The Vulnerability of God (Philippians 2:1-14)

“Who is God?”

It is the earnest question of a child, perhaps the first theological question we might ask along the path of life. We become aware that there is something bigger than ourselves, something that is quite simply “more” than we understand. We try to put words to it, and we ask the question to a trusty worthy grownup who fields all the questions that we want to ask.

A case in point: A few months back, Rosie asked her mother Rhonda this very question. “Who is God?” Being a small child, though, the questions simply did not end with one. There were many in succession: “Is this person God?” “Is that person God?” and finally, “Is Jerrod God?” (Upon hearing this story, Kerry laughed so hard that we had to call the rescue squad….).

Rosie asked if God was any of the adults she knew. When you are a small child, your general understanding of the world includes the sneaking suspicion that adults are giants. Along the way, you get the similar impression that God is big, just like an adult. God is powerful, just like an adult seems to be. God has a big authoritative, perhaps fear-inspiring voice. We tend to keep that image of God with us even into adulthood, the popular depiction of God in cartoons enshrines this image: God as a tall bearded male figure in a white flowing robe with a booming voice.

Rosie is one of our little theologians running around the church. Children ponder the world as they experience it, and we adults would be wise to take their questions seriously. “Who is God?” is a question that we never stop wrestling with. Indeed, as we get older and hopefully wiser it becomes more complex trying to answer this question. Life sobers us with its twists and turns, tragic and comic alike. In the dizzying world of adulthood, we can find ourselves yearning for our childhood with all its innocence. However, do not dismiss children’s questions as childish! Children have a certain candor unafraid to tell an adult the insufficiencies of their answers. In addition, children know that some adults are just too uptight for their own good. A case in point: A few weeks after Rosie’s theological inquiry, the church gathered at Cindy’s home for a summertime meal. Kerry and I had just arrived to find Rosie and other children running around the deck, and she stops for a moment, looks up at me, and says, “Who are you?” Apparently, she had ruled me out of the running for godhood. Now I was just another one of the giants eating hot dogs and baked beans out on the deck.

The passage from Philippians today asks the same question, “Who is God?” In Paul’s writing, he addresses the conflicted church at Philippi in part with the words of a hymn. In Philippians, chapter two, Paul calls the people away from their discord. Rather than being of a divided mind as a congregation, Paul asks them to seek the mind of Christ. To make his point, Paul takes a hymn that was in use in early Christian worship. Did you hear it in this morning’s reading? Here it is again:

T hough he was in the form of God,

[Christ] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient

to the point of death— even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him

and gave him the name that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

In this hymn, we encounter an early Church response to the question “Who is God?” This hymn comes from the earliest years of our faith, sometime between Pentecost (early 30s CE) and the day of Paul’s epistle writing (50s CE). Paul draws upon the worship life of the early Christians to summon the conflicted parties to a different way of being Church together, using the words of this hymn that both Paul and this distant congregation knew. With the text speaking to their hearts as a good hymn tends to do, this congregation might turn away from the difficulties separating them and reunite them around their common confession of Christ Jesus.

Read the words of the hymn with the opening question in mind: “Who is God?”, and you get an answer that we are less likely to give. In this hymn, we encounter an astonishingly different answer to “Who is God?”, a response that says, “God is vulnerable”. Jesus literally condescends from heaven’s glory to the life of a mere human. Jesus takes the fullness of human experience: life and death, not with any hint of power but with all humility. In the constellation of words we have about God, “vulnerable” does not seem to be one we picked up along the way. Vulnerable conjures images of weakness, a lack of ability, defenseless, fallible. What sort of God takes human form becomes like us and with us? The best word to describe the God celebrated in this hymn is not “omnipotent” but “vulnerable”. The early Church sang of the Christ who confounds the stock image of God altogether. The word “vulnerable” fits the Christian story, as we believe in the cross.

At the cross, Jesus experiences the finality of human existence. Jesus dies on the cross. We proclaim a story of life, death, and resurrection, but we should never be hasty in allowing our theology to rush past Good Friday and Holy Saturday for Easter morning alleluias. In the cross, God experiences not aloof triumph. God chooses vulnerable solidarity with this broken world. In turn, the resurrection demonstrates God’s overwhelming of death and the promise of New Creation to a sin-afflicted humanity and a groaning Creation. Vulnerable is proved not to be a word of weakness but of divine strength, a different sort of power, rooted in a love stronger than death and fully aware of the finitude of life.

The concept of divine vulnerability is a hard sell, as Christian theology has developed historically in ways that shy from such a concept. In 451 CE, the Council of Chalcedon ruled, “The synod deposes from the priesthood those who dare to say that the Godhead of the only-begotten is passible.” In plain language, in the fifth century, to say that God suffers in any fashion is heretical. Contemporary British Baptist theologian Paul Fiddes observes, “Theological statements throughout the history of the Church have tended to support this view of God as a self-protecting monarch, unmoving, unchanging, unsuffering” (The Creative Suffering of God, p. 1).

The language of the Philippians hymn undercuts this historical bent to theology. Christ comes in humble human form, born of a peasant woman, in what other New Testament traditions we call “the Gospels” held was a manger, not the idealized manger of our outdoor lawn Manger sets, but a lowly rough cut corn crib or cattle trough. Our New Testament professor back in seminary would get a television camera crew for an Easter story for the evening news. It was the standard media approach of “Oh, it’s Easter—we need something for the newscast” interview. “What was Jesus like?” they asked. Versed in the realities of the New Testament world, the professor looked right into the camera and say, “Jesus had bad teeth, aches and pains, and a life expectancy of under 40”. The early church creeds hold that Jesus is “fully human and fully divine”, wonderful language that inspires faith to this day. Yet, Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, vulnerable even to the point of death. Jesus did not live in a flat, two-dimensional world or move impassively through life, just waiting his time. The cross confounds any talk to the otherwise.

At the cross, we learn not that God is weak or fallible. We learn of God’s choice to enter into this world through Jesus. God enters into the world to bring the fullness of salvation to the broken, the vulnerable, the marginalized, the abused, and the neglected. It is good news incarnate! The world in its suffering is not beneath God’s gaze. God has met the deadliness of this world face to face. In one’s belief in Christ, we meet God on the cross as well as at the empty tomb and in the resurrection celebration called “worship” each time the Church gathers for praise and prayer.

In the Philippian hymn, Jesus “emptied himself/taking the form of a slave”. The key Greek word here is kenosis, which is a word meaning “self limitation” or “self-emptying”. Scholar Morna Hooker renders the Greek “Jesus became nothing”. Even though Jesus was equal to God, he came to the uneven playing field called life. Even though heaven resounded with glory to his Name, he chose to be part of the masses.

In the musical Evita, the story of Evita Peron, a political figure in Argentina, is told in part by a narrator named “Che”. Che appears throughout the musical, guiding the audience through Evita’s life, even dancing with her in a musical number. Watching the film version a few years ago, I remember remarking afterwards to a friend that Che was an interesting character. “You know what ‘Che’ means, don’t you?” he asked. “In Spanish, it means ‘nothing’. ‘ Che’”, he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. In the musical, Che serves as an “everyman” character speaking for the masses of people caught up in the politics of the Peron dictatorship and the allure of Evita’s charismatic presence.

Similarly, Jesus narrates the life that we live, knowing firsthand the scope of this existence. Jesus is in the midst of the world, and thus the Cross becomes a story that translates to every culture and every language, across every boundary. The cross takes those stories of pain, abuse, discrimination, neglect, and bears them as well. The pain of the world meets not just at the foot of the Cross. The pain of the world is carried upon the Cross, and in that humble, obedient servant called Jesus, the pain of the world is led from death into Easter hope.

Thus, the hymn pauses dramatically as Christ

“ became obedient

to the point of death

— even death on a cross.”

Then, it moves into the great crescendo of resurrection:

Therefore, God also highly exalted him

and gave him the name that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

We move into the glorious “therefore”, understanding anew what it means to answer “Who is God?” God is vulnerable enough to condescend to this level, to take on the fullness of life’s finite existence and unpredictability. God knows the suffering of this life first hand, affected because God is compassionate enough not to be solely “up there”, but knows what it is like “down here”.

So, Christians, gathered people called Church, we sing the song of God, in praise of the Crucified, who lived, died, and rose again. Moreover, we sing this song as we put our hands and feet into the service of this suffering world. We sing of the Savior who seems a failure in frailty, relevance, and death, who instead is the God to whom the whole of Creation shall confess glory, laud, and honor. AMEN.