The Mind of Christ

One mind, lowly mind (2:1–4)

Paul has a concrete worry: a church he loves is fraying at the edges into rivalry. His remedy is not a management technique but a disposition of heart. He stacks up four gentle "ifs" — "if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy" — and, having named everything the gospel has already poured into them, he leans the whole weight on a single request: "complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love… doing nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves." The fraying is not abstract; two women, Euodia and Syntyche, will be named before the letter ends (4:2). Humility (tapeinophrosyne) was not a virtue in the ancient world — it named the servile mindset of a slave, the cringe of the low-born. Paul takes the insult and makes it the mark of the Christian, and then, so we cannot mistake it for mere self-deprecation, he shows us what it looks like in God.

He emptied himself (2:5–8)

"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus." What follows is likely a hymn the early church already sang. Gordon Fee, the New Testament scholar, reminds us that Paul reaches for it not to lecture a quarreling church on the two natures of Christ, but to set a pattern before them — the mind of verse 5 given a face.^* And the face descends like a staircase. Christ, "existing in the form of God" — morphe theou, sharing the very nature and glory of God — "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped." The word is harpagmos: he did not treat his divine equality as loot to be clutched, a prize to exploit for himself.^* Instead he "emptied himself" — ekenosen — the great word of the kenosis. He did not empty himself of his deity; he emptied himself by addition, by taking "the form of a servant," the same doulos Paul called himself, "being born in the likeness of men." And the staircase keeps going down: found in human form, "he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Step by step — God, servant, man, corpse, and not just any death but the slave's death, the cursed death, the cross. There is no lower stair. This is the humility Paul is asking of a quarreling church: the humility of God. Calvin, the Geneva reformer, guarded the mystery here with care. Christ did not empty himself of his Godhead — deity cannot be laid down like a coat — but veiled it: “the abasement of the flesh was, notwithstanding, like a vail, by which his divine majesty was concealed.”^* The glory was never lost, only hidden, so that eyes that looked on a carpenter and a condemned man were looking, all unknowing, at God. And Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, preaching this hymn, would not let his hearers hurry past how far the stairs went down: that the One who is over all made himself, for our sake, lower than all — which is not a thing to explain so much as to worship.

Tim Keller, who preached at Redeemer in Manhattan for nearly forty years, set the hymn's direction against our own in a single line, and it is the most useful sentence in this chapter for a church that is quarrelling: “We're empty trying to fill ourselves. He was full and he emptied himself voluntarily.” That is the whole of Paul's argument in fourteen words. The rivalry at Philippi — and the rivalry in any room — is emptiness grabbing; the mind of Christ is fullness letting go. Keller located the hunger underneath it honestly, too: “The Bible has the right answer for why we are glory starved. It's because we were made for God.” The problem is not that we want glory. It is where we are shopping for it. And the staircase down, he said, was built for a reason: “He became so small so that we would become big in the eyes of the Father.”

Therefore God exalted him (2:9–11)

At the bottom of the staircase the direction reverses. "Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name." The verb is a rare double-compound — God super-exalted him — and the Name given is the covenant Name itself, Lord, before which, Isaiah said, "every knee shall bow." Paul takes the words God spoke about himself alone and applies them to Jesus without blinking: at the name of Jesus every knee in heaven and earth and under the earth will bow, "and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." The way up is down. The One who refused to grasp is the One God lifts highest. Exaltation is not the reward that cancels the humility; it is the humility vindicated.^* And feel what the church is being told to believe: that a man executed in a backwater of the empire is the One before whom every knee in the universe will finally bend. Rome bent the knee to Caesar and called him lord; Paul, from a Roman cell, writes that there is a higher throne, and the crucified Jesus sits on it. Every rival lordship — Caesar's, the market's, our own self-rule — is living on borrowed time; the knees that will not bow gladly now will bow at last.

Work out what God works in (2:12–18)

So, Paul says, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" — and lest we hear self-effort, he finishes the sentence: "for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." Not "work for your salvation" but "work out" what God is working in. The trembling is real, but it rests on grace: our striving is the surface of God's own working beneath it. Augustine, the North African bishop, turned that very paradox into a prayer that once shook the church: “Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.”^* There is the whole of grace in seven words — God does not merely tell us what to do and leave us to it; he gives what he demands, working in us the willing and the doing he requires. So “work out your salvation” is no burden dropped on the helpless; it is an invitation to spend a strength that God is, at that very moment, supplying.

Do it all "without grumbling," he adds — and the word has a history. Grumbling is the very sin Israel died of in the wilderness, and the phrase that follows sharpens the point to an edge. Paul wants us "blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation." A crooked and twisted generation is the exact description Moses sang over unfaithful Israel (Deuteronomy 32:5) — the murmuring generation that grumbled itself out of the land. Paul turns the label inside out. The complaint that once branded God's own people as crooked is now the thing his people must not do, so that they shine "as lights in the world," blameless children standing bright in the middle of the very crookedness the phrase used to name. Grumbling, in Paul's mind, is not a small sour habit; it is how a redeemed people quietly change sides.

Then Paul offers himself as the first to live it. "Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all." The word is spendomai — the libation, the wine poured out over an altar until the cup stands empty. Paul casts the Philippians' faith as the sacrifice and his own life as the wine spilled over it, and his answer to being emptied is not grief but joy, said twice in a single breath. Alec Motyer, the commentator on this letter, catches the wonder of it: that a man can look at the pouring-out of his own life and call it gladness, because the mind of Christ has become his own mind.^* The hymn is no longer only sung. It is being lived, drop by drop, in the man who taught it.

Two who lived it (2:19–30)

Paul ends the summit of his letter not with more theology but with two portraits of the hymn in ordinary flesh. Timothy is verse 4 walking around: of all his companions, Paul says, Timothy alone will "genuinely be concerned" for them, for the rest "seek their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ." The self-forgetful looking-to-the-things-of-others that Paul asked of the whole church he has found, fully grown, in one young man. And Epaphroditus is a quieter echo of verse 8: he "nearly died for the work of Christ, risking his life to make up for" what the Philippians could not do in person. The verb behind "risking" is paraboleusamenos, a gambler's word — he threw his life on the table like a stake. The mind of Christ is not an idea to admire but a life to be lived, and Paul will not close this chapter without showing it breathing in two men he can name.

We should feel the sheer strangeness of what this chapter asks and answers. To a church tempted to grab for significance, Paul holds up a God who refused to grab — who counted equality with God not as a prize to exploit but as a position from which to serve, and went down all the way to a cross to rescue the very people who would not serve. Our pride is the reflex to clutch and climb; the gospel is the God who let go and descended. And the wonder is that he does not merely command us this mind — he gives it: "which is yours in Christ Jesus." The One at whose name we will bow is the One who bowed first, all the way down, for us.