Let’s Speak Jesus w/ Dr. Chris Green W1

Anthony: Let’s get to it. We’ve got five pericopes that we’re going to look at from the Revised Common Lectionary here today.

And we want to start with Philippians 2:1-13, I’m going to be reading from the New Revised Standard Version. It is the Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 21 in Ordinary Time, which falls on October the 1.

If then, there is any comfort in Christ, any consolation from love, any partnership in the Spirit, any tender affection and sympathy, ² make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. ³ Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. ⁴ Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. ⁵ Let the same mind be in you that was^[a] in Christ Jesus, ⁶ who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, ⁷ but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, ⁸ he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. ⁹ Therefore God exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, ¹⁰ so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹ and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. ¹² Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence but much more now in my absence, work on your own salvation with fear and trembling, ¹³ for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Chris, this is one of my favorite passages of scripture in the entire collection. It’s a sweeping Christ poem. And I’m just curious, what are your Christological thoughts that you would like to share from this text?

Chris: Yeah, obviously you have the hymn, and maybe I’ll circle back to that, but two comments first to set the table about the very end, this “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

I think we can easily mishear that as work out your salvation with a sense of risk, with a sense of the precariousness of your salvation, but that’s not at all what Paul intends. Like this, the language of fear and trembling in Scripture is language associated with the coming near of God.

So, it’s the coming near of God that brings about the fear and trembling. So, this is not anxiety about the precariousness of our standing with God. It is an overwhelmed-ness at the nearness of the God who’s come to us. So, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling is Paul calling attention to the fact that God is at work in you, and he says that explicitly.

We just tend to not notice that the fear and trembling is the natural response to the fact that it is God who is at work in you. And it’s precisely because God is at work in you, that you can work out your own salvation. And this is the Christology, right? That in the communication of attributes in Jesus, where the divine and the human are communing with, in him, because of him.

So that he personally is drawing together all that is divine and all that is human, making it his and then making it ours. We can work out our own salvation because it is God who’s at work in us, right? I sometimes put it this way, it’s a bit simple, but I think it makes the point that salvation is not 100% God and not at all mine, 0% mine.

And it’s not 50 / 50, some God and some me. It is entirely God and therefore entirely mine. That is a 100% God and therefore a 100% me. Which is why in Galatians, Paul identifies self-control as a fruit of the Spirit, as the culminating fruit of the Spirit, that where God is most at work, I am most enabled to be what I know I need to be and want to be.

And I can work out my salvation. We can work out our salvation. Because God is at work in us. So, I think that’s a note about the end of the passage.

At the beginning, Paul says something that’s hard to hear. Do nothing from selfish ambition, regard others in humility, regard others as better than yourselves.

And it’s so easy to mishear that. It’s easy to mishear that and think there was something unhealthy in Paul. It’s easy to mishear that and think we’re being called to practice some kind of subservience or some kind of a way in which we are down on ourselves in order to exalt God. As if God’s glory comes at my expense, my humiliation.

Or that the only way I can live in community is if I’m sacrificial in a way that’s harmful to me. You’ve pastored, and I’ve pastored. We’ve seen these dynamics up close in which there are unhealthy ways of living together in community and there is selfishness, of course. And then there’s also a kind of bad selflessness, a way of not having enough of a sense of self to follow the boundaries that need to be followed.

I think what’s key here, Paul is not calling for any kind of unhealthy domination or subservience. The key is in that call to humility—in humility, regard others as better than yourselves, not humiliation. And this is where I think everything becomes clear in what he says about Christ, that the humility we’re called to have is not the humility that is actually humiliation, in which we get dominated by other people and then call that holy.

But it is to have the character of God so that we can genuinely delight in other people the way that God delights in them, right? The way in which this is the Jesus who washes the feet of Peter, even though Peter protests and says no. I should be washing your feet, right? Peter wants to work in a world in which he knows how the hierarchy functions, like who’s in charge and who’s meant to follow orders.

And Jesus overturns that, right? I’m among you as one who serves. So, this humility of God revealed in Jesus Christ means that God is regarding us as his betters, right? He says the Gentiles lorded over, but I don’t lord it over you. Like, I am among you as one who serves. Who is greater, the one who sits at the table or the one who serves? I am the one who serves, like I’m coming to you.

And they’re overturned by his Lordship and authority in their life. It’s too humble. They can’t track him most of the time because of how humble he is.

So, I think all of that is background for what Paul is calling for here from the Philippians and from us. So those two things said, to come to the hymn then—Bonhoeffer is so helpful on this point, and I learned this from him, that the incarnation is not a humiliation for God, that the incarnation is a revelation of the humility of God. But it’s not a humiliation for God. So, when we talk about kenosis—and I do think we need to talk about kenosis—we don’t need to hear that as God humiliated himself in order to prove something to us or to set an example for us.

The Incarnation is not humiliation. It’s revelation. What’s humiliating—and this, again, I’ve gotten from Bonhoeffer—is death on a cross. But he becomes obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, and that is humiliating. And he’s willing, in love for us and in solidarity with us, to go to that extent. But that humiliation exposes the wrongness of the world; it doesn’t reveal something essential about God. The Incarnation reveals God. His submission to death, even in humiliation, the shame of the cross, it shows his devotion to us. It shows his absolute commitment to our good. And it exposes the absurdity of the powers of the world. It puts them on display in the language of Colossians.

So, I think it’s helpful to make that distinction. That the incarnation is a revelation of the humility of God. It’s not a humiliation. It’s not undignified of God to become human.

I was teaching last night an old catechism, and I won’t call out the tradition where this catechism comes from because it’s a disaster.

The catechism is …

Anthony: Name it, Chris.

Christ: No, no, no. It’s part of my own history. It’s a Pentecostal catechism so it’s a part of my own tribe, my tribe’s history. And makes two dramatic mistakes, I think really damaging mistakes, and I pointed this out to my students. The first one is the catechism opens by talking about God but doesn’t talk about Jesus. It has one question about Jesus, but all it says is that Jesus is the Son of God manifested in the flesh, but there’s no theological content to the statement.

And to your point about beginning with Jesus, like when we start to talk about God and Jesus as an afterthought, something has gone terribly wrong. And we’ll keep going wrong all the way through the rest of catechism, because when we come to angels and human beings and sin and redemption and eschatology, if we have misconstrued God because we haven’t seen his glory in the face of Jesus Christ, then we’re going to misapprehend everything else, misconstrue everything else that’s true. That’s exactly what happens.

The other thing that happens in this catechism that I would call out here is that it is specifically seeing this God as being concerned for his own dignity. So, it identifies what it calls God’s moral attributes that constrain his person. So according to this catechism, God cannot do what he personally wills, except by harmonizing, this is their language, harmonizing his moral attributes, which are love, justice, power, and wisdom and dignity.

And dignity—and I pointed out to the students this very passage. And I said, what are we talking about when we talk about God’s dignity if we’re not talking about it in light of Philippians 2? What do we mean when we say God is concerned for his own dignity? Philippians 2 seems to suggest something very different.

Anthony: Yeah, and when we look at the face of Jesus, we see the Son of God, Son of Man being obedient.

Even to death on the cross, which you pointed out was humiliating. And so, we’re talking about the Son of God’s obedience, but as we live and move and have our being in him, we’re called to obedience. But that, man, that feels like such a prickly legalistic word, especially for somebody like me who comes from a legalistic past, but is it legalism? Tell us more about obedience.

Chris: It isn’t. There is a kind of pseudo-obedience that is dominating, that does require a kind of subservience from us, a slavishness from us. Jesus’ obedience reveals—and of course we see this in the saints and the prophets, the people of God who are faithful—that obedience is actually joyful.

There’s a chapter in—forgive the self-promotion here, I will have to repent of this sin—but there’s a chapter in Surprised by God book on obedience, in which I try to work this out a bit, that obedience is a source of joy. In fact, it’s the way in which we learn how to be ourselves.

And I draw on in that chapter, I draw on this image, a painting. It’s called, I think it’s called the Banjo Player. And it shows this older man teaching this young boy how to play the banjo. Tanner is the painter. [The Banjo Lesson by Henry Ossawa Tanner] And this boy is standing; the man is behind him. They’re both holding the banjo and the boy’s hands are under the man’s hands. And the man is directing the boy’s hands to the notes that have to be played on the banjo.

And so, he’s being taught a lesson. He’s learning to obey, but he’s not simply obeying his father or grandfather, whoever it is. There’s a way in which the instrument is obeying him and that his obedience to the master, the teacher, is bringing about an obedience of the instrument to his own hands. And what’s coming from that is music. What’s coming from that is joy and dance and life. That’s what obedience is, and of course there are times in which obedience is hard, like the act, you know. It requires we see this in life in Jesus.

This is what’s happening in Gethsemane. Hebrews makes this clear as well, that Jesus is learning through obedience and learning through what he suffers. He’s learning how to obey in ways that bring life to us, but even though that’s difficult, it’s not working against the integrity of his humanity.

And it’s not working against the integrity of his calling. It’s bringing music. It’s bringing joy. And if we can hear obedience that way, that nothing God requires of us is anything but our good, even if in the short run, I can’t see it that way.

And of course, this is to go back to the catechism. Luther’s catechism is so helpful here when he talks about the Ten Commandments. Like when we see what God is forbidding, we need to hear this as what God is making possible for us, right? By telling us “no” to adult adultery, he’s saying yes to the joys of lifelong marriage, right?

These joys won’t come to you unless I forbid those things. So, God is protecting these joys that would be lost on us. So, I think even when we obey, by God telling us, no, you shall not, even that is about learning to play the banjo. It’s about learning to make the music that we actually want to make.

Anthony: Yeah. That’s so beautiful. For the joy set before him, he was obedient even unto the cross, right? And I again I go back to being Christocentric. We look at Jesus. Who he is, what he has accomplished on our behalf and in us, that he would even die while we were still sick in our sins, in the depth of despair, he would rescue us.

Obedience is just—God, thank you! It really is the Eucharisto. It’s the thanksgiving of his goodness. Of course, we want to please him. Of course, we do. Yeah.

Chris: Because pleasing God is what brings pleasure in the world, right? So, God is not just one more person in my life that I’m trying to curry favor with. God is the source of all light and all love and all joy and all peace. And when I’m true to God, I’m being true to my neighbor. I’m being true to the world; I’m being true to myself.

Back to that point about where the Spirit is, there is self-control as well as love and joy and peace and goodness and all that comes where the spirit is allowed to abide. And obedience is a yielding to that, right? It’s accepting that in order for this music to be played, I have to play it this way.

But of course, that’s exactly what I want to do. But that is not destroying my will to get his will done. That’s not God’s purpose. My will is formed by being aligned to his will.

Anthony: Man, I would like to do a whole podcast on this Christological song. It’s so beautiful.