« HE HUMBLED HIMSELF »

In chapter 2 of Philippians, today’s Epistle reading, St Paul uses a wonderful hymn to Christ which, I'm tempted to say, sums up the whole of the gospel, and certainly it encapsulates the meaning of Holy Week and Easter. Jesus Christ, though “in the form of God”, or as the Church was later to put it, the incarnation of God himself:

humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him...

This is what is special and different about the Christian idea of God, that our God, God almighty, the creator of heaven and earth, judge of all, is prepared to humble himself.

And so we see that:

- In the incarnation, in the words of that ancient hymn we call the Te Deum, the Son of God “abhorred not the Virgin’s womb”;

- The boy Jesus grew up as the carpenter’s son in a perfectly ordinary village;

- He later, to John’s surprise, asked for baptism: despite being so much superior to John in God’s purposes, typically, he does not state any such claim, but lets John recognise it for himself;

- He goes about from place to place with a rather dubious rabble of itinerant followers; he mixes with everyone, but especially with those whom respectable people don’t really want to be seen with;

- And then comes this bizarre, almost comical, so-called “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem, which is really a parody of a king entering his capital because Jesus completely undermines the traditional symbols of power by riding in not on a horse but on a donkey, a peasant’s beast of burden.

After that strange, ambivalent episode, which we recall today, humility turns into humiliation as Jesus knowingly allows himself to be “handed over” into the control of his enemies. He surrenders his freedom; he puts himself at the mercy of the decisions made by his captors; he, the Son of God in human form, submits to the insults and the mockery of the soldiers.

Jesus’s way of humility ends in the disgrace of the Cross, execution as a criminal between two real criminals.

And after all this, Paul can affirm that Jesus was “highly exalted” by his Father, not despite having humbled himself, but because he humbled himself!

Surprising though all this may seem, it does in a way accord with our experience in everyday life.

Who are the people we really respect? Not, I think, those who are conscious of their status, who put on airs, and expect to be treated with due deference.

No, the people we really respect are the ones who don’t make a fuss, those who just get on with what they have to do, and are prepared to take on the messy jobs no one else wants to do; those, in a word, who show true humility.

And so in the Church, in the company of Christ, it is the humble who ought to feel most at home: those who feel themselves unworthy of God’s love, those who are most aware of their own sins and shortcomings. Those who should feel most at home among us are the losers, the failures, and the people who are looked down on by society, the sort that nice people don’t really want to know.

The Church ought to have a special welcome for people who are at the bottom of the social heap, those for whom our much-prized freedom of consumer choice is a cruel joke, those who have little control over their own lives and just have to accept the decisions others make for them.

These are the people who feel most at home in the company of Christ and so they should be the ones who are most at home in his Body, the Church. I leave you to judge how far this is actually the case, with us here and with the Church in general.

In any case, whether or not they find that the Church is in reality their natural milieu, it is those whose lives breathe true humility who will find themselves highly exalted, who will find in the Kingdom of Heaven their natural home .

John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Church

Palm Sunday, 1 April 2007

Year C: Epistle Philippians 2.5-11