Philippians 2:5-11
In his long poem ‘The Hymn to Proserpine, Algernon
Swinburne, one of the Victorian era’s most celebrated poets, pretends to be a
late Roman pagan lamenting the rise of Christianity in the Empire. The most
renowned lines from the poem are these:
Thou
hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath
We
have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Jesus Christ is of course the ‘pale Galilean’, the one
whose breath (for Swinburne) makes the world grey; the religion spawned by
Christ subdues and oppresses the human spirit, and makes the human soul
ignoble.
It’s a thought that the German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche would pursue, with his bristling moustaches and long walks in the Swiss
alps: Christianity is nothing more than a slave faith, a corruption of all that
is possible in the singular human being, a denial of the real. In his words:
Christianity
has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an
ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life
Christianity is the very antithesis of the idea of the
Ubermensch, the Superman, the kind of
Olympian ideal of the heroic man who is able to live out his humanity in
complete freedom, exercising his will through power unrestrained by fetters of
compassion or the chains off milksop and subservient virtues like humility.
We have learnt from Swinburne and Nietzsche that the
true hero amongst us is the successful narcissist, especially if they can
redeem themselves with such great deeds that we laugh off their failings; like Shane
Warne, the classic naughty boy, loved but not much liked by the Aussie public,
as the model anti-role model, the epitome of what we’d all like to be as men at
least, playing poker, driving too fast, sticking it to the authorities and hurling
with an actress across three continents; he’s good and he knows it, a legend of
the game; he knows we think of him as better than the rest, as inhabiting some
superior plane of human existence, and he agrees with our assessment: 700
wickets says so, which is pretty much 700 more than any other man he meets; and
for a while we seem to bow the knee in this cult of the Warne ego. Age? It is not
for him: he simply reconstructs his face to look younger. He scoffs at age.
The thing about Nietzsche is that he was exactly right
about Christianity. It turns out that it is
a faith that celebrates servility and submission, a religion that that
produces ignoble acts of service that make the pleasures of life seem trivial,
a cult of worship that makes people deny themselves. It glorifies the
inglorious.
In fact, Christians adore a Lord who is Lord precisely
because he gives up his noble entitlements. As Paul shows in Phil 2:5-11, it is
the Lord who stoops who is worthy of worship. This isn’t accidental, or
embarrassing; it is something to sing about, to advertise to the world. Yes:
the Lord was a slave, and being the slave of others is what he calls us to be,
as the high point of human existence. All the freedom and power in the world
was most gloriously used when it was exercised in the filthy business of
service.
For as Paul shows, the most divine of human beings was
a model in quite a different way, a paragon not of the usual virtues – strength
and mastery resulting in fame but something quite perverse in fact.
Not a superman, but an underman, not Ubermensch, but Untermensch.
Even so, this one is the model: as Paul says, Your
attitude, your cast of mind, your approach to other people should be just like
Christ, the royal Son of God, the majestic King, whose very nature made him ripe
for equal standing with the Father: He was in
very nature God. That was His being. He deserved nothing less than a seat alongside
the Father. He had the right to it by dint of who he actually was in and of
himself
But - and this is quite the extraordinary thing - for
no apparent calculation of advantage to himself he relinquished his power, and emptied himself ; he nothinged himself; he did not seek to
become something, but let go of his grasp on the something that he had; he
insisted upon not insisting upon his rights; exchanging the very nature or the morph of God himself for the very nature
or morph of a slave – the complete embodiment of the
one with no rights, the very one whose purpose is to serve and to do no other –
that is the form he took upon himself. He poured himself out.
I said that he did seem to calculate the advantage:
that he falls under suspicion like this is typical of our cynicism – where we
cannot imagine the act of pure love. Surely he could see his future glory, and,
like an athlete in training for Olympic glory, endured the pains and
discomforts of the world because of the outcome. But the benefit he wins
belongs not to him but to those who bow the knee to him in the final scene. He
in essence gains nothing he did not already have except for one thing: our
worship of him, which reconciles the created world to its creator.
And what was the form that he became, the nature that
he embraced? It was to become like a human being. To be ‘a little lower than
angels’; perhaps there is here a reminder that the purpose of human being was
to live to the service of God, to humbly live out that calling without grasping
at divinity.
By contrast Caesar in all his might would claim for
himself divine properties, a seat at the table of the gods in heaven, and
demand the prayers and sacrifices of men and women – longing to ascend to the
highest place in his arrogance.
But not this true Lord, deserving of power and status,
but not grasping; having what tyrants
long for, but giving it away, emptying himself and becoming no different to the
most abject non-citizen of the empire. He takes on our form: as Athanasius puts
it:
He
has not assumed a body as proper to his own nature, far from it, for as the
Word He is without a body. He has been manifested in a human body for this
reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of
us men.
What he takes on himself is not simply the indignities
of bodily life, with all its liquids, solids and gasses; but he opens himself
up to the vulnerability being human
life. We are vulnerable to pain, to loss, and to death. Could there be any less
vulnerable position than being divine? But the Son of God exposed himself to –
can we say the risk? – of human
living, as Athanasius says, ‘out of the love and goodness of His Father’.
And his life itself was a humble life of obedience to
command of God – and to a particular command, the command to embrace a human
death – indeed the sin-bearing death of which human kind was in dire need.
What an extraordinary mystery this is – the obedience
of the Son of God! That, we discover, in divinity itself is not simply raw
authority and power but a submission to power and authority – not a coerced
submission, as if he left heaven at gunpoint, or because he had been tricked in
some divine card game, or outvoted by the other persons of the trinity, but a
completely voluntary submission: a submission without necessity other than the
desire of God’s heart that the lost be saved.
I don’t know when it was that you last gave up
something that it was your right to have; it is part of our ongoing
childishness as human beings that we continue with this demand that we be
treated according to what we feel we deserve: it has become a part of our
cultural discourse, our way of getting noticed. As well we might: this has been
the way in which oppressed groups in our culture have asserted themselves as
full human beings among other human beings, and achieved equal status before
the law. With Jesus, however, we are not dealing with an outsider. He had the
rights of an insider, the rights off
the one who was born to rule, the rights of the powerful, not the powerless. It
is precisely we the powerful and included who ought to hear this word, then:
whenever you find yourself pointing the loaded gun of submission at someone
else, you have missed the point; it isn’t a teaching that is meant to increase
the subjugation of others, it is meant to be about you: you ought to
consider others better than yourself, and stop complaining that others aren’t.
It is this submissive, obedient, dying Lord who is
vindicated, nevertheless. In this him there is an exaltation which is higher
than than the degradation with which we began. The journey above trumps the
journey downwards – for God has exalted him to place above all places, and
given him the name that is higher than any name – a name which can only be
God’s own name. If the Son gave away equality with God, we see that here is it
fantastically restored, to the glory of God the Father.
And finally, we will see the complete unveiling of the
glory of God in the Son. Whereas he came anonymously to earth, obscure and
unknown, he is now the bearer of a name on every tongue. Where once he was the
slave of all, he is now the object of the worship of all, recognized by all as
the Lord of all, with no exceptions or qualifications.
And this
should be your attitude? The hymn of Christ’s descent from heaven really
overwhelms Paul’s appeal for the Philippians to show humility to one another,
doesn’t it? That was just the beginning; yes, be humble, to the point of abject
subservience and loss of dignity – not simply because here we have some Aesop’s
fable of humility, but because the way of humility runs with the grain of the
universe. That’s the direction in which it is all purposed – the final moment
when all recognize the Lordship of the humble one, not because he has subdued
them but because he has served them to the point of death and beyond, and
because that is what the Father celebrates and honours above all.
But if you see that this is where everything is
headed, it may lead you to sit in the mud alongside those who also sit there;
to expose yourself to the unlovely and unloveable people of another culture; to
listen for hours to the lonely old woman when you have better things to do with
your time; to exercise your freedom to live in acts of sheer love; to pour
yourself out for the needy; to spend your life’s silver coin in a way that
seems like such a poor investment to everyone else around.
How trivial our petty calls for recognition seem! How
completely this puts our grasping to shame! How marvelously this turns us from
the usual bickering and complaining to the words with which we must forever
worship and adore the Son of God, as we humble ourselves before the one who humbled
himself for us: Jesus is Lord.
