Obedient to Human Form

By the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow

This sermon is based on Philippians 2:5-11. Click here to listen to an audio version of this sermon.

“Being found in human form, Jesus humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.”

I was in a Bible study once where we were looking at this passage, and in response to the first study question — “What words or images catch your attention?” — one of the people in the group said the word that always caught his attention was obedient, that Jesus’ death on the cross was an act of obedience. And that in turn got me to thinking: In dying on the cross, just what was Jesus obeying? Who or what demanded Jesus’ obedience even to the point of death?

One way of answering that is to say that Jesus was obeying God, that it was God’s plan from all eternity that the Word should be incarnate in Jesus, the Word should take flesh in Jesus, so that Jesus could be killed, so that the shedding of Jesus’ sacrificial blood could pay the price humanity owed to God because of sin. It was God’s plan from all eternity that Jesus should be punished so that we could be set free — and when Jesus died on the cross, he did so out of obedience to God’s eternal plan.

But I have to admit that I have some trouble with that interpretation. You see, the Bible speaks over and over again — Jesus speaks over and over again — about how God forgives sins, and forgiveness doesn’t mean punishing one person so that other people can go free. Forgiveness means not punishing, intentionally giving up the right to punish, choosing something other than punishment to make relationship right. The more I’ve thought about it over the years, the more I’ve done theological reflection on it, the more I’ve come to think that it was not God’s plan for Jesus to be killed so that we could be forgiven. It was God’s plan for Jesus to proclaim forgiveness of sins and new life in communion in grace, and Jesus was killed by worldly powers that didn’t want to hear that proclamation. So if Jesus was “obedient to the point of death,” it wasn’t God’s plan he was obeying.

What then did Jesus obey? I think Paul gives us the answer in the very same verse that mentions obedience: “Being found in human form,” he says, “Jesus became obedient.” What Jesus was obeying, even to the point of death, was “human form,” human nature, the basic ground and condition of what it means to be a human being.

Because whether we like it or not, it is part of human nature that we die. We spend lots of time and energy and cosmetics and fantasy trying to deny it, but we are mortal. We are transient. We are here for a few years, a few decades, then we’re gone. We began this Lenten season on Ash Wednesday with a mark of our mortality, with ashes that say to us “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It is a part of “being found in human form” that we die.

We could even say that dying is part of our life. We die a little every day. Every moment is a little bit of passing away. Think about it: Right now, in this moment, you are having an experience, and the experience is vivid and vibrant and present and alive. But after this moment comes another moment, and that moment brings a new experience, and the experience you’re having now will pass away to make room for that new experience, and as it passes away it becomes less vivid, less vibrant, less present, less alive. As moment by moment comes to us, all our experiences fade and dwindle and pass away, until some of them we can’t even capture in memory anymore. The philosopher Whitehead says that our life is a “perpetual perishing” — because the moments fade, because we can’t hold on, because nothing ever stays the same, because we are always changing, because everything we put together sooner or later falls apart, because everything we accomplish has its moment and then passes away. It is part of human nature that we die, and we die a little every day.

And Jesus, being found in human form, became obedient, obedient to human nature, obedient to human nature even to the point of death.

And therefore, Paul says, God exalted him, therefore God raised him up, therefore God gave him a name above all other names, therefore God took his death and made it the source of life.

The death and resurrection of Jesus — this tragic and triumphant tale we tell in the Solemn Reading of the Passion and the celebration of the Eucharist on this Palm Sunday — the death and resurrection of Jesus is simultaneously the deepest mystery of our faith and the most basic ordinary truth about being human. The death and resurrection of Jesus tells us that it is part of human nature that we die, and that if we will be obedient even to that, if we will commend even that into God’s hands, then God will take our perishing and raise it up to the possibility of new life. The death and resurrection of Jesus tells us that our human form — even our transience, even our passingness, even the way each moment fades when the new moment comes — our human form can be the channel and the instrument for God’s creative grace, for God’s creating energy, which can take up all the fading moments of our lives and make out of them possibilities for doing something new. The death and resurrection of Jesus tells us that we must be ready to die to what is, so that we can be alive to what in God we can yet become.

There was a parishioner in a church I served in Tennessee who was a recovering alcoholic — and who was not at all shy about telling people how much her faith and her church’s support meant to her recovery. She told a group of us once that the hardest thing she ever did was the day she looked in the mirror and said to her reflection “You are an alcoholic. You've been pretending for a long time. You’ve been in denial for a long time. You’ve built up this image of yourself as someone in control, as someone who can handle it. But that is a lie. That is not who you are. You are an alcoholic. And if you don’t accept that, it will kill you.” She told us that facing that truth about herself was hard, the hardest thing she’d ever done — that giving up her image of herself felt like giving up everything, it felt like dying. But if she hadn’t accepted the truth, she said, if she hadn’t become obedient to that reality, she said, she never could have turned her life around, she never could have admitted she needed help, she never would have gone to an AA meeting and gotten a sponsor and started to do the hard work of becoming sober. She had to become obedient to the truth about herself before she could offer that truth to God, and let God’s grace come to her and take her up and make of her the possibility for something new. If she hadn’t become obedient to that hard truth, she would never have let God exalt her to being the sober, alive, joyful person she was when I knew her.

And I think that is the good news of the Passion for us, too. Because we all have hard truths about ourselves we have to face. We all have difficult realities to which we must become obedient. A relationship ends. A career opportunity becomes a disappointment. A dream you’ve cherished for years turns out to be something you’ll never be able to do. A diagnosis tells you you’ll have less time than you’d thought. Someone you love dearly is no longer there. The way we’ve always done it is no longer enough to do it now. You look in the mirror and realize you are not the person you’ve been pretending to be. We all have hard truths we must face, truths of our limitations, our failings, our perishing, our mortality. And the mystery of the Passion tells us that it is only by facing those truths, only by admitting those pains, only by becoming obedient to that reality, that we can commend our spirits to God, that we can open up the way for grace to come to us and raise us up and make of us new possibilities for life and light and love.

Being found in human form, Jesus humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — and therefore God exalted him, and gave him the name above every other name. May we share in such obedience, and in such exaltation, all in the Name of Christ. Amen.