In our very complicated world, there is one thing that I think we enjoy above almost all things, and that is a bit of simplicity. It is marketing companies that have figured out our desire for simplicity better than anybody else. For example, many years ago, Kentucky Fried Chicken decided to put a meal in a box. They sold it in a box so we didn’t have to make a choice about what was in it. We bought the box: we showed up; we took it away. Simplicity! Convenience!
Then, other companies came along and they decided that they would also do something similar: tech companies with the Internet and cable television and phones decided to give us bundles. Then of course, they charge us the earth for them! These bundles that we buy are given to us, and we don’t have to think really, we just pick a few things – and there it all is! Simplicity! Or, car dealers and companies have packages. You don’t have to think about the options, you just buy a “Sport Package” or a “Comfort Package” and you get all these things with it, and it is easy for you, it is easy for the sales people. It is simplicity! At the beginning of the hockey season, the Maple Leafs will sell you a bundle of tickets, all of which are of course worth a quarter today. Everyone tries to make life easy for you: sell you a bundle, give you a package, have it nice and easy and simple so you don’t have to think any more than is necessary.
Well, not long ago I was invited to take part in a panel. In this panel discussion, they asked me with a ten minute time-line to give an overview of Christianity and its influence on the history of the world. So, needless to say, I lost many nights sleep thinking about how I would condense the history of an entire faith into ten minutes without sounding like a babbling fool. And then, it just dawned on me. I woke up one morning and I thought, “Why bother giving a whole history of Christianity, why not just talk about the object of our faith and the subject of our faith?” I mean, just talk about Jesus. And how would I talk about Jesus in ten minutes and do him justice?
Our passage from Philippians Chapter 2, verses 5 and 11, is like Jesus in a bundle. In fact, it has been given to us as a gift to help us understand who Jesus is. Originally when Paul quoted it, he was dealing with a contentious church. There were struggles, in this case between two women who had people lined up behind them, and there was division within the church. Paul was concerned about this division. He wanted them to focus not on the things that were dividing them, but rather on Christ.
In this great passage, he tells them, “Look, have the same mind that was in Christ.” He didn’t mean to imitate him in everything. How could one imitate the Son of the Living God and do it justice? But rather, to have the mind, to have the spirit, to have the attitude, to have the whole approach that we see in the relationship between Jesus and his Father as expressed in this incredible passage that followed. What followed, according to most people and certainly the great New Testament scholar James Dunn, was the hymn. It was a hymn that the early church sang. It was something that was quoted, probably when believers were baptized.
In these succinct few verses, we have a perspective on how the early church saw Jesus. So, I thought, “Hmm, we are entering into Palm Sunday and beginning of Holy Week. We are moving through all the great moments in the sense of Jesus’ life. What better than for me to give you as a gift a bundle, a package that you can reflect on in the next few days.” This is because in this bundle we see elements in the life of Jesus clearly stated in this incredible hymn that the Apostle Paul must have loved so much. What we find is a servant’s life, and we are trying to figure out what fits into the bundle.
It begins with a servant’s life. We are told that Jesus had the same nature – in Greek the world is morphe – the same nature or form as God. Therefore, he didn’t have to grasp equality with God. It is not like he had to wrestle it. It is not, as some later people have come along and said, that he had to earn it. It is not that he was adopted into it. But rather, from the very beginning, his nature was the nature of God, as the great Creeds of the Church say: he was fully God and he was fully human.
He was fully God, and it was quite clear right from the beginning that is his status, that is his nature. But what is radical is what follows. He also takes on the nature of a servant. Here we are getting to the heart of the matter. He takes on human morphe: human form. He takes on all that we are: he takes on our identity; he takes on our weakness and mortality; he takes on our very being.
When you look at it, he also says in this great passage, that this Christ Jesus emptied himself taking the form of a servant. This does not mean that he emptied himself of his divinity. He never ceased to be God’s Son. No! That is not true! He rather emptied himself of all the special powers that were there for him and took on the full humanity that was to restrict him. Jesus was fully human, fully like you and me in every single sense he took on that which we are.
Not long ago, I was reading a fascinating piece about the eleventh Chief Justice of the United States of America. His name was Charles Evans Hughes. The reason that I was reading about Evans Hughes was because one of my Welsh relatives – my mother was Welsh – had expressed how important it was for us to know Welsh history. I started to read about those of Welsh descent who travelled throughout the world and had done great things, and Charles Evans Hughes was one of them.
He was a fascinating man this Charles Evans Hughes! He was for a while Secretary of State for the United Nations. He was the Republican candidate in a national general election: he ran for the Presidency. He worked in various forms in the legal world as a scholar and as a thinker. In 1930, he was appointed the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He held that position from 1930 to 1941. He was a remarkable person in many ways and a great scholar. Like all jurists, he was controversial. Having a political background like his made it quite difficult in some ways for politicians to deal with him. But on the other hand, he was of great help to Roosevelt in the New Deal. A fascinating man!
Then, I read a story how in 1930 when he settled back in Washington, DC, he wanted to join a local Baptist Church. His father had been a Baptist minister. So, he went before the congregation and said to the Pastor, “I want to become a member” and the Pastor told him it was a special Sunday for those who were already baptized when they received new members – just like we do here at Eaton Memorial, usually in the beginning of June. So he turned up that Sunday. The minister invited those who were new to the congregation who wanted to become members to come forward.
Well, the first man who came forward was a man called R. Tsing, and R. Tsing owned a laundromat not very far from the church in the centre of Washington, DC. This man, who had grown up in mainland China, but had grown up as a devout Christian and who had done great works in the city, came forward and stood in front of the pulpit, as if it were right here in front of me. Then, ten other names were called, but the other ten names went and stood as far from R. Tsing as they could. They stood in front of what here would be the lectern. R. Tsing stood alone! Finally, it came time for Charles Evans Hughes’ name to be mentioned. Charles Evans Hughes gets up – and all eyes are upon him, the Chief Justice of the United States of America. And where does he go? Right next to R. Tsing!
In doing this, he made one of the most powerful statements of his day and age. Word went everywhere that this man, who had been discriminated against, this R. Tsing was actually identified with the Supreme Court Justice! If you want an image of the servant-hood of Jesus you need only think of your own life and your own being or the being of the world to realize that the very Son of God comes and stands beside us and identifies with us, and becomes one of us. He humbled himself, says this hymn, and took the form of a servant, or in our translation, a slave, a doulos for the sake of us.
This is Palm Sunday. This is the Sunday historically when we sing his praises and sing Hosanna! It is the Sunday when we realize the Son of God has come into Jerusalem. It is a moment of triumph of the beginning of a week that should have been triumphal, but it is a week also when we receive him in his servant-hood and in his humility as he rides and becomes one of us.
He did it because he was obedient. Jesus had an obedient life. He was obedient to his Father. He was obedient to the mission that was before him, and that mission was the redemption of the world. Jesus was obedient for us. Jesus was obedient because of us. Jesus’ obedience made him humble, and he took on in totality our mortality. He died on a Cross, a real death. It was fascinating that when we were discussing this person of Jesus on that panel that I kept telling them that The New Testament says he died. He died fully. He didn’t just appear to die. He died! He took on our mortality, he took on our death: he shared it.
I was thinking about that this week with the death of Jim Flaherty. He was a man who over the last few years excelled in serving our country. He worked hard and has slugged through a terrible illness the last few years. And then, to finally step down and such a short time afterwards to die is exactly a tragedy of our mortality. While he might have been a figure who in some ways has caused some controversy, what political figure doesn’t? As somebody who gave himself for our nation and worked his heart out for us and the world, it is tragic to see someone die like that. In the same way, it was tragic to see Jack Layton die right after a campaign. He had given his all in that campaign, and then to die. Sometimes, our mortality seems unjust and tragic and hard to deal with.
I think we are not as a humanity coming to terms yet with the death on the Malaysian flight. It seems as though with all our technology and all our knowledge and satellites and abilities, we are absolutely confounded that we can’t figure this out, and that it is taking so long. We realize then that we have our weaknesses and our ignorance as well as our great abilities. Jesus came to take all that on.
Talking to a theologian in Aberdeen a couple of weeks ago, a Bonhoeffer scholar who talked about Bonhoeffer and his work and implications for people with disabilities, people who are physically challenged, often the other, often ignored, often the put-away, often those who don’t have the ability to speak for themselves. He said that Bonhoeffer would want us to speak on behalf of them. Why? It is because of the words of Communion.
In a few moments time, we are going to recite, and I am going to say to you those famous words: “This is my body broken for you.” Can you imagine what that means to a person whose body is already broken? Who of us really, if we are absolutely honest, does not have some disability, does not have some fragility or imperfection, or is not touched by our human mortality and frailty and sinfulness? We all are! Jesus was obedient even to the point of taking on that very weakness himself for us. And then, what did God do? God gave him an exalted life. God exalted him to the highest place. God raised him from the dead.
He had been obedient to the Cross, but now he is raised, and “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess” that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God, the Father. Here it is: Jesus exalted, Jesus lifted up. Not a name that is in competition with other names or powers or religious figures. How trite and trivial it is to reduce a wonderful passage like this to simply be a way of entering into a conflict with the world, but rather as the unique Son of God, as the one who has come and as the servant of all, as the obedient one, as the crucified one has been lifted to the highest place and honoured by God.
What should be our response to this on Palm Sunday, but that our knees should bow and we should humbly confess him. It is this great joy that I felt when I had to give my ten minutes on Christianity; it was at that moment that I felt exalted. It was because I was talking about the substance of everything that I hold and believe dear in my heart, and that we should too, that “at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow” because it was his knees that bowed and came down to us.
So what should we do this Palm Sunday in response? The late, great Maurice Boyd, in a sermon that he gave from The City Church in New York entitled The Habit of Being had this incredible quote: “We can think ourselves into a new way of acting, or we can act ourselves into a new way of thinking.” That our response (and this is very Jewish by the way) to what Christ has done is not to begin with an idea of what he was like, but rather to follow him in the path that he has led, to walk with him: not just to emulate him, but to be with him; not just to talk about him, but to honour him. To stand with the weak and the broken, to love the lonely and the dispossessed, to lift up those who are suffering from their sins, to grant unto the world the gift of those who are willing to be like Christ. And, to be like Christ is to offer them his Cross. When we act, we act as those who have Christ in our lives, and when we act with Christ in our lives, and when that becomes the power that we follow, then indeed it is at that very moment that we have bowed down and humbled ourselves and taken the form of a servant, for we know there is one greater than us who leads us and invites us to follow.
This Holy Week, he invites you to do the same! Amen.