Lectionary Commentaries for April 13, 2025
Sunday of the Passion (Palm Sunday)

Any short essay on one of the Passion narratives will of necessity discuss only a small portion of what could be said. The themes noted here have been chosen because they appear in the Passion and connect to Luke’s particular way of telling the gospel of Jesus Christ. Central to the story is the way that Jesus announces the kingdom of God throughout Galilee and enacts it along the way to Jerusalem. The Passion in Luke demonstrates Jesus’ continued fidelity to that work and to the Spirit who commissioned him for it. 

The kingdom of God and the cross

Throughout the Gospel, Jesus has proclaimed the kingdom and sent others to do the same. He has said that his works testify to the coming of the kingdom (Luke 11:20). He has welcomed children and claimed that the kingdom belongs to such as these (Luke 18:16). As his suffering and death are unfolding, Jesus speaks again of the nearness of the kingdom and its fulfillment. He does this as he shares bread and wine with the apostles (22:16, 18). Further, he confers on those alongside him “a kingdom,” saying that he is conferring on them what his Father conferred upon him (22:28–30). 

The Passion of Jesus does not defer the dream of the kingdom of God, but rather brings it closer. The kingdom is brought so close that when one of the thieves asks Jesus to remember him “when you come into your kingdom,” Jesus replies, “Today, you will be with me in paradise” (23:42–43). The exchange with the thief on the cross is itself emblematic of Luke’s way of telling the story of Jesus’ death as a story in which Jesus is in control. 

In this Gospel, Jesus, ever the great physician, heals the man whose ear is cut off by the hasty drawing of a sword in Gethsemane (22:51). He looks at Peter as the cock crows and both men are reminded of Peter’s boast (22:61). In Luke, Jesus never cries from the cross in abandonment. Instead, he prays for the forgiveness of those killing him; he promises the thief continued fellowship; and at the very end, he commends his spirit to the Father. The indignity and agony of the cross do nothing to drive a wedge between the Father and the Son, nor do they separate the Son from his mission to seek and to save the lost (19:10).

Misplaced mockery

It is from Luke’s Gospel only that we know the parable of the tower-builder (14:28–30), in which Jesus warns those who would follow him to count the cost. If someone begins a construction project and then is unable to finish, those who see his half-built structure will ridicule him, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish” (14:30).

In Luke’s Passion narrative, Jesus is ridiculed in much the same way that it was predicted the impulsive tower-builder would be. Those holding Jesus when he is in the custody of the chief priests ridicule him (22:63). Herod’s soldiers mock him (23:11). So also, those under Pilate’s command who carry out the crucifixion mock Jesus (23:36). Even one of the criminals crucified alongside him derides him (blasphēmeō in Greek; 23:39). 

To those on the outside of the connection Jesus has to the Father, it looks as if this Son of God didn’t do his math right. It looks like the construction project of the kingdom ran over budget. Like the tower-builder of the parable, Jesus was forced to stop partway through. 

Yet Jesus’ own Passion prediction at Luke 9:22, along with the cool, calm demeanor that he exudes throughout the Passion story, leads readers of the Gospel to draw a different conclusion. It is not that Jesus miscalculated the cost of faithfulness to the One whose kingdom he proclaimed. It is that he decided to pay that cost. (The only hint the Passion story gives that such a decision, on Jesus’ part, was difficult is his time of prayer in Gethsemane; see Luke 22:42.) 

Innocence and guilt

Three minor characters in the Passion story are characterized as guilty, and their guilt is contrasted with the innocence of Jesus. 

• The first is Peter, who, outside the high priest’s house, is guilty of lying about whether he knows Jesus (Luke 22:54–62). Peter’s lie protects him. It also confirms the prediction that Jesus made just hours before, that Peter would not be able to find the courage of his convictions when courage was needed. 
• The next guilty figure in the story is Barabbas. Luke tells readers twice that Barabbas had been imprisoned for insurrection and murder. Still, Pilate releases him and sentences to death Jesus, whom Pilate has said neither he nor Herod could find guilty (23:14–15). 
• Next, the second thief on a cross alongside Jesus discusses innocence and guilt. The thief goes as far as to say that he and his companion are “getting what we deserve for our deeds,” as contrasted with Jesus, who has “done nothing wrong” (23:41). 

Finally, after Jesus dies (and just in case someone somewhere had not been able to follow the story up to this point?), a centurion on the scene says, “Certainly this man was innocent” (23:47). 

The early church would come to make the innocent suffering and death of Christ an article of faith related to the fitness of Jesus to offer atonement for sin. Within the Passion story itself, however, the repeated reminders of the innocence of Jesus draw the eye not so much to atonement but to the contrast between the corruption that surrounds Jesus and Jesus’ own integrity to the end. Surrounded by betrayal, denial, mockery, and cruelty, Jesus remains faithful to God and to the kingdom of God. 

In his telling of the Passion, Luke draws our eye to Jesus’ fidelity and then to the fidelity of another. Joseph of Arimathea is brave where Peter had been cowardly; he is “good and righteous” where the council and the leaders of Rome had been corrupt. In faithfulness to the kingdom for which he has waited (and whose coming has surely been obscured by the cross on Good Friday as much as revealed through it!), Joseph does what he can. The stage has emptied out, as it were. Religious officials, world leaders, and military officers are gone. In their place is one fellow, beginning the burial process—oh, and some women who notice where he is laying the body.

Palm Sunday is a difficult Sunday to preach. Sermons regularly crack under the dissonance of a text that rings with celebratory “Hosannas,” even as it heads toward the horrors of state-sponsored execution. It doesn’t help matters that, for many congregations, watching children wave palms in a bewildered pre-Easter procession is the whole point. The preacher’s job is to illumine something more, especially when preaching from Luke’s gospel—because in Luke 19, there are no children or palms. In Luke 19, there are not even “Hosannas.”

What ties Luke’s account together with the entry narratives of Matthew, Mark, and John is a shared citation of Psalm 118:26—and of course, a donkey. Matthew and John make sure readers see the animal’s connection to Zechariah 9:9, but Luke keeps the connection implicit. The donkey may be part of the story’s melodic line, but Luke seems intent on playing that melody in a different key.

Preachers and poets alike have been fascinated by that donkey. There are more than several well-loved poems about the animal that Jesus rode into Jerusalem.¹ But like our gospel accounts, they rarely read its significance the same, some reflecting the animal’s unlikely moment of glory and others wondering at its ignorance or fear.

Nickole Brown’s The Donkey Elegies is less concerned with the donkey’s interior life or its symbolic echoes in Christian tradition. She is after a grittier, social history of the animal.² Listing what donkeys have carried “on their backs” over centuries, she names the stories of the laboring Mary³ and Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem—but also describes carts weighted down with dead soldiers or pallets of bricks, burdens too heavy for any creature. She recounts ways that donkeys have been literally worked to death. The poem reflects on the suffering we choose to see and the suffering we don’t, insisting on the holiness of created life.

Brown’s attention to creation’s sacredness and suffering fits Luke’s account well, in part because of the pericope’s final line. If Jesus’ followers were silent, he tells the religious leaders of his day, “the stones would cry out” (verse 40). It is a phrase that foreshadows the lament over Jerusalem that follows. The city will be left without “one stone upon another,” Jesus weeps, “because you did not know the time of your visitation from God” (verse 44). Interpreted by his tears, the cries of stones sound anything but triumphant.

But the phrase does more than foreshadow grief on history’s horizon. It testifies to the cosmic significance of the present. All creation is included in this entry procession—human and nonhuman alike. Palm branches may be missing in Luke’s account (an absence attributed to Luke’s avoidance of nationalistic overtones⁴), and yet there is something of creation’s groaning (Romans 8:22) in the procession, even as there are echoes of angel song (Luke 2:14).

The familiar carol “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” imagines a day “when the whole world sends back the song which now the angels sing,”⁵ giving glory to God in the highest heaven and celebrating peace on earth. It would seem that the vision is coming to pass in the triumphal entry—except for one stark omission. Jesus’ disciples speak of “peace in heaven,” (19:38) but not yet of peace on the earth—or for the earth. It is, perhaps, Luke’s acknowledgment that the next week in his account will hold very little earthly peace.

Luke uses the word “peace” in his gospel more than all the other gospel writers combined. But the scope and cost of this peace are lost on Luke’s disciples. Like them, preachers could proclaim this paradoxical account of a lowly king as if the peace of God has already arrived—a spiritual peace in heaven, with little material reality. But, similar to Brown’s poetry, Luke’s account is after a grittier, material point. Jesus’ kingship is meant to overturn the world, not justify it—which means that some truths need shouting aloud. What truths is creation waiting for us to speak?

God has not given up on God’s people. This is the proclamation at the heart of Palm Sunday.  But if creation is holy—its beasts and its rocks and its war-torn cities—what paths of peace does this promised king call us to travel?

There is, of course, another central touchstone tying together the gospel accounts of the Jerusalem entry—and that is Jesus himself. Just preceding the Psalm 118:26 blessing of the one who “comes in the name of the Lord” is the psalmist’s well-known reference to “the stone that the builders rejected” (Psalm 118:22). When the world goes silent at the foot of the cross, this Stone will also cry out—the cornerstone of peace in heaven and our call to peace on earth.

Notes

1. For example, G. K. Chesterton, “The Donkey,” The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton (Dodd Mead & Company, 1927), 297; Mary Oliver, “The Poet Thinks About the Donkey,”  Thirst (Beacon Press, 2006), 44.
2. Nickole Brown, The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020).
3. Which is an image that Luke does not gift us.
4. Fred Craddock, Luke (WJK, 1990), 227.
5. Edmund Sears, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” The United Methodist Hymnal (United Methodist Publications, 1989), 218.

Experiences of shame, bullying, or malicious discrediting usually leave people with a sense of humiliation, personal hurt, and despair. On the other hand, moments of affirmation and advocacy can bring a sense of relief, inner peace, and a genuine sense of belonging or confidence that everything will fare well even during hostile times. Isaiah 50:4–9a is the third of the Servant Songs in Second Isaiah presenting similar experiences in the life of an unnamed suffering servant.

The first two songs (Isaiah 42:1–4 and 49:1–6) focus on the mission of the servant, and the last one (Isaiah 52:13–53:12), on the vicarious nature of the servant’s suffering. These texts are frequently applied to the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some verses from Isaiah suggest that this “servant” figure is a prophet (Isaiah 49:6). However, the complex hermeneutics of the texts reveal multiple levels of interpretation for this “servant,” including a community of survivors from Judah and Israel (Isaiah 41:8–9; 44:1–2, 21; 49:3) and even an anonymous group (Isaiah 52:5).

Composed in the late sixth or early fifth century BCE, the text is closer to the restoration after the devastation of the Assyrian and Babylonian imperial conquests. It evokes the impact of imperial violence, oppression, and injustice on nations and individuals who resist.¹ The servant is targeted with unjust public shaming, much like the increasing social media trend in our time that humiliates, offends, and discredits selected persons or groups.² In such a world, the “servant” is a model of resistance to this factual abuse.

The passage moves from the way the Lord awakens and tasks the servant (verses 4–5), to the servant’s suffering and shaming at the hands of his adversaries (verses 6–7), to a courtroom confrontation (verses 8–9a). Throughout the text, the writer affirms the servant’s confidence in the Sovereign Lord and his determination in the face of the adversaries.

Like undocumented or unhoused persons and other groups, the servant experiences systemic injustice, economic depression, cultural disgrace, and theological abuse. Israel’s land has been devastated, their kingdom destroyed, and their status relegated to exiles. God seems to have abandoned them.³ In this context it makes sense that the servant is awakened, stirred up by the Lord not once but twice, to sustain his people! He is incited to give prompt assistance to the weary and to speak at the right moment (verses 4–5), consoling and sharing their pains and hopes.

This servant’s purpose seems to challenge the powers that be as his adversaries strike, pluck, spit, shame, and accuse him (verses 6, 8). He suffers stigmatic shaming, which labels the individual not only as someone who has done something bad but also as someone who is bad.⁴ In ancient Israelite culture, honor was associated with social standing, reputation, and the fulfillment of communal and covenantal expectations, while shame was associated with the body and sexuality, to the violation of social norms;⁵ or linked to sin, failure, or divine judgment in the private and public spheres.⁶

Bodily images—face, cheeks, and back—are used to reflect the physical abuse of the beatings, the pulling of his beard, and the humiliation of being spit on. These acts are designed to degrade and erase any sense of honor and worth (verses 6–7). It is not surprising that the Christians of the first era saw the parallels with the Passion of Jesus Christ, humiliated in a similar way.

Verse 7 functions as a pivot, changing the tone from an apparent submission to the adversaries, to a legal challenge dignifying the servant and his call. A collision occurs between the adversaries intending to rip the servant from his worth and the servant’s trust in the Lord. Setting his “face like flint” carries the sense of unyielding resolution, endurance, and strength. Jesus (Luke 9:51–53) and other individuals and groups have shown the same determination.

The stance of the servant and the literary atmosphere change in verse 8. The writer employs the language of the courtroom through rhetorical questions, daring the adversaries to dispute and to accuse the servant.⁷ The adversaries’ implicit silence validates the power of the Sovereign One who vindicates. In contexts where hope is almost lost, this raw faith gives respite, strength, and a renewed sense of possibilities.

How is it that this servant manages to save face, defend himself, and challenge his adversaries when the odds are completely against him? Verse 9a presents the root affirmation of the passage: “The Sovereign Lord helps me.” “Sovereign,” used four times and placed alongside the verb ‘azar, meaning “to help, support, assist,” often in times of need or distress, now defines who is in power.

The verb also means “to gird” or “to belt.” The fact that girding is related to fortifying, tightening, and encircling our core brings up the image of a weightlifter. The belt supporting the core muscles helps one to lift more weight and maintain better form. It stabilizes one’s spine and protects one’s lower back from injuries.

Refusing to give up in hostile times is a remarkable stand to take amid systems of structural injustice built upon everyday enslavement, exploitation, extermination, and exclusion. The servant calls us to remain steady and firm in every adversity. Even when the Lord plays the long game, we, like the servant, refuse to give up. If the Lord girds us, we have mental fortitude and hope to look forward with determination.

Notes

1. Justin Tse, “Doing Prophetic Theology After Empire: On the Isaiah Readings at Sixth Hour for the Fast,” Eastern Catholic Person, April 19, 2019, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/ecperson/2019/04/19/doing-prophetic-theology-after-empire-on-the-isaiah-readings-at-sixth-hour-for-the-fast/.
2. Gretchen Kerr, Ellen MacPherson, and Sophie Wensel, “Online Public Shaming of Women Athletes at the 2024 Paris Olympics Highlights Gender-Based Violence,” The Conversation, September 12, 2024, https://theconversation.com/online-public-shaming-of-women-athletes-at-the-2024-paris-olympics-highlights-gender-based-violence-237104.
3. Elizabeth M. Ross, “What Is Causing Our Epidemic of Loneliness and How Can We Fix It?” Usable Knowledge, Harvard Graduate School of Education, October 25, 2024, https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/24/10/what-causing-our-epidemic-loneliness-and-how-can-we-fix-it.
4. Rodger A. Bates and Bryan LaBrecque, “The Sociology of Shaming,” The Journal of Public and Professional Sociology, 12, no. 1, July 2020, https://doi.org/10.62915/2154-8935.1162.
5. K. C. Hanson, “How Honorable! How Shameful! Matthew’s Makarisms and Reproaches,” accessed March 25, 2024, www.kchanson.com/ARTICLES/mak.html. See also Lyn Bechtel, “Rethinking the Interpretation of Genesis 2.4b–3.24,” A Feminist Companion to Genesis, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 77–117.
6. Jerry Hwang, “How Long Will My Glory,” Old Testament Essays 30, no. 3, 2017.
7. G. S. Ogden and J. Sterk, A Handbook on Isaiah vols. 1 and 2 (United Bible Societies, 2011), 1425.

What are the stories that you replay over and over again in your mind?¹ What are notes that you choose to hear in your inner ear long after an event has played its tune? What are the contours of fear that rise before and beneath your feet as you travel through this life? Where is your hope when all hope seems to have faded away? 

To my ears the psalmist’s poetry is asking us questions in the middle of our own existential life questions. They are questions that connect with our visceral questions. They are the ones we may not want asked, or they are questions that are too close to the pain of life or too aligned with our missteps and mistakes of the past. The writer writes from a place most people have known and where many live at this moment: distress, sorrow, grief, despair, brokenness, and so on. 

The land of despair is like a shadow that doesn’t leave even when the sun is shining at midday. The place of threat can be a place that feels as if it is ever around and within, and it seems there is little room for escape. The power of grief can weigh like heavy weights on shoulders unable to be removed, and each footstep feels like a labored endeavor.

Whatever the contours were of the writer’s experience (here the writer is ascribed as David), it is clear that he felt as if there was no escape from his present predicament and it troubled his every thought. If this was written at the time in which Absalom sought to bring down David’s throne and place himself upon it (2 Samuel 15), then we might discern something of the cause of David’s fear, anguish, and despair. 

One might join the writer’s refrains and say things like: I have no hope except in God’s mercy, love, and grace. I have no hope if God doesn’t exist. The fleeting moments of existence fly toward an abyss to be forever forgotten if there is no meaning beyond the meaning I choose to make for myself and my place in the world. If evil triumphs and wickedness has no price to pay or there is no resolution or restitution or reconciliation, then it seems all is lost.

Each packet of grief, measure of mistakes, stone of sin, ounce of guilt, measure of shame gathered into a personal bag of troubles worn on shoulders can add to and increase one’s experience of despair.  

The psalmist sings of feelings of despair, and he sings words of trust and hope in the midst of it. The echoes reverberate off the walls of our inner spaces where our own grief, despair, guilt, and shame may linger. The instructions at the outset of the psalm, “For the Director of Music. A Psalm of David,” invite the psalm to be sung by those who know the slopes and valleys of life. It is an invitation to sing in the middle of trouble a song that knows that trouble doesn’t last in the presence of God.

The psalm writer doesn’t leave us in a desolate place to think that despair is all there is to life. Instead, the writer opens our eyes to vistas beyond the edges of our experience and invites us to hear a song that sings even in the harshest of conditions. “‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hands; deliver me from the hands of my enemies, from those who pursue me. Let your face shine on your servant; save me in your unfailing love” (Psalm 31:14–16, New International Version). 

“My times are in your hands” is a refrain I could carry anywhere. The words have only become richer and more imbued with meaning as I move closer to the end of my existence on earth. Having lived nearly six and a half decades, I discover each day an infused hope layered within David’s sonic tones that serve as reminders of a God who knows the span of our existence and who loves us for who we are and not what we have done or left undone.

David’s song rising from the depths of despair sings of a God greater than despair, and of a God who will sustain us no matter what life might bring toward us or we might bring toward ourselves. 

The verses of truth latticed in human experience within this psalm connect with people across the ages. Commentaries on Psalm 31 lift out the verses elsewhere in the Bible that reprise lines from Psalm 31.²

We discover Jonah singing the tones of trust while he languishes inside the whale or big fish (Jonah 2:8). We hear them sung by Jeremiah as he undergoes hardship because of speaking truth to power (chapters 6, 20, 46, and 49). We hear the apostle Paul opine the tones to encourage the young Christian congregation at Corinth to remain vital and strong in the face of opposition (1 Corinthians 16:13). And we discover that Jesus himself utters words from this psalm from the cross (Luke 23:26). 

Trust in God despite the adversity in which one finds oneself is a refrain carried through the psalm. This trust finds echoes across the books of the Bible, within Christian church history, and within contemporary contexts. There is something in the power of words of truth that can lift spirits and bring hope in the midst of disaster and despair. 

I know this firsthand. While I was working at Pacific Theological College, Suva, Fiji, in 2000, a political coup happened. The Parliament building had been overtaken by those who didn’t like the direction that the country was taking and decided it was time for a change. They took parliamentarians hostage and democracy was diminished that day. The young and old Fijian men walked past our door armed with cane knifes and zealous intent to reassert a political ideal of indigenous Fijian rule. Each day and throughout the day I heard in my mind the words, “Trust me [God], and it will be all right.” 

My family and I lived on the PTC campus about one block from the Parliament building, and we could hear occasional gunfire. One day the Fijian military set up machine gun emplacements on the road leading up to the Parliament building. The rebels didn’t welcome this assertion of power and proceeded down the hill from the Parliament building toward the Fijian military, who were firing their guns at the ground and in the air next to the campus to deter them. That day I called the U.S. Deputy Ambassador, and he picked up my family in an armored car and brought us to his home. 

A few days later we traveled through the night through military checkpoints toward the other side of the island and eventually left the country. Throughout that experience I heard the refrain “Trust me, and it will be all right.” David’s psalm came to mind, and it has been sung across the past 3,000 years with notes that touched hearts and minds with hope and courage to face whatever would come.

When the U.S. Capitol was overrun by insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, I couldn’t help but make comparisons to the Fijians who had overrun the Fijian Parliament building 21 years earlier. Zealous for a cause, rooted in an ideology, fueled by desires for a different set of definitions of what it meant to be a country, they counted themselves as the patriots. Democracy is always a breath away from being lost, and yet, even if it were lost, the refrain remains the same. “Trust me, and it will be all right.”

David the psalm writer was embroiled in a political landscape that threatened his very existence. Yet, even in a space of uncertainty, his words sang a song of trust in God no matter what the conditions of life might be. Even in despair the word of God breathes an eternal hope of God’s presence. 

Notes

1. This commentary previously published on this website for April 10, 2022.
2. See Enduring Word Commentary, https://enduringword.com/bible-commentary/psalm-31/.

This passage raises several questions: What does it mean for a community to be “of the same mind”? More pointedly, what does it mean for a community to be “of the same mind that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5)? 

In light of those first two questions, does Paul’s use of the Christ Hymn (verses 6–11) aim at clarifying the nature of Christ for the sake of future systematic theologies and competing doctrinal statements, or does it aim at clarifying how far our own humility and obedience to God might lead us to empty ourselves in our own faith journeys? 

Let the same mind be in you … 

Five times in this letter, Paul tells the Philippians to be of one mind (1:27), of the same mind (2:2; 3:15), of the same mind as Jesus (2:5), or of the same mind in Jesus (4:2). It is helpful to note that the Greek word for “mind” (nous) never occurs in these passages. Philippians 1:27, somewhat unusually, translates psychē (soul, animating life force, center of one’s being) as “mind.” The other four passages, including today’s reading, use the verb phroneō, which generally signifies thinking as it relates to action—setting one’s mind to something, having a tendency or disposition to do something.

The verb phroneō occurs 10 times in Philippians. Many New Testament scholars see its use here (and in other New Testament writings) as influenced by the Greco-Roman philosophical category, “Phronesis.” Phronesis did not refer simply to the act of thinking in general. It addressed one’s practical moral or ethical reasoning, the thought processes or underlying worldview that guides one toward acting in virtuous—or in this letter’s case, faithful—ways that are good for the community.  

When Paul tells the Philippians to be of the same mind, he is not saying that everyone should think the same thoughts, have the same ideas, or be mental clones of one another. He’s telling them to have the same motivations, to draw from the same animating life force. He doesn’t necessarily want them all to have identical thoughts and beliefs. He wants them to embody and be guided by the kind of decision-making that leads one into the ways of Jesus, opens one up to God’s life-giving power that permeates all of creation. 

Phronesis is a skill that can be developed. But it’s not just about knowing and memorizing things. Memorizing traffic laws and the directions from your house to a friend’s house 500 miles away is different from driving with family or friends through 500 miles of weather, traffic, and road conditions to get from door to door. It takes a group phronesis for you and your passengers to make countless wise, thoughtful, and caring decisions as you travel so that when you reach your destination, you’re all glad you made the trip. 

Knowing how to describe humility and faithfulness is different from actually being humble and faithful. Knowing the best things to do is different from doing the best things. What Paul says here about “having the same mind” elaborates on what he said earlier in the letter: “This is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best” (1:9–10). Paul’s admonition for the Philippians to have the same mind essentially means, “Have the same mindset connected with the right skill sets so that God can move you forward for the good of others.” This raises the question of what that mindset might be.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

Again, having the same mind as Christ does not mean having the same thoughts as Christ, but the same intentions, the same acceptance of God’s call. It means following Jesus’ mindset in Gethsemane: “Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:41–42, in this week’s Gospel text).

Paul’s use of the (probably preexisting) Christ Hymn (verses 6–11) raises longstanding theological questions: Does Jesus’ “equality with God” mean he was divine, or was he only “in the form of God” (whatever that might mean)? Why say he was “in the form of” God, slave, and human (verses 6–7) rather than saying he simply “was” all those things?  

Those questions might be tantalizing, but in this letter, the hymn does not primarily serve to point us toward doctrines about Jesus but to point us toward Jesus. Christ’s willingness to humble himself and die serves as the touchstone for discerning our own willingness as individuals and as communities, if called by God to do that, to do that. 

And most importantly, the point is not simply, “Jesus did that, so you should, must, do that.” The point is not that God sent Jesus, and Jesus died on the cross, so, therefore, at the name of Jesus, “every knee should bend” (verse 10) and “every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (verse 10)—or else! This is not about compelling the world to bow down to Christ but about God empowering those who follow Christ to live up to whatever Christ calls them to do. 

God’s desire for our fullness of life in Christ can be seen more easily by connecting this passage to the letter’s beginning, which assures the Philippians that “the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ” (1:6). And right after this pericope, Paul further assures, “It is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for [God’s] good pleasure” (2:13). Jesus serves as a model for humility and faithfulness, but he is not just a model. We’re not left to our own devices when seeking to “have the same mind as Christ” in order to rise to whatever calling Christ sets before us.