 Thank you Scott so much for that wonderful welcome, and thank you all for being here. It's great to be back in Steubenville. I can't believe it's been a year already since our last conference together. I love coming here every summer, and I'm especially excited to share this morning some reflections on Philippians too, although I will confess I am a little daunted whenever they asked me if I do this chapter, and I knew that humility would be one of the main topics. I thought, okay, you picked the wrong guy, so Dr. Berksman just told me he will pray that I do badly though, so that I can grow in humility, and then everything will work well. All right, so let's begin with a word of prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Eternal Father in heaven, we thank you so much for this beautiful day. We thank you for the opportunity, the great privilege that we have to have the leisure to come together and to spend these days together studying your holy word, studying your Son, studying the inspired words of St. Paul, your apostle, in the letter to the Philippians. We ask that as we turn our hearts and minds to the great mystery of the canosis of Christ, of the hymn of Christ and Philippians 2, that you would pour out that Holy Spirit upon us to open our minds, to open our hearts to everything you want to teach us about humility and about the secret of joy. And so we pray to you, Father, in the words your Son gave us. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now and at the hour of our death, amen. St. Paul, St. Therese, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. All right. Well, I'd like to dive right in and begin by opening up your Bibles. Don't look at the handout. Oh, by the way, just make sure. Does everyone have a copy of the handout here with you? It should be Philippians 2, The Mind of Christ and the Secret of Joy. You want to take that out? I'm going to be turning to it in just a moment. Also, I want to let you know, just like Dr. Barber did, that if you stop by the Veribom Table over in the JC Center, they've actually digitally uploaded these handouts that you have in front of you, both my presentations today with all the hyperlinks to the Greek words, the scriptural passages, any commentaries that I might be used that can link into the Verbom Software. So you might go over there and check this out. It'd be a great way to take home your materials from the conference in a digital format. All right. So if you hold on for just one minute, keep those handouts out, but take your Bibles out and turn to Philippians chapter four. I'd like to begin by just rereading a passage that Dr. Han mentioned last night. It's in Philippians chapter four, verse four and following where Paul exhorts the Philippians to have joy. And he says to them, rejoiced in the Lord when things are going well. Oh, wait, never mind. Rejoice in the Lord went what? Always. Again, I say rejoice. Let all man know your forbearance. The Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God. And then the very famous verse and the peace of God, which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Now, skip down just a few verses to verse 11, chapter four, verse 11. Then he says again, not that I complain of want, for I have learned in whatever state I am to be what? Content. I know how to be abased. I know how to abound in any and all circumstances. I've learned the secret in the Greek. There is Muo or we get the word musterion form mystery. I've learned the mystery or the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want. I can do all things in him who strengthens me. Another very famous verse. So the question I want to begin with in is Paul here is talking about a kind of peace that passes understanding. He's talking about a joy that's constant in our hearts. He's talking about the secret of a contentment that is always present in us, no matter what the outstanding circumstances are, no matter what we're suffering, no matter what we're undergoing. Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds great. Right. That sounds like a fantastic goal. Right. I also, I don't know about you, but I am so far from that. It's not even funny. Right. Okay. So the question is, what is this secret of joy? What is the secret that Paul alludes to when he's talking about a peace that passes understanding? What I want to suggest in this presentation is that the secret of joy that Paul's alluding to in Philippians four is outlined in Philippians two, in the hymn of Christ's self emptying, the canosis, the Christ hymn that he describes in Philippians two. So we're going to go back to Philippians two and we're going to work through chapter two with that question of the secret of joy in mind and try to ask, what does Paul mean? And how can we acquire it? So on page one of your handout at the top, we'll just begin with verse one of chapter two and look at the fact that Paul begins by exhorting the Philippians to the unity of mind and to the virtue of, here's going to be the key, humility, humility. Verse one, Paul says this, so if there's any encouragement in Christ, any incentive of love, any participation in the spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility, count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. So have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, dot, dot, dot, and he's going to go on to give the hymn in the next verses. Now Paul's there for a second. When many people exegete or interpret Philippians chapter two, many commentators and scholars want to rush into the famous hymn of Christ's self-emptying and exaltation, but I think it's important to put that hymn in context. The hymn isn't just floating around, Paul's situating and in the context of his exhortation to the Philippians to embody the virtue of humility and to have the mind of Christ that's going to be revealed in the hymn. So if you look at these opening verses, Paul makes a few key contextual points. Number one, first, he calls them to unity of mind. He says, I want you all to have the same mind. And the Greek word there is froneo, means to think, to think the same way. Okay. Secondly, and this is important, he's not just asking them to change their thinking. He's also calling them to change their will. He's calling them to a unity of will to have the same love, agape in Greek, right? So he wants them to think the same way and love the same way. And what is that way that he's calling them to? To do many things, no? To do some things, no? To do what? Everything in humility. The Greek word there is tapeno frosune, right? Humility, like soft frosune is wisdom. Tapeno frosune is humility. It's like a state of mind whereby you regard yourself in humility. Now the question here immediately becomes, well, what does it mean to be humble, right? There's lots of debates about this, lots of misunderstandings, right? Does it mean to be down on myself, right? All the time, to constantly berating myself and criticizing myself? Well, that's not what St. Paul says here. Look at what he gets at. This is very important. In the essence of humility for Christ, he lays out three things. Number one, count others better than yourselves. Number two, do not look out for your own interests. And number three, look out for the interests of others. That's the biblical vision. That's the Pauline vision of what it means to be humble, right? Now, I hope you can already see the challenge that this lays before us, right? How easy is it for us to walk around and do what? Judge others, right? I don't act like that person. I would never have said that. I would never have done that, right? Right? And especially, by the way, if you've had a recent conversion, have you ever met recent converts, right? Oh, yeah, you know, I'm talking about maybe you've been one, right? In that zeal of having recently converted to the faith is like, I can see all the sins and all the problems and all the faults in everyone else, and I'm going to tell you about them now, right? This is why elsewhere, Paul says in the pastoral letters, don't let a recent convert be a bishop, right? Because they'll be puffed up. That's true. He says it, right? But you don't have to be a recent convert to be proud. You just have to be human. You just have to be human, right? Because it's so easy to walk through our lives, counting everyone else as less than us, right? Or as not deserving what we deserve, or as being second and third in line, where we place ourselves first. So for Paul, the first key to humility is just to see the best in others and to regard them as better than yourself, right? I've been reading the Life of St. Teresa of Avila lately, because it's the 500th anniversary of her birth. And it's fascinating. You read this great saint, Dr. the Church, as she walks through her autobiography, she's talked about these different people in her life, various lay people that she had that were friends of her as a mother or father who lived near who they would come and have conversations. You know what she always says about them? They're so much holier than I am, so much greater than I, right? And she's not just feigning it. She means it, right? Because she's discovered the secret of humility to see others as better than herself, right? And part of the reason she can do that is because she embodies those next two things that Paul is talking about, not just thinking differently about others, but actually choosing differently, having a different heart, not looking out for your own interests, but placing the interests of others ahead of yourself, right? That, by the way, is the definition of love. To St. Thomas Aquinas, it's to will the good of someone else, right? To look after someone else's interest, to put their good ahead of yours. That's what agape is, okay? So Paul's beginning his reference before he gets into the Christ him. He wants to be sure that we understand that humility involves a change in the way we think and a change in the way we act, right? It's a mind and heart matter, right? Now, with that said, he's going to then move in to tell us that the ultimate example of humility is, of course, Jesus Christ. And so he says that we should have the mind of Christ, especially in two ways. If you look at your hand out here, first, he calls disciples of Jesus to do everything in humility, tapeno for sunne. And then in the hymn, he's going to go on to use the exact same Greek word, tapeno, to describe Christ doing what? Humbling himself, right? Secondly, he's going to tell us to, in order to have humility, to regard others as better than ourselves. And the Greek word there is, hey, get on my, it means to consider or to make a judgment or to evaluate someone else, right? OK, to consider them, right? And you know, we're all very good at that, right? I don't know if you've ever gotten on the internet, social media. Boy, the judgments fly, don't they? All right, all that, we were really good at evaluating each other, OK? So Christ here is saying, if you want to evaluate others, evaluate them, consider them as better than you. Why? Well, Christ himself made a judgment. Look, he's going to say in the hymn that Christ did not, hey, get on my, he did not regard, he did not consider his divinity, his equality with God, something to be exploited, but he's going to pour it out. He's going to empty himself in the incarnation and then ultimately the cross. So I bring these Greek words to your attention, not just to make a good excuse for the student loans that I pay every month, but more to show you that if you read the letter in its original, Paul's preparing his audience to link them to the life of Christ. He doesn't just want us to imitate Christ. He's going to really call us to participate in the humility of Jesus, which was displayed both in his incarnation and then ultimately in his crucifixion. All right, so that's the preparation. Now let's look at the famous hymn itself. Now, thankfully, Dr. Hahn talked about this last night, so I'm not going to repeat everything he has to say, but I'm going to try to make a few other points about it and work through it with you together. So the second part of Philippians 2 is what's called the Christ hymn or in Latin, the Carmen Christi. And this passage is often regarded as either some kind of liturgical hymn, a poetic portion of the material in the chapter that Paul either got from early Christian worship or which he himself is waxing poetic and composing. It has a kind of creedal formula to it. And in these key verses, Philippians 2, 5 through 11, we read these famous words. This is the heart of the chapter. Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form. He did what? Humboldt himself. That's the key word. He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name, which is above every name, 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 is Lord to the glory of God, the Father. All right, we'll stop there. Now, as you might imagine, there are lots of debates about the interpretation of this passage. One of the most famous ones is whether Paul here is talking primarily about a kind of incarnational mystery of Jesus, where the eternal Son is choosing to become man, or whether he's alluding more to the story of the fall of Adam, where Adam grasps at divinity, right, in the fruit of the tree of knowledge, good and evil. And therefore falls. I'm not going to go into the details of those debates. I'm going to be looking primarily at the traditional interpretation that focuses on the incarnation leading to the crucifixion. But you can find out more about that in some of the resources I've cited in the footnote. So if you turn to page two, let's look at this traditional interpretation of this canosis hymn, hymn of the incarnation and crucifixion, and try to work through it point by point, because it's a very dense text. All right. So on page two at the top here, a couple of key questions. Number one, what does Paul mean when he describes Christ as having been in the form of God? All right. Number two, what is Paul talking about when he describes Jesus' equality with God? And number three, this is the big one, what does he mean when he says that Jesus is emptying himself? All right. Emptying himself. Does that mean he's giving up his divinity? All right. What is the meaning of this expression? And how does all of this shed light on what it means for us to try to be humble? Well, if you look, there are four key points I'd like to make about the hymn. Number one, when Paul says that Christ was in the form of God, he's using the Greek word there morphe, morphe, right? And we still have that word in English. You see certain words like metamorphosis, right, changing form. And that's basically what it means in Greek. Morphe has to do with kind of outward appearance of someone. So, for example, in a parallel passage in Mark 16-12, when Christ is resurrected, it says he appears to them in another form, right? Well, that doesn't mean he's not human. What happened in that resurrection appearance? His appearance was different than it was, right? And he had walked around with them in his earthly ministry. Think here of the famous story of the road to Emmaus. You remember that? Where Jesus is walking with the disciples. And it says their eyes were kept from recognizing him. So, morphe has to do with appearance. It's outward appearance, right? And scholars have long debated what it means, but in the context of the passage here, Paul's using a Jewish form of literary rhetorical device known as synonymous parallelism, where in order to explain one expression, the form of God, he's going to give another expression, equality with God. So, point number two there. He says, although being in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, right? So, the Greek word there, Issa, literally means equal, right? Or equality, to be equal with God. Now, this is a very important passage for us as Catholics to be familiar with, because as you may know, there are many people out there who claim to follow Jesus Christ, but do not believe that Jesus is divine, right? Have you met people like this? Have you encountered them before? I'll never forget one time I had some Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door, right? And they, you know, they knocked on the door, and I said, okay, kids, here we go. That is going to answer the door. It might be a minute, okay? And they came in, you know, they said hello, and I said hello, and, you know, they asked, or, you know, who are you, or, you know, what religion do you belong to? And we start talking. And of course, we immediately get into the question of the identity of Jesus, right? And they said, we want you to know that we believe in Jesus. We follow Jesus. And I said, oh, well, that's great. Do you believe that he is fully God and fully man? Do you believe he's fully divine? Because I knew they didn't, and I want to go straight to the point, because sometimes they'll try to mislead you in thinking, well, we believe in Jesus, right? And get you to think, well, that means we have the same faith, but it doesn't. Because they deny his full divinity. They actually believe that he is the highest of the angels. He's the archangel Michael, okay? So I said, well, I believe Jesus is equal to God. Do you believe that? And of course, they started to get a little sheep. Well, no, no, that's not actually believe. So I said, well, let me tell you why. And we began to go through passages in the Bible. John chapter 20. Sorry, it's what I do for a living, right? You know? They'd have asked me to do 20 push-ups. I wouldn't have been so successful. All right. Okay, so we began to go through the passage of course. John 20, where Thomas says, my Lord and my God, right? Which of course, they said meant, oh my God, like it's Jesus. So I'm not quite sure that's it, right? But I also immediately went to Philippians 2. Because it says that Christ did not regard equality with God, something to be exploited, right? So the eternal Son, Christ the Son, is equal to God the Father. It says it right there in the Greek. And my brothers and sisters, we need to be clear about this and we need to tell people about the divinity of Jesus. There may have been a time where you could assume everyone knew Jesus was divine. You can't anymore, right? And Paul knows it too. We need to affirm, we need to propose, we need to proclaim the divinity of Christ. So point three then, he goes on to say even though Christ was equal with God, he did not regard that as something to be grasped. And the Greek word there is harpogmon. And as Dr. Hahn pointed out last night, there's debate about how to interpret this. Some people think it refers to something Jesus already possessed. Some people refer to it as something Jesus has not yet possessed. He doesn't yet possess divinity, so he's going to seize at it. But the traditional interpretation has always been that it is something that Christ already possesses as the eternal Son. But it's something he's not going to exploit, right? The NRSV does a good job with this. He did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited. But rather, number four, he emptied himself. In the Greek word there is canosis, right? To pour out. He emptied himself in becoming man. Now, a couple of points about this. First, this does not mean that Jesus emptied himself of his divinity, that he somehow became undivine when he became man, right? Rather, what it means is that he takes the form of a man, he takes human form by being born in the likeness of men in the incarnation, right? In assuming our human nature, a fully human nature, he remains divine, right? This is the great mystery of the incarnation. As Paul will say elsewhere in Romans 8, verse 3, he came in the likeness of human flesh. Now, think about that for just a minute. What would it have been like to actually be with Jesus? To walk with Jesus, right? Thirty-something-year-old young man, right? Who is also the one who made the universe. What a mystery, the mystery of his emptying, his canosis of coming down to our level as humans in order that he might raise us up to his. Many centuries ago, Saint John Chrysostom wrote a commentary on Philippians. It was a homily that he delivered in the church in Constantinople in the 5th century. And this is how he expounded these words of Paul. Saint John Chrysostom said, Christ was not only human, which is what he appeared to be, but also God. We, we humans, we're soul and body, but he is God, soul and body. For this reason, Paul says in the form, and so that when you hear of his emptying, you may not suppose that he underwent change or degradation or some sort of annihilation of his divinity. But remaining what he was, he assumed, that's the key language, he assumed what he was not. Becoming flesh, he remained the Word of God. I forget who brought this up to me, but once someone said, someone asked the question, it might have been Fulton Sheen, but Jesus was a carpenter in the Greek, a tecton. Why was he a builder? It could have been any number of, you know, occupations. Why was he a builder? Because he's the one who built the universe, right? The hands that built homes in the 1st century Galilee are the same hands that, whoa, the stars, right? You know what else? His dad was a builder too. See it? It all makes, it's almost like it's all true, right? All right. So this is the mystery of the incarnation, right? So this is the eternal Son of God, the one who made the universe becoming fully man and yet remaining God. But he doesn't stop with the mystery of the incarnation. He goes further in his humiliation. He goes further in not counting himself better than others because he goes all the way to the cross, right? As Paul said, being found in human form and he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Now, why does Paul say even death on a cross? Well, I mean, I think most of us are clear on the fact that crucifixion was a horrible way to die. If you ever saw Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ, you saw a pretty realistic description of what it was like, the brutality of a Roman crucifixion, right? And most of us, when we think about the crucifixion, that's what we focus on, the extreme physical suffering that Christ would have endured. But there was another aspect to crucifixion that we often forget, but which is crucial for understanding the Philippians' hymn. And that has to do with the humiliation of being crucified in the first century AD. Last year I came out with this book, Jesus the Bridegroom, The Greatest Love Story Ever Told. And in it, I have a chapter where I take you through in detail what was crucifixion like in the first century to try to show you not just the brutality of the ancient crucifixion, but the shame involved and also how Jesus' crucifixion actually parallels an ancient Jewish wedding. Well, as I was working on that, this really hit home to me that this cross that Jesus underwit was absolutely not just the most painful way to die, but the most shameful way to die. Consider a few quotes here from the first century AD to explain what Paul means by saying Christ humbled himself. For example, the Roman writer Cicero referred to the Roman cross as, quote, the tree of shame. That's what they called crosses. Trees of shame. Another Roman writer, Seneca, said this. Why was it called the tree of shame? He said, I see crosses there, not just of one kind, but made in many different ways. Some have their victims with head down to the ground. Some impale their private parts. Others stretch out their arms on the gibbet. What's Seneca describing here? Well, he's pointing out the fact that when Romans would crucify you, they didn't just do it to kill you. They did it in as humiliating a way as possible. So they would, for example, flip people upside down and just leave them hanging there to die. This was, of course, how St. Peter chose to die. They were going to crucify him. He asked to be crucified upside down. Why? He didn't think he was worthy to be crucified in the same position as Jesus. He wanted to be more humiliated than Christ had been. Sometimes they would impale their private parts. They would stretch out their arms. And often time, the standard Roman custom was to crucify people naked in the nude so that you would literally be stripped of all human dignity and your shame would be paraded in front of everyone as they all watched you die. That's why they would do it in as public a place as possible, too. Not just as a warning to everyone, but to increase the shame so that as many people as possible would see you in your humiliation. Now think about that for a minute. Think about the shame of just having your clothes stripped off of you in front of a group of people, much less being stripped naked in order to die in front of everyone. This was the ultimate act of shaming. And the eternal Son of God who made the universe went there, chose to die in that manner in order to save us. Dionysius of Hala Cronassus points out that the reason it was so shameful was because crucifixion was the way you killed a slave, not a Roman citizen. Roman citizens had a dignified form of death that would be decapitated, St. Paul being another example. But non-citizens, slaves of the empire, they get crucified. This is what Dionysius writes. A Roman citizen having ordered one of his slaves to be put to death, delivered him to his fellow slaves to be led away. And in order that his punishment might be witnessed by all, they directed them to drag him through the forum and every other conspicuous part of the city as they whipped him. The men ordered to lead the slave to his punishment, having stretched out both his arms and fastened them to a piece of wood which extended across his breast and shoulders as far as his wrist, followed him tearing his naked body with whips. I don't know if you've read about this, but Isis just did this to one of their enemies recently. They were going to execute the leader of one of their opponents, so they stripped him naked and they walked him through the streets as they brought him out to be hung. A walk of shame, it was called. They didn't make that up. The Romans did the same thing. And why did they do this? Because in some ways, shame is an even worse form of suffering than the physical suffering. It's a very deep way to inflict harm on someone to shame them. And you know this is the case if you've kept up in the media with some of the social media shaming that goes on now among young people. You know what I'm talking about? Where they'll take humiliating pictures of one another and they'll post them on the Internet or they'll do videos. And what do some of these young kids do when they get shamed like this? They kill themselves because the pain is too deep to live with. The pain of being humiliated in front of everyone hurts too much to even stay alive. So they kill themselves. That's the kind of shame they wanted to inflict in crucifixion. And that's the kind of shame that the Lord willingly took for our sake and for the sake of our salvation. So when Paul's laying out this hymn here about the incarnation, he's showing us that Christ doesn't just descend to our level by becoming human. He descends into the depths of what was considered at the time the lowest form of humanity possible. The shameful execution of a slave by crucifixion. Now I'll turn to page 3. And what is God's, God the Father's response to Jesus's willingness to go into the depths of human shame and human suffering? Exultation. Resurrection. Ascension. So Paul says in the next verses, therefore, in verse 9, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every other name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and heaven and earth and under the earth. And every tongue confess that he's the Lord to the glory of God the Father. Now if you look at the top of page 3, we want to break down these terms that Paul uses. First, the language of God greatly exalting him. If you look in the Greek there, it's hoop-er-oop-sa-o. Right? And you see the word hyper there? You get it in English, right? It's like a hyper-exaltation. So despite the fact that Christ goes so low on the cross, what does God do? He hyper-exalts him by bestowing upon him the name above every name so that at the name of Jesus every knee is going to bow and every tongue going to confess that Jesus Christ is not a do-loss, he's not a slave, he's not less than human. That's what the Romans wanted to say with crucifixion. You are nobody. No. He is the Kurios. He is the Lord. He's not just the creator of the universe. He's the one who rules over the universe. Right? Now, what's so striking about this in a first-century context is, guess who else was called Kurios at the time? Caesar. The emperors. They were held as Lord. Right? They were anti-Roman rhetoric going on in Paul's Philippians hymn. Who is the true Lord? Is it Caesar? Or is it this man who is crucified in a loincloth in a little town out in the Middle East, Jerusalem? This little podunk village. It's Christ. So he hyper-exalted him so that his name would be revealed to be the Kurios, the Lord. Now, in making this statement, it's really interesting. You can show here that Paul recognizes the fullness of Jesus' divinity not just by the fact that he actually says that he's equal with God, but also by the Old Testament passages that Paul alludes to in this hymn. So in this hymn, he's drawing language from two key passages of the Old Testament. They may be two of the most monotheistic passages in the Old Testament. This is chapter 45. So look at this passage here with Paul's words in mind. For thus says the Lord God who created the heavens. I am the Lord. I mean, you see the all caps there. What's the Hebrew word? Yahweh, right? Y-H-W-H, the sacred tetragrammaton. The name of the one God. He who is. So I am the Lord and there is no other. There is no other God besides me. There is none besides me. So turn to me and be saved all you ends of the earth for I am God and there is no other. By myself I have sworn from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return to me. Meaning to me Yahweh every knee shall bow and every tongue shall swear. Isaiah 45 verse 18 21 through 23. So Paul's there. Notice, Paul just said in the hymn that every knee is going to bow and every tongue is going to confess that Jesus is Kurios. And yet here we have Isaiah saying in chapter 45 that Yahweh is the one God, the one creator. There is no other. So what is Paul doing here? He's taking the language of the one God from the Old Testament and saying it applies to Jesus of Nazareth. So he's revealing the mystery here that there is one God but there are three persons. The Father, the Son and we'll get to him elsewhere, the Holy Spirit. So here he's focusing primarily on God the Father and God the Son. One of the reasons I bring this up is because there are certain scholars who have argued in recent times that Jesus didn't I mean Paul didn't actually think Jesus was fully divine. He kind of understood him as an angel like the Jehovah's Witnesses. He was an angel who after his willingness to go to the cross, God made him divine. He divinized him. He exalted him to the status of divinity as if divinity was something he kind of passed out. You did a good job. Here I'll make you divine. I'll make you God. No. What Paul is expressing here in the hymn is what one scholar Richard Balkum has called a Christological monotheism. It's still monotheistic. He's quoting the monotheistic passage that is revealing that the monotheism of the Old Testament is in fact one that is going to be revealed fully in the trinity. God the Father and also God the Son. Both fully God from all eternity. Yet one, the Son, becoming man and going even to the cross. And if you have any doubts about this what about the language of every knee bowing to Jesus in heaven, on the earth and under the earth. Where did Paul get this image? Every knee in heaven is going to bow. So how many knees are there in heaven? Who's up there? You got the angels. Every knee on earth is going to bow. This is obviously all of humanity. But every knee under the earth. He's talking about the realm of the dead. So basically it's a way of expressing all of creation, the entire cosmos. This is so exciting to me to think about. One day they're going to admit we're right. Sorry, this is my pride coming through. I told you! One day all of creation. No matter what's going on right now. No matter what's going on in the Middle East. No matter what's going on in the White House. No matter what's going on in the in Planned Parenthood. One day every knee, everybody's going to get down and recognize that Jesus Christ is courteous. That he's the Lord to the glory of God the Father. Amen? And if that doesn't make you joyful I don't know what will. So we have to remember that Christ has the victory. He's already won it. But it's being worked out in us. It's being brought out into the world. He wants the humility that he already had to live in us. So we might be lights in a world that is so dark and so brown. So Paul gets this language from Exodus 20. This is the Ten Commandments. A graven image or any likeness of anything that's in heaven above or that's in the earth beneath or that's in the water under the earth and you shall not do what to them. Bow down or serve them. Right? So here from Exodus 20 the most well-known passage in the Old Testament the Ten Commandments God explicitly said you're a creature. You only bend your knee to God. And yet in the Philippians Paul says every creature is going to bend their knee to Jesus of Nazareth. To Jesus Christ. Because he's not just man. He wasn't just a prophet. He wasn't just the Messiah. He wasn't just the new Moses or the new David or the new Adam or any of those things. He is the Lord. He is the God who made the universe. And we're all going to give him the worship that is due to God alone. This is something that's real close to my heart lately. I just finished writing a book called The Case for Jesus. The biblical and historical evidence for Christ. And I wish I could sell that book to you now. But it's not going to come out until February. So keep your eyes out for it. But one of the things I began realizing is that day in time there's a rising tide of atheism. And I have a lot of friends who teach in Catholic schools and they'll tell me that a large number of their high school boys and sometimes high school girls too although it seems to be more prevalent among the boys will not just have doubt about the faith. They'll come out and tell their teacher first day religion class, look I just want you to know I'm an atheist. I'm coming to this Catholic school because my parents are Catholic and they sent me here. And I'm going to tell you what I believe, not just in Jesus Christ but in God. And so I realized, oh man things are different than when I was younger. When I was younger we were all fighting with the Baptist and fighting with the Protestants and getting locked in all these struggles about the papacy and marrying. Those are all important questions to answer. But it's important that we also recognize that at some point we have to go back to basics and just argue why should we believe in Jesus at all? How do you know he is God? What makes him different than Buddha or Muhammad or any of these other leaders of these various world religions? So I wrote this book, The Case for Jesus again it would come out in February just to go through the evidence for why Christ is divine. One of the things I'll show there is that we don't just believe Jesus is God because St. Paul said so although that's important. We believe that he's God because the miracles of Christ and the prophecies show that Christianity isn't a made up religion. Because Jesus Christ is the only leader of any world religion who was ever pre-announced. You realize that? There's no prophecies of Muhammad. There's no prophecies of Buddha. They didn't fulfill any prophecies but Jesus fulfills prophecies written down centuries before he came because this is a revealed religion of God. And we need to recognize that we can no longer assume that everyone knows Jesus is divine. We can't assume that we need to propose it. We need to share that truth with others. Amen? And Paul knew that too and that's what he's doing here in the Philippians hymn. Now that he's laid out here and by the way as Dr. Hahn said last night what does it mean to be divine? Christ shows us what it means in the humiliation and the humility of the incarnation and in the humiliation and the humility of the cross. That's what true divinity looks like. It doesn't look like Caesar. It looks like life-giving love poured out even unto death for the sake of others. Sacrificial love, conodic love, self-emptying love, a love that doesn't count itself as better than others but puts other people's interests ahead of its own because that's what Jesus did with us. He was more interested in our salvation than he was in preventing himself from suffering and being stripped and being shamed. That's how much he loves us. That's how much he loved us. All right, so that's the hymn of the Philippians, the letter to the Philippians. Now with that in mind, Paul doesn't stop there. He doesn't just stop at the glory of Jesus. He also wants to then go on to the Philippians and say that's how you have to live. You want to be Christians? You want to be little Jesuses? You want to be cross of humiliation and humility. So look at what he goes on to say in the next verses. Number three, living with the mind of Christ. Therefore, and when you ever see the word therefore, you should always ask, what is therefore? I know you've heard this joke. Those of you who have been here years, come on, make up some new jokes. But the reason I highlight is because the therefore points back to the hymn. This is going to be the implications of the hymn. What are the implications of what Jesus has done on the cross? What does it mean for my life? Therefore, my beloved, as you've always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence, but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For God is at work in you. Both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Right? So when we see the humility of Jesus Christ, it should make us a little scared, right? Because if you know yourself even a little bit at all, you'll know that's not how I love, right? We don't love selflessly like that. We tend to love selfishly, right? You make me happy, I'll make you happy. You stop making me happy, guess what? Relationship's over. So there's an element here of dauntingness of the gospel. How could I possibly ever be like that? How could I possibly ever love like that when I'm so proud and I'm so selfish? But as soon as he tells us to be fearful and trembling in the very next words, he gives this consolation because God is at work in you. You're not doing it through your own strength. You're not pulling yourself up to heaven by your own bootstraps. God is the one who's going to show you and work in you the humility that was manifested in Jesus Christ. And therefore, keep going, verse 4. Oh, I hate this verse. Do all things without grumbling or questioning. Ugh. No grumbling, everybody. Notice it's not like a suggestion. It's a command. Do everything without grumbling. I have a friend who's kids, you know, kids, I like to complain. You make stuff, you slave away at the stove, or they don't like some food they don't like. They start complaining, right? And she tells them, don't complain about your food because you know what God did in the Old Testament to the Israelites when they complained about the food? He sent snakes to kill them, right? Okay, so no grumbling at this table, right? Here come the water moccasins, right? Or copperheads, wherever you live, whatever the snake may be. So do all things without grumbling or questioning that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. Look, everybody in the world out there, get on the internet, everyone's complaining. It just doesn't stop. We need to be different. Christians should be different. Do everything without grumbling, without complaining so that you can be light in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom you should shine as lights in the world, as a word of life so that in the day of Christ I may be proud, Paul says, that I didn't run in vain or labor in vain. Even if I am to be poured out as a libation upon the sacrificial offering of your face, I'm glad and I rejoice with you all. Likewise, you also should be glad and you should rejoice with me. This verse is so convicting to me because I am so tempted to complain all the time, right? It's one of my major faults. Complaining, complaining, complaining. But if you think about it for a second, if you've received the grace of salvation and baptism, what in the world do you have to complain about? Think about it this way. If you've ever committed a single mortal sin, just one, what do you actually deserve? To be eternally separated from God forever in hell. That's what you earned. Not even a single mortal sin. Full knowledge, deliberate consent, all that. So no matter how bad it's going in your life, right? I go laugh. Relax. What you've earned is hell. But what you have is salvation in Christ, right? So no matter whatever suffering comes your way, think about it for a second. You haven't yet been separated from God. You have the grace, you have the sacraments, you have the scriptures, right? You have the models of the saints, you have the love of Jesus. What do you actually have to complain about? And if you're complaining because you're suffering, if you step back from it for a second and think, what is it that Christ is calling us to? The cross. Suffering shouldn't be a surprise to us as Christians, right? If you read any of the saints, they'll tell you, when suffering comes your way, it's a paradoxical sign that Jesus really loves you. Because he wants to draw you in to the mystery of Calvary. He's telling you, I want you to get close to me. I want you to get closer to me than you can ever get if you don't taste suffering. The only way you can really get to know who Jesus is is to cross with him and suffer with him. To climb into his wounds, and be washed in his blood and feel his love. So when the suffering comes, we have to reorient our thinking. We have to have the mind of Christ about our suffering and begin to do what? Offer it for others like he did. Not to constantly be worried about ourselves and our interests, but to put others above ourselves. Not to waste the suffering that God gives us, but to offer it to the world who needs us to offer our sufferings in union with Jesus for the salvation of others. Amen? Well, I'm running out of time, but in the rest of Philippians there, basically Paul goes on to give two practical examples of this, and I'll close with this just one last comment. So first he refers to Timothy to give examples of this kind of love. He says, I hope in the Lord Jesus, 1st 19, to see Timothy to you soon I may be cheered by news of you. I've got no one like him who will be genuinely anxious for your welfare. They all looked after their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ. So notice here he's using Timothy as a model of humility as someone who looks after other people's interests first and not his own. But Timothy's worth you know as a son with a father he served me in the gospel. I hope therefore to send him as soon as I see how it will go with me and I trust in the Lord that I shortly myself will come also. Then he gives a second example of Epaphroditus who is not just humble and focused on others but willingness to suffer for Christ. I have thought it necessary verse 25 to send you Epaphroditus my brother and fellow worker and fellow soldier and your messenger and minister to my knee for he's been longing for you all and has been distressed because you heard he was ill. Indeed he was ill near to death but God had mercy on him and not only on him but on me also as I should have sorrow upon sorrow. I'm the more anger to send him therefore that you may also rejoice at seeing him again and that I may be less anxious. So receive him in the Lord with all joy and honor such men for he nearly died for the work of Christ risking his life to complete your service to me. So in other words in order to put some flesh on his teaching he gives Timothy as an example of someone more concerned about others than he is about himself and then he gives Epaphroditus as an example of someone who's willing to suffer to be sick and to risk his life for the sake of the gospel. So that's how the whole chapter fits together. Well in closing then I want to give you one last example of what I mean here. So what does this mean for us? What kind of humility is Christ calling us to? What kind of humility is Paul calling us to? And how do we find the secret of joy in that? Well I don't know about you but one of my favorite saints is Saint Therese. I'm sure most of you are. Yeah, she's like super populace. But if you read through her sort of soul at one point she really manifests the role that the gift of humility played in her life. It's the famous story of the Christmas miracle, the Christmas grace she called it. You know what I'm talking about? It was one night it was a Christmas night. They had gotten them from Midnight Mass. They came home late and everyone was tired. And her father blessed Louis who's by the way going to be canonized by Pope Francis in October. Louis and Zell. Yeah, amen. I love Louis and Zell. We have a devotion to them. To Mary, Mary Saint, husband and wife canonized together on the same day. It's so awesome. They're such holy people. Anyway, well they came home and despite being a future saint Louis was a little tired. And they had this little ritual with the shoes they would put gifts in the shoes on Christmas night and the girls would come home and they'd take the gifts out and they'd get all excited and because Therese was the baby they had done it for her. So she goes up the stairs to take off her hat and she hears her daddy say he's tired, thankfully this will be the last year we do this. And she was crushed. She started to cry. Because she overheard he was just getting his aggravation and Celine, her sister said don't go crying. You'll break his heart. And Therese said at that moment Christ gave her a grace to be more concerned about her father than about herself. And it totally changed her life. So this is her words. I'll just read this last point and then we'll stop. She says on that night began the third period of my life the most beautiful and the most filled with graces from heaven. The work I had been unable to do in ten years, because she was a very selfish child very precocious, very focused on herself very needy, was done by Jesus in one instant. Contending himself with my goodwill which was never lacking. He made me a fisher of souls and I experienced a great desire to work for the conversion of sinners a desire I hadn't felt so intensely before. So notice what she's saying my heart turned from being inward and focused on me, now what? To others. And then she says this I felt charity enter my soul and the need to forget myself and to please others. Since then I've been happy. I forgot myself then I was happy. That's the secret of joy she discovered it there. That's what humility is that's the kind of humility Paul is calling us to in the Christ him. To stop being so focused on pleasing ourselves and to turn our hearts outward to others. And when you begin to do that when you willingly accept the suffering that others are going to cause you and they're going to cause you suffering then you'll learn to be content in whatever life brings you right? Because you can run from suffering but you can't hide can you right? Suffering is going to track you down and find you in order to teach you how to love. And humility and love are just two sides of the same coin. So may God give us that grace if you're a mother, your child wants you right? Forget yourself, look into their eyes give them your time. If you're a father and your daddy just want you know your little girl just want daddy look at me forget yourself lean into her if you're a brother or sister forget yourself and learn to love your co-workers, your family and when you do that and when you can develop the habit of that then you'll have joy then you'll be happy. Amen? Amen. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord Jesus thank you for the gift of St. Paul thank you for the gift of yourself and your incarnation and on the cross please teach us the secret of your humility so that we might taste the joy of resurrection. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you very much. Thanks. If you like St. Therese If you like St. Therese check out my CD set in the bookstore Spiritual Theology on the stages of the spiritual life. God bless.