Last week we took note of the striking fact that in Philippians 1 Paul was able to put up with some people who, although proclaiming the Gospel, did so out of selfish ambition, envy, rivalry, and probably some measure of vain conceit. 

So it may be somewhat surprising that we no sooner turn to the second chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Philippians only to hear Paul say, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit” (2:3). Apparently it is one thing to put up with such things in others but surely such postures were not to be commended.

This month we are looking at each of the four chapters in Philippians to see how Paul displays humility and selflessness and calls all of us to be likewise. In this regard, no chapter in Philippians or even in the entire New Testament gets at such a gracious way of living better than Philippians 2 and most famously through the song Paul quotes about the humble self-emptying of Jesus Christ. How should we live with one another and in the world just generally?  This way:

Who [Jesus], being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross! 

Sometimes we look at some challenge and we deem it to be what we often call “a tall order.” As such you’d have to look at Philippians 2 and decide that it is the tallest order of them all. We must adopt the mindset of no less than Christ Jesus. Yet so much in our world and in our culture presses us to go the opposite direction. We don’t want to stoop low but to reach high. Few people are intent on seizing the bottom rung of the ladder.

I sometimes think of this when I see pictures of the offices of politicians. People who are somewhat low on the political totem pole tend to cover the walls of their offices with photos of them standing next to politicians in higher ranks above them. Thus the higher up you are status-wise, the fewer people there are above you to be seen with. A state politician may want to be seen with a U.S. Representative, with a U.S. Senator, with the Vice-President, and with the President. A U.S. Representative wants to be seen with a Senator and the Vice-President and the President. A Senator wants to be seen with the Vice-President and President. A Vice-President wants to be seen with the President. But by the time you get to the Oval Office, you see only family photos because now there is no one higher up to be seen with! And that then is a mark of having truly “made it” in life.

Jesus went another way. He always wanted to be seen with those deemed to be the lowest of the low.  Sometimes it seems like this annoyed the disciples. It was nice that Jesus was humble and all but honestly, when was he going to get serious about being upwardly mobile in a political way to deal with those nasty Romans? The disciples were thus constantly trying to shoo away children, hush up noisy blind beggars, telling Jesus to send people like the Syrophoenician woman away. Religious people are really good at trying to keep all the “wrong” people away from Jesus.

Even today the Jesus who emerges from Philippians 2 is clearly judged to be a non-starter for many Christians.  As Kristin Kobes DuMez and others have detailed, the masculinization of Christianity wants a Rambo Jesus to vanquish perceived foes (and it seems that some of those foes are those sissy Christians who actually think living out the Beatitudes and bearing the Fruit of the Spirit are good things).

Even in the church these days it can be difficult to spy people who have the mindset of Christ Jesus. And as last week we saw how difficult it would be to adopt a posture of rejoicing even when faced with some unlovely people, so adopting the mindset of Christ as Paul lays it out in Philippians 2 is a struggle for all of us and so I don’t want merely to point fingers at the Rambo Jesus crowd. I struggle to have this mindset too.

Of course the great paradox of Philippians 2 is that by stooping to the lowest point of them all, death on a cross, Jesus was exalted to the highest place of all. The disciples had once been sure that all of Jesus’s talk about suffering, sacrifice, and death would lead only and quite literally to a dead end. A disciple like Peter even once openly rebuked Jesus for such weak defeatist rhetoric. That did not end well for Peter.

Our vocation, Paul wrote in Philippians 2, is not to correct Jesus but to follow him and adopt his mindset for ourselves. That will mean thinking of others more highly than ourselves and even if our culture tells us that’s a road going nowhere, the church needs to know that it is the only road we can travel, at least if we want to have Jesus as a travel companion.

Header photo by Erin Randle on Unsplash