Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
—Philippians 2:5-11 (ESV)
I’m filling in right now for the regular leader of our Wednesday evening Bible study, leading those who come through Philippians (when he asked me to cover this period for him, we selected that together). This evening, as we were working on 2:5-18, a couple dots connected for me that had never connected before, and I realized a bit more of the punch of this remarkable passage.
As you may know, the official Roman religion was emperor-worship, and its creed and sole tenet was “Caesar is Lord.” The various emperors took their proclaimed divinity with varying degrees of seriousness, but they all valued it as the glue that held the empire together. This, incidentally, is why Christians had such a rough time of it, because their insistence that Jesus alone is Lord made them a national security threat. (Shades of Janet Napolitano.)
This is of particular importance in the letter to the Philippians because Philippi was a Roman colony, and thus everyone born in the city who was not born into slavery was a Roman citizen. That put them ahead of most people who lived under Roman rule, for relatively few people in the empire had citizenship, and the difference in legal status between citizens and non-citizens was profound—only citizens could participate in political life (though they didn’t have the option of not doing so), and only citizens received the full protection of Roman law. Being a citizen was thus a very big deal, and so since native free Philippians all had citizenship, they took great pride in this fact, and in their city. Their sense of Roman identity, of both their civil rights and their civic responsibilities, was very strong, and Caesar-worship was very strong in the city as well.
This meant that Christianity was counter-cultural in Philippi to a much greater degree than in most of the rest of the Roman Empire. In this passage, though, Paul pushes that even further. You see, one of the rights of Roman citizens was that they could not be crucified; in fact, Cicero once wrote,
To bind a Roman citizen is a crime; to flog him is an abomination; to execute him is almost an act of murder; to crucify him is—what? There is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed.
As you can see, Roman citizens had a very high opinion of themselves; by virtue of their status as citizens, they were quite certain they were better than every other class of people on the planet. The idea of being crucified would have been unspeakably, nauseatingly horrifying to them—maybe even more from the psychic shock and the assault on their identity and self-image than from the physical agony. They were too special to be treated like that. And yet Paul says, in effect, “Sure, you’re special, you’re Roman citizens; but look at Jesus—he was even more special; he was God become human, and look what he did. Now you go and do likewise: do not consider your status as citizens something to hang onto, but make yourselves nothing, taking on the full reality of slaves, and humble yourselves even to the point of death on a cross, if it should come to that.”
Lay down your specialness for Jesus Christ, and in humility, serve others, even to the point of laying down your life. That’s what it means to follow Jesus; that’s the road that leads to sharing his reward.
Photo © 2012 Tobias Lindman. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.