NOTES for Php 3:1

Paul touches on the theme of righteousness and the theme of circumcision, which at that time was acute in some churches of Greece and Asia Minor. The apostle connects circumcision "with the righteousness that comes from the Torah," while noting that if anyone had grounds to boast in such righteousness, he had more than those who were defending it before the Philippian brothers. But in comparison with what he received in his encounter with the Risen One, Paul considers it no more than trash.

And the point here is not that the apostle rejects the Torah as such. He simply understands too well, from his own experience, that the Torah as such does not make a person righteous. It only points out the path of righteousness, from outside or from within, if we are speaking of the inner Torah. But it is not the Torah that makes a person righteous, but God, who gave the Torah to a person as an instrument on the path of righteousness. The Torah is a spiritual compass that points a person to this path.

But to reach the Kingdom, it is not enough merely to look at the compass; one must also walk the path it indicates, and here God's help and the participation of the Savior Himself are important, all the more because He Himself became the living Torah. The alternative to such a path is religion, religious activity, religious life in general, which often substitutes itself for spiritual life. And then, instead of the path, people begin to be carried away by various religious customs, rituals, and ceremonies, supposing that this is the very thing to which God is calling them.

In reality, however, all these things are merely human games that people invent for their own peace of mind and play for their own pleasure, while the players themselves consider them a means of attaining a certain "righteousness" (which the apostle calls, perhaps not without irony, "the righteousness that comes from the Torah"). Circumcision was just such a game for many Philippian Christians, and not only for them.

For them it was merely a religious rite: after all, they were not seriously intending to walk the spiritual path of Judaism, the path of the inner Torah, humility, unceasing inner prayer, the acquisition of the Shekhinah - in short, everything that mattered to the finest representatives of the Jewish spiritual tradition. For them circumcision was merely a kind of religious game that they played, thinking they were doing something important and necessary. Paul regarded such games as a profanation of the genuine spiritual path, and he was completely right to do so.

The apostle Paul very often warns his readers against the temptation of a legalistic relationship with God. He devotes today’s passage from the Epistle to the Philippians to this problem, which was perhaps even more pressing in his time than in ours. He says that only Christ’s disciples, who worship God in spirit and place no confidence in the achievements of the flesh, truly fulfill the law. He says that he himself possesses every advantage of a zealot for the law and that, according to the righteousness of the law, he is blameless. Yet he counts all this as nothing, because he himself prefers—and calls us—to boast in one thing alone: that Jesus Christ gave His life for us. Indeed, what else can be set against all the horror that we perpetrate?