Sermon
Dr.
John C. McDowell
Giving Myself Up
There is a story of a preacher who
raved “The time has come when we must get rid of socialism and communism and
anarchism, and…” At that point an old
lady let slip enthusiastically, “and rheumatism, too!”
I know I’m getting old whenever I
start looking back on ‘recent’ events and say, in amazement, ‘my goodness, that
was almost 20 years’ ago.’[1] The then Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher had famously
declared that “there is no such thing as society”. What she meant by that was that what we tend
to call ‘society’ is nothing more than the collection of individuals, individuals who gather together, and limit their
freedoms by abiding by rules that will prevent them from coming into conflict
with other people’s freedoms. Mrs. (now
Baroness) Thatcher took her Gospel of the new world into the heartland of the
Church of Scotland. Just a year before
the demolition of the Berlin Wall, she gave a fateful address in the Church of
Scotland’s General Assembly in
·
The
power of the private – not merely were many public industries privatised, but
there developed an ethos of ‘privatisation’ – people can shut themselves away
from their neighbours until they choose the time and place of their encounters
– we are individuals who come into social contact;
·
Consumerism
– the encouraging of private home ownership did much to kick start the rampant
consumerism of the 80s, and this has not quite dissipated even two decades
on. Consumerism is the ethos of the day,
according to social commentators, and what it does is encourage us to put
ourselves first – my needs, my desires, my pleasure, and so on;
·
The
power of self-help – Mrs. Thatcher’s ‘enterprise culture’ emphasises an ethos
of self-help – I am an individual, and I am responsible or me – I need to work
hard to help myself;
The rich
text of Phil 2[3]
stands as a judgment on the movement of churches to conform to these pressures
to exalting oneself or even to think of oneself outside of society, a challenge
to take a good look at who we think we are, a challenge to be radically
different, a challenge that, if lived in the most public way, would itself
radically challenge the values, goals, and structures of the society we live in
– in the ways it thinks of itself, gains and spends its wealth, spends its
time, and generally lives together. It
is a challenge that that the church often fails in making her own – this
expression of self-concern runs through much of what the church does and
thinks:
·
From
the power of self-preservation – a seeking to preserve its own existence, and
not live in risk and daring;
·
To
the powerful privatising the Gospel by making it a ‘salve for the soul’ – a
blunting the healing power of the Gospel by imagining that it is only about our
souls, or that it is even primarily about these souls and not about shalom or peace and justice in every
area of God’s creation;[4]
·
And
to the power of religious self-concern – partially, but not only, exhibited in
singing songs about how God makes us feel.
It is very damning that C.S. Lewis’ senior demon in the Screwtape Letters writes to his protégé to keep
his assignments’ “mind on the inner life”, a way of turning “their gaze away
from Him [God] towards themselves.”[5]
Philippian Giving
Many
scholars think that Paul was writing this letter in the context of his own
personal giving of himself up for the sake of the Gospel (cf. 1:7, 13) – from
inside a prison, the place of this agitator who was stirring up trouble for
himself everywhere he went preaching.
The church he was writing to was the
first church founded in mainland Europe on his so-called ‘second missionary
journey’. This was not a wealthy church,
it seems, and yet they were actively supporting some of the financial burden of
Paul’s work, at probably, then, considerable cost to themselves (cf.
But Paul’s colleague Epaphroditus had brought back not only the gift from
Giving Up What?
The comments
Paul makes are quite general, so we do not have much of an idea of the
problems.
Paul appeals
for unity. And notice just how he does it:
·
Not
by appealing to some long lost but nonetheless illusory ‘traditional’ or
‘family values’ as Mrs. Thatcher and subsequent ministers have done;
·
Or
by using a pragmatic argument appealing to what would benefit them – a kind of
‘work together because you’ll get more out of it, and you’ll get more done’
type appeal.
No! He appeals to theological reasons.
Each year in my first year classes I have students who claim
that what I teach them (theology and philosophy) is too abstract – they are practical people. Paul would have been appalled by the thought
that we act or practice without knowing why.
The “If” opening v1 is followed by reasons for why the Philippians
should be united –
·
Because
of the “fellowship of the Spirit”[6]
·
And
who they are in Jesus[7]
Because of
these Paul can suggest that the self-serving and arrogant party-politics is
actually based on ignorance, an
ignorance of the truth of the Gospel – a theological ignorance. They have misunderstood what the Gospel is
all about. If you dig deeper, he is
saying, you will be able to see that you have no theological reason to be
arrogant.
Let us look
at this a little further. We tend to
think of arrogance as having to do with the way someone presents themselves –
an unattractive quality of someone’s style of self-presentation. But it is more than that. To imagine that we are superior to others is,
some thinkers argue, to forget our own weaknesses. No matter how good we are, there is more
often than not someone who is even better.
Arrogance can prevent us from trying harder – it is generally a state
that we are fine the way we are. There
is a saying that the trouble with man is that he quits the job too early. That would be the sense here. The C15th text The Imitation of Christ, usually attributed to Thomas à Kempis, offers this kind of warning:
If it seems to you that you should know much more and
understand well enough, know also that there is much more which you do not
know. ‘Do not be high-minded’, but
rather confess your ignorance. Why do
you wish to set yourself ahead of another, when more may be found with greater
learning than you and more skilled in law?
If you wish to know, and to learn anything to good purpose, be eager to
be unknown and accounted nothing.[8]
But even more important than this, and this is Paul’s point,
humility is more than merely looking away
from oneself – it is a looking toward
the good of others. Arrogance is a
forgetting of one’s place and the point of one’s talents. It imagines that being better than others at
something (whether that is a sport, exams, a job, and so on) is something that
is for one’s own glory – and one’s glory can be lorded and wielded over others.[9] In that sense, one’s talents, whatever they
may be, are used for ourselves and our own glory, and not for others and in
their service. Again à Kempis’ comments are illuminating:
Every man naturally wants to know, but what is the good of
knowledge without the fear of the Lord? … If I should know everything in the
world, but should be without love, what would it avail me in God’s presence, he
who will judge me by my deeds?[10]
Paul is saying that to possess these
traits of self-concern is not merely something unattractive for the appearance
of Christians before the world but is in itself fundamentally unchristian.
What Does God Give in Christ?
Paul now
turns to this very famous text to make his theological point. This is a text that has a rhythmic structure
and certain words unusual in Paul’s letters, and that therefore seems to be a hymn
that he is quoting.[11] In many ways it is a text that is difficult
to interpret because the language and the imagery could mean several things.[12] In fact it is instructive to see one
interpretation, that which is expressed in El Greco’s painting of the late
1570s, ‘The Adoration of the Name of Jesus’.
The verse, of course, that the
painting expresses is v10, “that at the name of Jesus every knee should
bow”. We can see the central figures
here bowing before the exalted name IHS (IHSOUS). But, let’s look at the painting again –
things are a bit more disturbing once we bear in mind certain things:
·
At
the bottom right we can see the torture of the heretics, so that the worship of
Jesus’ name is being carried on regardless – there is no care shown for the
damned.
·
The
three central figures are : Phillip II
of
·
And
the context of the painting is
celebration of victory in the battle of Lepanto
(1571), against the Turks.[13]
So what we
have is no innocent depiction of worship of the exalted Christ of this
Christ-hymn, but rather the worship of the imperial Lord who wields might
against his enemies – and, of course, Christ’s enemies are the enemies of
Christendom, in this account.
The Christ-hymn of Phil 2, though,
seems to depict a wholly different kind of Christ from the powerful one we see
worshipped here.
What Does God Give in Christ?
As I have
already mentioned, this hymn is difficult to interpret at several points. The particular difficulties come at three
main points: the meanings of morphē, harpagmos and kenoun.
·
the
word Greek morphē
is translated in the NIV as “in the nature
of God”, while in the NRSV it is “in the form
of God” – and the difference is important.
·
The
term that the NRSV translates as “exploited” and the NIV as “grasped” harpagmos is
often translated in different ways, giving different emphases:
–
‘grasped’
– a thing not yet possessed but desirable;
–
a
thing already possessed and embraced, a thing to be clutched and held on to,
and used to one’s own advantage, of exploiting one’s status for selfish ends;
–
‘seized’
or ‘plundered’ – refers to acquisitiveness, the act of snatching, gained as
spoils of conquest or robbery – an unholy ambition (Satan and Adam). C.F.D. Moule:
Human evaluation may assume ‘that God-likeness means having
your own way, getting what you want, (but) Jesus saw God-likeness essentially
as giving and spending oneself out …. He did not consider that being equal with
God was taking everything to himself, but (àllà) giving everything away for the
sake of others.[16]
·
NRSV
– “emptied himself”; NIV – “made himself nothing. Kenoun, can also mean ‘pour out’. There is no indication in the text of Christ
having emptied himself of anything. The
sense is that he effaced all thought of self and poured out his fulness to enrich others, even unto death (cf. Isa. 53:12).
[I]t is a poetic, hymnlike way of
saying that Christ poured out himself, putting himself totally at the disposal
of people….[17]
The modern hero is the poor boy who
purposively becomes rich rather than the rich boy who voluntarily becomes poor.
… Covetousness we call ambition.
Hoarding we call prudence. Greed
we call industry.[21]
Divine equality meant sacrificial self-giving. Accordingly, the hymn reveals not only what
Jesus is truly like but also what it means to be God.[24]
When we reflect on the history of the church, are we not
bound to confess that she has all too often failed to follow the model set by
her founder? Frequently she has worn the
robes of the ruler, not the towel of the servant. Even in our own day it can hardly be said
that the brand image of the church is a society united in love for Jesus and
devoted to selfless service of others. [28]
Conclusion: Who Am I?
It is
interesting to hear talk about a ‘service industry’. One of the dangers implicit in this talk is
that certain kinds of jobs that certain kinds of people choose to do (and, of
course, because of the nature of the vocation, and the fact that these
professions are not wealth generating, they can be comparatively underpaid). Other types of jobs, then, are not jobs of
service. So at the heart of our
professional language we have a sense of being able to hold service away from
ourselves.
Christians are not free from the ‘service industry
mentality’. We can all too often imagine
that service is something we can do at various moments, and some are paid to do
it more than the rest of us:
·
Going
to church
·
Going
to, or being involved in church meetings
·
Giving
something to charitable organisations
And it is
right that we should do so. But this is
nevertheless a very partial perspective.
Service is not a code of ethics, not a set of rules that we can pick up
and follow at some points and then put them down again. Rather, it is a way of living – what would it
mean for us to be servants in every
area of our lives: with our money,
leisure time, the jobs we do or not do, our minds, and our various other
talents?
I never thought I would ever be
quoting a comic book character in a sermon, but there is a good line in the
movie Spider-Man:
J.R.R. Tolkein’s
most profound piece of writing, The Lord
of the Rings, depicts Frodo on a journey that may not only take his life,
but his very soul itself. Yet it is a
great risk that he is willing to take – the fate of Middle Earth depends
largely on the course of his journey, and Frodo has chosen the path of the servant,
even unto death.
Tolkein’s
Elves display the courage of service to the infinite depths in the most
poignant of ways – they give up their unending living in the undying Grey
Havens to die for the humans’ cause.
These acts of service were big – the very salvation of the world –
ours may well be very little in comparison, and relatively mundane. But it no less demands everything we have,
our lives, our very souls. Nothing less
would be true to our Lord whose earthly and resurrected live was and is one of
utter self-giving, in service to us in order to make us human.
[1] On a
particular day, almost 15 years ago, on the evening of the 9th
November, I was weight training in my garage with my two best mates when we
were told that the
[2]
The address was on
[3]
Karl Barth, The Epistle to the
Philippians, 49: “A text like this
can hardly be approached with sufficient care and concentration for it offers
so much in so few verses.”
[4] We
try to console ourselves by suggesting that Jesus did not address himself to
practical economic, social, or political questions. But politics, for instance, is the way of
organising human beings together, the management of human relations; and
economics is the regulating of their exchanges of giving and receiving. What Jesus did was to create new way of organising human relations, and
therefore his live has pronounced significance for the political economy. Moreover, as a Jew he would have stood in the
tradition of shalom without having to
address it explicitly very often.
Finally, Jesus’ teaching on wealth is frequent and explicit (cf. Lk.
[5]
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape
Letters (London: Collins, 1942), 20,
25.
[6]
R.P. Martin, Philippians, 91: “This doctrine should sound the death-knell
to all facetiousness and party spirit”.
[7]
Commentators often use exemplarist language to
describe how Paul uses christology here [see, e.g., Hawthone,
79]. Certainly Paul is making the point
‘You are disunited and self-concerned.
You shouldn’t be. Look at how
Christ lived!’ But moral exemplarism does not sufficiently cover the theologically
grounded moral necessity generated by the sense of the “in Christ Jesus” of the
letter. The point, then, seems to be
more forcefully the following: ‘You are
disunited and self-concerned. You
shouldn’t be – you are in Christ, and just look at how he lived!’ It is this theological ethic that
[8]
Thomas à Kempis, The
Imitation of Christ, 25.
[9]
This critique of the self
demonstrates that R.P. Martin’s comments that Paul is recommending the
Philippians to look at the virtues of others, and to learn from them are
insufficiently penetrating [Martin, 94f.].
[10] à
Kempis, 24.
The writer here is echoing the insight of the Wisdom writer of Ecclesiastes with the claim that the
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
This is no knowledge for knowledge’s sake, as the contemporary
fascination of many with decontextualised facts and
quiz shows would suggest. Yet the claim
cannot be a plea for love without
knowledge, although à Kempis sounds at a point as
if he does come close to making this mistake (“There is much which it profits
the soul little or nothing to know. And
foolish indeed is he who gives his attention to other things than those which
make for his salvation.”). Such a thing
can be misguided and dangerous. So the
Wisdom writer of the Proverbs warns
against a zeal without knowledge.
“It is not good to
have zeal without knowledge,
nor to be hasty and
miss the way.” [Prov. 19:2]
[11]
Was this possibly one which the Philippians themselves knew?
[12]
J.L. Houlden, 68:
“This is in many ways the most difficult section of this epistle and one
of the most difficult in the New Testament.”
[13]
The name of Jesus was believed to have power over infidels.
[14]
The text has not morphē theo (the form of God) but en morphē
theo (in the form of God).
Ernst Käsemann sees behind
the hyman the Gnostic Redeemer myth of a descending
and ascending Saviour. O’Brien, however,
asks whether it is more appropriate to read it in term of Jewish Wisdom.
[15]
Critics of this reading point to the fact that morphē theo corresponds to morphē doulou for which an equivalent eikōn makes no sense [J.P. Collange, 82].
[16]
C.F.D. Moule, cited in
[17]
[18] Collange, 101. This,
however, implies that what Christ does is become unlike his divinity since he
renounces his divine power. Something
very different is suggested by D.G. Dawe: “Kenosis says that God is of such a nature
that the acceptance of the limitations of a human life does not make him unlike
himself. Kenosis is a way of saying that
God in his revelation is free for us, i.e. he is free to our God without
ceasing to be God the Lord.” [‘A Fresh Look at the Kenotic Christologies’,
SJT 15 (1962), 337-49 (348)] The problem, then, with C19th German kenotic
theories is not merely a reading of too much into an otherwise highly
suggestive text, as most of the commentators acknowledge, but a reading into it
of inappropriate things. In other words, the problem is more than one
of simple exegesis, but of theology.
[19]
This is most likely the meaning of “emptied himself out” – that he denied his
own interests in order to be a servant.
[20]
Exaltation of Christ (cf. Isa. 52:13) – the exalted
one is not contrasted with the self-emptied one, as if the emptying was but a
stage that can now be left behind, or that the exalted state is a position new
to him.
[21]
Foster, 101.
[22]
[23]
Peter T. O’Brien claims that one cannot establish with any certainty Isa. 53 as background to the hymn [The Epistle to the Philippians:
A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
1991)].
[24]
O’Brien, 216.
[25]
It is worth noicing the circle of giving here since
Christ’s exaltation gives itself over to the Father.
There is a parallel to the movement of this hymn in
the Gospel of Matthew. Only twice is God
explicitly portrayed as an actor: 3:17
and 17:5 in which God directs the attention to Jesus as the Son, the One who
now seems to act as Representative of God so that not only do Jesus’ actions
enact his own intentions but also God’s.
[26]
In his column in Life and Work of June
2004 [p. 11] Andrew McGowan complains of the decline of the churches. In assessing the reasons for this
deterioration he forgets to mention the churches’ own hand, and instead locates
the blame firmly elsewhere than on the church herself. Christians get off rather lightly in his
complaint.
[27]
See Foster 150 on the complicated practical application to complex questions of
the limits of submission.
[28]
Michael Green, Freed to Serve,
21. “If the whole church has failed, the
ministry has failed even more signally to exhibit the character of the Servant.
… Does the vicar give the impression of being the servant of his people? Does he not rather behave, as too often the
missionary has behaved, like a little tin god, loving to be recognised and
looked up to, anxious that nothing shall go on in the parish without his
personal supervision?”
The point here is not to do away with the sense of
leadership and authority – the point is rather that Paul completely rearranged
the lines of authority, abolishing and not reversing the ‘pecking order’. Christian authority is not an authority of
status – to manipulate, control, suppress or alienate; but it is rather an
authority of function – a pragmatic leadership of talent in service for the good
of the others. Bernard of Clairvaux: “Learn
the lesson that, if you are to do the work of a prophet, what you need is not a
sceptre but a hoe.” [cited in Foster, 159]