-all, enabling our will and works for God’s own good pleasure, and for ours.
