NOTES for Php 2:6-11

We are accustomed to thinking that “man—that has a proud ring,” that humanity is the crown of creation, the most beautiful thing on earth. In today’s apostolic reading, which is 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, becoming human is a humiliation.

Christ took the form of a servant. The apostle says this so that we may sense what it would mean for a free person voluntarily to become a slave and be stripped of dignity. Who among us could do this? Who among us, out of love for our lesser brothers and sisters, would agree to become a kitten? Yet the distance between us and God is far greater. And it is precisely in His crossing that distance, in His humbling Himself (the Greek ταπεινόω means to humble or abase), that the greatness of His mercy is revealed to us.

Continuing his discussion of Christian life, Paul reminds his brothers and sisters in Philippi that humility is its necessary condition. The apostle speaks of spiritual poverty and of the fact that fullness of communion with God is possible only when one recognizes oneself as nothing. He gives the example of Christ Himself, who did not try to establish Himself by His own efforts, relying in this respect on His Father. Here the apostle draws on a tradition of understanding poverty that goes back to the time of the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem.

Even then, poverty was understood as a spiritual state associated with a person's recognition of the simple fact that not even their own life belongs to them. Indeed, what makes a human being human is the ‘breath of life’ that God gives and that belongs to God. A person merely makes use of it, yet without it the person does not exist. All the more, then, can none of us possess anything by right and by nature: if our very life is, in essence, not ours but God's, everything else can only be given to us for our use—at most until the end of our earthly journey.

And if what has been said is true not only of every person, but of the Messiah Himself, then it is all the more true of every Christian. Moreover, the fullness of the Kingdom's life can be given only to someone who, like Christ Himself, is not afraid to become nothing, refusing to fill their own life with content originating in the fallen world. Only by renouncing such content completely can one hope that it will be replaced by something else whose origin lies in the Kingdom.

But then the numerous disputes over all kinds of religious and theological questions, which, judging by the apostle's words, were not uncommon in the church at Philippi, lose their point of their own accord. They serve precisely to establish a person not in God, not in Christ, but in themselves. Accordingly, they replace the Kingdom's life with the life of this world, leading a person off the Christian path. The apostle calls on the recipients of his letter not to lose sight of what matters most—Christ and the Kingdom—and to pay no attention to everything else.

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.