Be of the Same Mind that was "in Christ"

Paul Gaugin, Le Christ Jaune. 1889

Be of the Same Mind that was “in Christ”
Philippians 2:1-13
20th Sunday after Trinity (Proper 22), 9 Oct. 2008
Homily delivered at St. John's Cathedral, Hong Kong

God, let us not accept that judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

My second son David was a very precocious child, and occasionally would ask questions that in their simplicity and naivety actually revealed profound problems. When he was about nine or so, he once asked me, “Why did God have to kill his Son Jesus to pay for our sins? Doesn’t that make him a very bad Father? Why couldn’t he have just been bigger-hearted and forgiven us when we’re sorry? Isn’t that what he expects from us? Besides that—didn’t he forbid human sacrifice?”

I tried answering him by citing the normal “Law versus Mercy” and “the need for an eternal atoning sacrifice” arguments we usually hear from people quoting snippets of scripture, here and there. But David would have nothing of it,” “Look,” he said, “if God is really in charge of everything, he can make things the way he wants. So why did he make them so that he had to kill off his own Son?”

It took me several years before I fully realized that the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the incarnation mean that in a real sense God the Father did not have to “kill off” his Son to satisfy some law he had set up. Rather, the death of Jesus on the cross “for our sins” was in fact God giving himself freely to heal us and rescue us from our failings and shortcomings and all their effects. My nine year old son’s image of the child-abusing, murderous Father-God set on obeying the constraints of justice at all cost is common. But it is wrong. It is a twisted and wrong image, seen through the narrow and distorted lens of human limitation. The birth, life, death, and bodily reappearance of Jesus after his death is actually the Great Mystery of Love Himself descending below all things to save, redeem, and heal his pitiful creatures from the nasty fix we find ourselves in.

This Great Mystery was the subject of an early Christian hymn that Saint Paul quoted when writing to the saints in Philippi. Since it comes from before Paul, the hymn in today’s reading is one of the oldest parts of the New Testament, from the first couple of decades after the death of Jesus. Paul quotes the hymn, probably one that his audience in Philippi would have sung in Greek in their small Church services, in order to argue that Christians should be humble, not stuck up, and should always try to serve one another. It does not call for a fawning and fake “I’m no gooooood. I’m worse than everybody” false humility. It says we should have the mind of Christ.

I think perhaps a better translation of the first verse of the hymn would be that, “though he had the form and substance of God, Christ was not of a mind to see equality with God as something to be grabbed at and held onto tightly.” Rather, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave by being born in human likeness. “ But the hymn goes on to say that in addition to this great stooping down of Christ from the eternities to our pitiful mortal life, there was a second stage of humiliation. “Once he was found in human form, he further humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.” The point is that Jesus died such a horrible and shameful death—the Roman Imperial punishment for political rebels, bandits, and terrorists, being slowly tortured to death publicly to set an example– that he died such a death unjustly, but willingly.

Now this passage expresses the idea of Christ’s emptying himself with the Greek word kenosis. This later became an important point of departure in Roman Catholic and reformation theology on the relation of the persons in the Holy Trinity, the “occultation” of the Divinity, and its abasement and making itself subject to the laws of nature in the incarnation. The great Anglican theologian Charles Gore developed the idea of kenosis as a means of understanding the limitations of the human consciousness of the historical Jesus. The traditional Christian hymn “Te Deum” expresses this in the phrase, “Thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.”

But Paul’s point here is that the “mind” that was in Christ—indeed, that all who are “in Christ” already share—was one not of grasping, but of emptying, not of dictating, but one of obedient servitude or slavery.

This is the great point of the idea of kenosis in the Mind of Christ.

The Christian Church has a shocking doctrine, one that throughout its history has been repeatedly oversimplified by pious people: the doctrine of the incarnation expressed in the line in the creed about our One Lord Jesus Christ who, “became flesh of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became a human being.” Many church members think they are giving a highly orthodox answer when they define the Incarnation solely in terms of "The Divinity of Christ." But this is really heresy, and was so branded by the early Church. What the Incarnation actually affirms is that the man Jesus of Nazareth, known to his disciples as a fully human person, sharing the limitations and temptations of ordinary men, was also in a unique sense the self-expression of God.

This became clear to them when after his horrific and unjust death, he reappeared to them in bodily form—they knew that whatever it was they were seeing, it was not a ghost. They also knew, as St. Paul elsewhere says, that it was by raising Jesus from the dead that God revealed just who this Jesus actually was (Rom. 1). The clearest expression of the idea in the New Testament is in the Gospel according to St. John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."

The idea has been put in many other ways over the centuries: Jesus was truly man, and at the same time truly God, is "God living a human life," "the manifestation of God in human terms," and "the fullest expression of Divine personality that is possible under the conditions of human life."

D. M. Baillie, a distinguished Scottish theologian, argued that this “100% God and 100% man” idea is perhaps best explained this in by what he calls the "paradox of grace." We Christians since antiquity have been aware that we possess what appears to be a genuinely free will of our own, that we are "not marionettes but responsible persons." At the same time, we are equally sure that whatever good there is in our lives comes from God acting in us. And we feel that we are never more truly free, nor more truly human, than in those moments when we are most dependent on and most open to God.

"This is the deepest paradox of our Christian experience, and it runs right through it, woven into its very texture," said Dr. Baillie. "I suggest that it . . . points the way to an understanding of the perfect union of God and man in the Incarnation." In the New Testament, Jesus is seen "surpassing all other men in refusing to claim any¬thing for himself independently, and ascribing all goodness to God." Yet his disciples felt that when they were with him, they were in the presence of God. And he told them they were right in believing that. "If the paradox of Divine grace is a reality in our poor imperfect lives at all," asked Dr. Baillie, "does not the same or a similar paradox, taken at the perfect and absolute pitch, appear as the mystery of the Incarnation?" [[Preceding four paragraphs are adapted from Louis Cassels, Christian Primer: Adult Answers to Basic Questions about the Christian Faith (Doubleday: NYC, 1964; rpt. FMP 1981) 24-26.]]

But this is all the more the case when we talk about the mind of Christ and its emptying itself of all self-seeking, self-will, and even instinct for self-preservation. Especially in the second stage of humiliation described in the hymn-- Jesus Was a Palestinian Jew and let God lead him where God would. He ended up standing in opposition to the “religious” and “righteous” people of his day, and siding with traitors, drunkards, and whores. “For they,” he said, “recognize their need for God.”

Jews of all sects at that time had expectations for what a Messiah would be and do; God had another idea. Jesus, when faced with the prospect of his death by torture, prayed in Gethsemane that “this cup” would pass from him. The allusion is to Psalm 75:9 that refers to a cup brimming with “foaming, spiced wine” in the hand of God the dregs of which are punishment for “the wicked” of the world, an image called in Isaiah 51 “the cup of the wrath of God.” Despite his fear and desire for another outcome, Jesus says, “nevertheless, let what you want be done, Father, not what I want.” In the end he empties himself even further and, as Saint Paul quotes the hymn, “was obedient unto death, death upon the Cross.”

It is only in such surrender to God that we can find ourselves. It is only is such admission of total dependence on God that we can find a way out of our hopeless situation. Self-will is a great fraud. How can we talk to God face-to-face when we don’t yet have faces? We are pretty pathetic creatures, but ones that God loves nevertheless. He loves us foolishly. He’s “crazy about us.” That’s why he emptied himself, showed us the way, and paid whatever price our failings had set.

Just as Jesus accepted who he was and the tasks God had for him, we must accept who we are and what we must do to amend our lives. But this requires an open-ended listening. This requires total trust in God’s good intentions for us, in knowing, with Lady Julian of Norwich, “that all is well, and that all manner of things shall be well” in God’s intention.

Such openness is the difference between true humility and its cheap counterfeit, the pride that demands that we either be the best of all or the worst of all.

The Latin word from which we get the word humility is “Humilitas”, that is, close to the humus or the earth. Another way of saying it is “Down-to-earth.” It does not mean self-abasing or playing the drama-queen in thinking oneself as the least valued person on the planet or the worst of its sinners. C.S Lewis said that humility is the golden rule—treating others as you would be treated--applied to self-esteem. Charles H. Spurgeon, an English preacher in the 19th century, said, “Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self.”

In our meditation today, I want us to think about emptying ourselves of self-will and self-grasping. Think of how to make real in our own feeling and thinking the mind that is “in Christ.”


Here are two prayers, both from African Christians, that we can reflect on as we seek to empty ourselves.

O thou great Chief, light a candle in my heart, that I may see what is therein, and sweep the rubbish from thy dwelling place.

God in Heaven, you have helped my life to grow like a tree. Now something has happened. Satan, like a bird, has carried in one twig of his own choosing after another. Before I knew it he had built a dwelling place and was living in it. Tonight, my Father, I am throwing out both the bird and the nest.

In the name of God, Amen.