The Apostle Paul was a wanderer. God had gifted him to plant churches, and that meant moving around a lot: start the church, build it up to where it could keep itself going, raise up leaders within the fellowship, and move on to the next city. Or at least, that was the general approach. Some places, he stayed longer—most notably Ephesus, where he spent three years; but there were more places like Thessalonica, where the authorities ran him out of town after just three weeks. None of them added up to long pastorates for Paul, only short ones and shorter ones. That was hard on him, because he cared deeply about the churches and people he had left behind; getting back to visit churches he had planted drove his travels just as much as planting new ones. When he couldn’t visit for whatever reason—perhaps because his travels went awry, perhaps because he was in prison—he wrote letters, like this one.
In reading Paul’s letters, we should always remember there’s no small talk here and no fluff. Right from the first word, he’s always on about his purpose, always doing something intentional. Philippians is one in which his opening comments serve as an overture to the letter, bringing up themes he intends to address at greater length, starting with the very first line. Normally, Paul opens his letters with “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus . . .” and goes on from there. His calling as an apostle is the source of his authority, and so that’s generally where he needs to start; but here, writing to a body of believers who honor and respect his authority, he leaves that out. Instead, he describes himself (and Timothy) as a servant of Christ Jesus. Or at least, that’s how the NIV renders it; to give the word its full force, he calls each of them a slave of Christ.
To be sure, this didn’t mean quite what it does to our ears. Roman society knew full well that slaves were human, and they weren’t doomed to perpetual slavery; if things broke their way, slaves could earn their freedom and even become Roman citizens. In fact, I’ve seen speculation that Paul’s parents might have been slaves who had earned citizenship. All the same, slaves had no legal rights, no freedoms, and no personal autonomy whatsoever. They were completely subject to their masters’ every whim and desire, whatever those might be.
In addition to the cultural context, there is an important biblical context for Paul’s description of himself as a slave of Christ, because nearly a third of the Old Testament uses of the word ebed, the principal Hebrew word for “slave,” are used to describe an individual or the nation as the slave of God. Among individuals, the word is used most frequently of David and Moses, 38 and 37 times respectively. Paul is putting himself and Timothy in the same biblical frame as those two, Elijah, Isaiah, and the prophets more generally.
For Paul to call himself a slave of Christ means he is bound over to Christ, totally at his service, with no independent rights of his own; Jesus is his Lord in every respect, in every aspect of his life. It therefore means he is Christ’s instrument: he does not speak and act on his own, but God speaks and acts through him. It also means he does not find his life in getting his way, but rather in submitting to Christ, for that submission defines his life; his identity is defined by serving others, for he serves his Lord by serving his people. And here’s the key: Paul isn’t claiming this title to assert his authority (he would do that by invoking his apostleship) or his superiority to the Philippians—and how ironic would that be, anyway? Rather, I believe, Paul is presenting himself and his status as a model for the Philippians. We might say the goal of discipleship in Jesus is to reach the point where we can honestly say we, too, are slaves of Christ.
Having set the goal before them, Paul then defines their identity, laying out the fundamental reality of their life as disciples of Jesus Christ: they are “God’s holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi.” Two things to note here. First, the believers in Philippi were, and we are, “God’s holy people”—i.e., saints. In the final year or two of Kent Denlinger’s tenure as pastor here, he drew repeatedly on Martin Luther’s famous dictum that Christians are simul iustus et peccator—roughly, at one and the same time saint and sinner. Kent noted something I hadn’t thought about before then: the word “saint” comes first. To expand this a little with a line from Christian singer-songwriter and my fellow Regent alum Carolyn Arends, “we are prodigals and pilgrims, we are sinners, we are saints,” but in Christ, his creating and redeeming work in us is the deepest reality of our souls. That truth is deeper in us than our sin; we are sinners, yes, but saints first; and so that’s how Paul names the Philippians. As Kent quoted Eugene Peterson as saying with regard to the Corinthian church, Paul addresses them from the perspective of health.
Second, there is another way in which the Philippians, and we, are saints first. We have a tendency to identify ourselves by secondary things, and so if Paul had named them as we tend to name ourselves, he might have sent his letter to Philippian Community Grace Church. He doesn’t do that. Instead, he addresses them as the people of Jesus at Philippi. What defines them is that they are God’s people in Jesus. Their identification as Philippians is secondary—it matters, but it isn’t who they are, it’s the place where God has planted them to serve him by being who they are. That was a big deal, because Philippi was a Roman colony—a city planted by the empire to serve its military and economic strategy, which conferred Roman citizenship on all its residents who weren’t slaves—and so being from Philippi was very much a point of identity. Paul writes this letter to Christians in a Roman colony in part to help them understand themselves in a new light as a colony of the kingdom of God on earth, and citizens of God’s kingdom. It’s a lesson the American church could stand to learn as well.
When Paul turns to pray for the Christians in Philippi, he’s clear that his prayer flows out of deep and abiding gratitude for them. That gratitude is deeply rooted in relationship, for he loves them dearly. They have not been dependent on him, nor have they fought to assert their independence from him; rather, they have been his partners in the ministry of the gospel from the very first. With that, and their resulting commitment to support him and his work however they could, they have been a steady source of joy and encouragement for him. He trusts the reality of their relationship with Jesus.
Out of that, note what he prays for them: that their love would overflow and overflow and overflow. Obviously, this is first of all a prayer for abundance, that they would be so full of love, they wouldn’t be big enough to hold it all, and so it would flow out of them. It’s also, however, a prayer that their love would be directed. This is profoundly important because if it’s left to us to define love for ourselves, on our own terms, as we see fit, it’s easy for us to use it to justify doing whatever we may happen to want to do. Paul’s prayer rules that possibility out.
He prays, first, for the Philippians’ love to abound in deep experiential and relational knowledge of God, of his character and will and ways and concerns, and of other people as well—but a knowledge of other people which is formed and shaped by that relational knowledge of God. Second, he prays this knowledge would produce moral insight and discernment, which would ultimately grow them in wisdom—wisdom being the pattern of acting and living in conformity with truth and goodness, with the character of God. It is, as NT scholar Peter O’Brien put it, the capacity to turn knowledge into practical concrete judgment; we might call it knowledge and love with their boots on. This is the same vision Paul articulates in Ephesians 4:15: “Speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every way the mature body of him who is the head, namely, Christ.”
If we look to the purpose of Paul’s prayer for this body of Christians whom he loved, we see two levels. The immediate purpose is that they would be able to discern what is best, so that they would know what is truly essential and what is not. Our age tends to believe every molehill is one to die on, while at the same time waving off mountains as unimportant. What do we truly need to hold on to, and what should we hold with open hands? It’s a massive question, and one we cannot sort out well on our own; as much as the Christians in Philippi did, we need divine wisdom to guide us here.
Beyond that, Paul’s ultimate purpose is, as I mentioned a moment ago, the same one he declares in Ephesians 4: that the church in Philippi would grow up into the full character of Jesus. Here, he uses two particular words to describe that. One, he prays they would be pure—which means, biblically, that they would be single-minded, having undivided hearts. As the Danish philosopher/theologian Søren Kierkegaard summed it up, “purity of heart is to will one thing.” To put this in the terms on which we’ve been focusing this year, purity of heart is internal integrity. Two, Paul prays the Philippians would be blameless—but while his usual word for this refers to faultless behavior, the word he uses here means not stumbling or causing anyone else to stumble. The focus is not on our behavior for our own sake so much as it is on how our behavior affects others.
Now, note three things here. First, Paul prays these things would be true of the believers in Philippi so that they would stand in the day of Christ with their arms full of the fruit of righteousness. Second, this is the purpose of his prayer for them, but not the content of his prayer for them. He doesn’t pray simply that they would live pure and blameless lives which would bear fruit in the effects of their lives on the people around them. He doesn’t even pray that they would have knowledge and wisdom. No, he prays they would be full to bursting with the love of God, and as that love pours out of them, a river on its way to the sea, it would grow them up in knowledge and wisdom, in pure hearts and blameless lives.
And third, and note this well: what he prays for the Philippians in verses 9-11 is what he has declared himself confident of in verse 6, “that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” He is certain that they will stand in the day of Christ with their arms full of the fruit of righteousness—why? Because that’s God’s work. God is the one who began it, God is the one who is doing it, and what he began, he will complete. What he started, he will finish. This is the already/not yet: in their own experience of themselves, the Philippian Christians are far from pure or blameless, just as we are—but while that work is not yet done in us, at the same time it has already been completed because Jesus has already done it, and it only remains for us to grow into what we have already been made to be. Paul prays this for the Philippians out of the sure and certain hope that what he asks for them, God has already given.
So then, if all this is true, what is discipleship? Well, it’s not about us going out and doing things, even if they’re good things. It’s also not about the things we don’t do, even if they’re bad things. Both the things we do and the things we don’t do matter, but they aren’t the heart of the matter. Discipleship at its core is the process by which we come to be defined by Jesus rather than by ourselves. It’s not about our work, because it’s God’s work in us, not our work for God. Again, the work we do matters, but it’s not what makes anything happen, it’s God giving us the dignity of participation. Discipleship isn’t a list of accomplishments checked off by a teeth-gritting commitment to duty, it’s the fruit of the love of God poured out on us and in us and through us. It’s not about being driven by fear, or shame, or anything else, it’s about being drawn by love, by the God who is love amongst himselves. And though not yet accomplished, it is already certain, because God began this project and he never abandons his projects halfway through.
The challenge, of course, is that it’s easy to say that on Sunday morning in the middle of a church service, and a lot harder to hold on to it and live out of that reality on Monday night, or Tuesday afternoon, in the midst of a world which is hostile to our faith—even if it has to be a lot subtler about that here in the buckle of the Bible belt. When we look at our lives and all we can see is the rubble and things half-finished, it can be brutally hard to believe that the work really is already finished, we just haven’t gotten to the end of the story yet; the general contractor from Nazareth who’s doing the building has finished more than a few houses, and if I spent the last week doing little but knocking holes in the drywall, that was already factored in. When I go out into the world to follow him in his mission to this lost and broken world so loved by God, it can seem like a sick joke to look at the job I’m doing and claim that I am his instrument, that he’s using me to carry out his work; I am and he is, this is true however bizarre it may sometimes seem, but it’s a lot to hold on to. And it’s agonizingly hard to believe in resurrection when all we see is pain, suffering, grief, and death.
Thing is, Jesus knows all these struggles, and they don’t mean we’re failures as disciples. We are physical beings, we need physical anchors and touchstones for our faith, and Jesus knows that from the inside because he’s one of us. That’s not the only reason he gives us this table, but it’s one of them, and not the least. This is his promise to us made physical, made visible and tangible in three dimensions, past, present, and future—remembrance, communion, and hope.
Image from flickr; creator unknown. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic