NOTES for Php 2:4-5

We are accustomed to thinking that “Man—that has a proud sound,” that man is the crown of creation, the most beautiful thing on earth. In today’s apostolic reading, always read on feasts of the Most Holy Mother of God, the apostle Paul tells us that for Christ, who is the Son of God, God by nature, to become human is a humiliation. Christ took the form of a servant. The apostle says this so that we might sense what it would be like for a free person voluntarily to become a slave and lose his dignity. Who among us could do this? Who among us, out of love for our lesser brothers, would agree to become a kitten? Yet the distance between us and God is far greater. It is precisely in the fact that He crosses this distance and humbles Himself (the Greek ταπεινόω means to abase, to humble) that the greatness of His mercy is revealed to us.

In the passage from the letter to the Philippians that we read today, the apostle Paul speaks of the greatest of miracles: God, the Creator, became man. He, the Lord, not only lived an ordinary human life, but accepted death, a death by no means ordinary, but the most shameful. We know that both for Israel and for the Roman Empire, execution on a cross was the most terrible and humiliating possible. In the Law of Moses it was said that everyone hanged on a tree is cursed (Deut. 21:23); the Romans did not subject citizens of the Empire to such an execution. But almighty God, by His own will, accepted precisely such a death, because sin is so strong and terrible that redemption was possible only at the highest price. And precisely because He agreed to the most terrible pain and the most terrible humiliation, heaven and earth bow before His name.

Today the apostle Paul speaks about the motivation behind our actions. It is very important to consider why we wish to do one thing or another. Even quite respectable actions can be performed with very disreputable motives. A simple example is the situation in which someone gives alms not in order to help a beggar, but to display his own righteousness to those around him, to God, and to himself. Yet this is a simple situation... and a fairly harmless one. It is far worse when we begin to act solely to prove to someone else that he is wrong—out of contentiousness. Arguing for the sake of arguing, activity for the sake of activity... This destroys both ourselves and relationships within the Church, as well as our relationship with God. The apostle Paul offers a simple solution, though one unattractive to a vain person: simply to acknowledge that other people, their feelings, and my relationship with them are more important than my righteousness and wisdom—which, alas, are most often imaginary.