Finally, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord.

To write the same things to you is not troublesome to me, and for you it is a safeguard.

Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh!  For it is we who are the circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh — even though I, too, have reason for confidence in the flesh.

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:  circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee;  as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.  More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.  I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

When I was offered a chance to speak on this passage I was both excited and also a bit nervous. On the one hand this passage brings up some things that have grown very near and dear to me in recent years as I’ve tried to better understand my Christian faith. On the other hand, this passage provokes me to re-evaluate my life, which always feels like threat in some sense.

As you may have noticed, in this passage Paul gives a list of his religious accomplishments. Some of the things he lists have nothing to do with Paul’s action. Paul counts it a religious privilege to have been born a member of the people of Israel, and to his specific tribe within that people. He is a “Hebrew born of Hebrews”. On top of all this, Paul was a Pharisee. This means that he had a theological education and was dedicated to putting his knowledge to work in his community. Paul was blameless with respect to the law of his people, and zealous for the purity of their religion, so much so that he tried to eliminate religious rivals, such as the people who followed Jesus.

In any case, Paul looks on all his privilege and religious accomplishments and tells us that he regards them as rubbish, as shit. Yes, Paul swears here. Why? Because Paul is comparing his privilege and accomplishments to something greater, something he once resisted with all his strength — knowing Jesus Christ. It is better to know Christ than to be born with privilege. It is better to know Christ than to achieve great things as a religious leader. And this is where the passage challenges me to re-evaluate my life. Hopefully it challenges us all in some way.

My focus today, then, is the last two verses where Paul gives us his self-stated aim in life:

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,  if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

I plan to look at this sentence part by part.

“I want to know Christ”

It is very easy for me to read this phrase and think to myself, “yes, Paul, I want to know about Christ too!” But there is a big difference between knowing Christ and knowing about Christ. I am haunted by Paul and the desire he reveals here. Paul doesn’t say “I want to know all about Christ, and the details of his theology, and the sharing in his credibility, so that believing like him I can somehow attain authority on matters pertaining to the Christian faith.” That’s what I might have said a few years ago if I were honest with myself. There’s something greater than knowing about Christ — knowing Christ — and Paul is driven toward this one thing above all else. Nothing else in his life, whatever its value, can compete with knowing Christ.

If Paul wanted to know about Christ, above all else, then he could have spent his life sitting at the feet of the apostles in Jerusalem, those who had walked with Jesus for at least a year during his mission to Israel. He could have “devoted himself to the apostle’s teaching”, as Acts 2 describes. Paul’s relationship to Jesus isn’t that of student to topic. Instead Paul relates to Jesus as servant, or slave, to a master. Paul has been forgiven much and lives a life of debt toward Jesus Christ. For Paul knowing Christ is inseparable from obeying Christ. Paul’s life is a life of empowered obedience rather than a life of study.

Elsewhere Paul writes that “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge;  but anyone who loves God is known by him.” Let’s remember that Paul is an educated man, a Pharisee. Compared to knowing Christ, Paul’s education is rubbish. The knowing in question involves love for Christ and others. And it also involves being known. Elsewhere Paul writes “now that you have come to know God,” and quickly corrects himself, “or rather to be known by God.” When you know about something, that something doesn’t know you. I know a thing or two about algebra, but algebra doesn’t know anything about me. And it certainly doesn’t know me. Knowing God is different. When you know God, what matters most is that God knows you.

It is easy to dismiss this, thinking, God knows everything! Yes, perhaps, but does God know everyone? Is it possible, by force of power, to come to know someone? Martin Buber made an important distinction regarding how we relate to one another. We can either relate in the I-It mode or the I-You mode. I can related to you as an “It” without your consent or cooperation. In fact, we do this to each other all the time. But you and I cannot share I-You fellowship without doing so together. In the same way, I can’t know God without God’s cooperation, and God can’t know me without my permitting it. This is why knowing God and being known by God are inseparable. And this, strangely enough, is how Paul relates to Jesus Christ, a troublemaker who was crucified. And after hating Jesus and his influence for many years, it is now Paul’s mission in life to know this Jesus, and be known by him.

“And the power of his resurrection”

The rest of this sentence helps explain what it means to know Christ. Paul writes “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.” I love this phrase because it describes knowing Christ in a way that impinges upon our present tense experience. Christ is, to us, a power that reaches us today and is not trapped in history long ago.

To explain what I mean, I want to appeal to one of the major insights of Soren Kierkegaard, an important Danish author from the 19th century. Kierkegaard uses the phrase contemporaneity with Christ. What does that mean? What Kierkegaard realized was that to know Jesus Christ we need to be contemporary with him. How is that possible? Jesus lived 2000 years ago. Isn’t it too late for us to live alongside him? We can’t be there to witness his miracles or hear him teach with our own ears. What Kierkegaard realized was that those who lived alongside Christ had no special spiritual advantage and that we are actually on equal footing with them when it comes to knowing Christ.

This may come as a surprise. It seems to many people that if only they were there with Jesus to see his miracles and to hear his teaching, then they would have an advantage. In that situation, they would be much more likely to believe in him than today, when we only seem to have stories of a place long ago and far away. Kierkegaard realized that this isn’t true. If you look closely at the miracles of Jesus in the Gospels, you’ll notice that they don’t really convince anyone. Instead they provoke those who see them. Either they believe, or they misunderstand and try to appropriate the power, or they attribute the power at work in Jesus to the power of the devil. The same is true of the teaching of Jesus. We may long for a better seat at his feet. If only we had been there and heard him teach with our own ears. Then we would have an advantage. Not so. The teaching of Jesus left most people confused and it offended many of them. So let’s not flatter him by calling him “Good teacher.” Hearing Jesus teach in the flesh was no guarantee of a good outcome for those who listened. Those who were truly contemporary with Christ, in his own day, were not those who merely saw his miracles and heard his teaching, but rather those who believed. And it is the same in every age. We are brought, somehow, face-to-face with Jesus Christ and we are either offended or we believe. In fact, Kierkegaard insists that faith is impossible without first passing through the possibility of offense. Christ can become present for us today in a way that provokes us just as he provoked those who literally walked alongside him.

Think of Paul. Notice how he introduces himself in his letter to the church in Galatia. “Paul an apostle — sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.” In that letter Paul is adamant that “the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” We need to remember that Paul was once trying to destroy the early Jesus-movement within his own Jewish religion. Rather than being won over by the disciples and their stories about Jesus, his miracles, and his teaching, Paul finds himself confronted in the present by Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. Paul tells us that following this event “I did not confer with any human being,  nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus.” Paul is contemporary with Christ yet never walked alongside him. Christ confronted Paul in Paul’s present. We don’t consider Paul an authority because he received his gospel from the disciples of Jesus, who were physically close to Jesus. No human laid hands upon Paul to commission him as an apostle. Paul was contemporary with the resurrected Christ, and aspires to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.

All that to say, the power of the resurrection is for us, as it was for Paul, something available in the present. We do not depend solely on the testimony of others concerning a power confined to the past. We do not take comfort in an unbroken apostolic succession, tracing from one bishop, to his predecessor, and so on, all the way back to Jesus Christ. Neither should we take comfort in a perfect book, static and unchanging. We, like Paul, seek and welcome encounter with a living Jesus Christ in the present. Paul is a co-experient of the risen Jesus. We should strive to know the same Christ that Paul knew, in the same way that Paul knew him, and to be known by the same Christ that knew Paul. To use Paul’s own words, our solidarity with him rests on the fact that we are among those, “together with all those who in every place”, and I’ll add in every century, “call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.”

“And the sharing of his sufferings”

It would be nice if that were the end of the passage, and indeed the end of this sermon. But we risk completely misunderstanding Paul and Christ if we stop there. Paul wants to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing in his sufferings. This coming week we have both Easter and Good Friday. And we all realize that there is some connection between the two. On Good Friday we remember the death of Christ and on Easter we remember the resurrection of Christ. My point here is that we cannot actually know Christ and the power of his resurrection without accounting for the suffering of Christ in some sense.

Once again, Kierkegaard helps me understand this better. Kierkegaard warns us that when we think about Christ, we are prone to think about Christ the exalted or triumphant one. We want to think of Christ in his loftiness, high and lifted up. We celebrate the second part of Paul’s hymn in chapter two: that God has given Jesus Christ the name above every name, and that every knee will bow and confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Frankly, it is easy to be attracted to a victorious Christ. It is easy to desire the beatific vision of a cosmic Christ who rules over creation, to taunt at death defeated, and so on. But the power of his resurrection is somehow linked to the sharing in his sufferings.

Do we really want to know Christ? Which one? Jesus Christ is an inkblot test. We look at him and what we see usually reveals more about us that it does about him. We see a hero for our various causes, we see a rebel to align with our distaste for the current powers that be, we see an insightful teacher to help with our self-improvement plans. So when we hear that God has exalted Christ, that the power of his resurrection is available in the present, we naturally think that whatever we happen to project onto Christ has been affirmed and exalted by God. We use the exaltation of Christ, the loftiness of Christ, to buoy our own agendas, preferences, and prejudices.

Kierkegaard’s insight, which I see here first in Paul, is to remember that we can only know Christ if we know Christ in his abasement. The Jesus that set his face toward Jerusalem and came to an end as one discredited and despised — this Jesus, Christ in his abasement, this is the one that God has exalted for all to see and worship. Christ in his abasement is the one who took on the form of a servant, who became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. How can we say that we know him if we don’t share in his obedience, an obedience that sooner or later leads to sharing in his suffering? The power of God was hidden — yes hidden — in Christ in his abasement, Christ crucified. This is why Paul elsewhere writes “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom,  but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to [the nations],  but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” The power and wisdom of God is hidden in Christ crucified, and to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, we cannot ignore or avoid sharing in his suffering. No one simply knows Christ and the power of his resurrection. This is only possible when we continue on to the sharing in his sufferings.

“By becoming like him in his death”

One very common reaction to Paul’s remark, “sharing in his sufferings”, is to aim instead to know Christ and the power of his resurrection by dwelling on his sufferings. The thought, perhaps, is that if we think about how much it hurt to be Jesus Christ, especially on Good Friday, then we will gain something of religious value. Why do we do this? Perhaps we think that the suffering of Christ belongs to him and not to us. Perhaps Christ suffers so that I don’t have to suffer. That isn’t what Paul says. Not even close. Paul aims to know Christ by sharing in his sufferings. If we want to know Christ, if we want to be contemporary with Christ, if we want to know Christ in his abasement, the way to do it is to share in the experience of Christ. This involves walking the miles with Jesus from the mount of transfiguration to Jerusalem. And this is only possible as we understand and appropriate for ourselves the power at work in Jesus Christ.

The resurrection power that Paul seeks is the power of the Spirit of Jesus, the power of the Spirit of God or the Holy Spirit. Paul writes elsewhere that “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” Knowing Christ, being contemporary with Christ in his abasement, is living by the power of the same Spirit that drove Christ toward the cross. To know Christ, we need to yield to the Spirit of Jesus so that we become like him in his death.

What was Jesus like in his death? Paul answers that in this letter, in the previous chapter. What Paul values in the death of Jesus is precisely this — his obedience unto death. It is the obedience — not the suffering — that brings value to the death of Jesus. It is my conviction that we are wrong to dwell on the suffering of Jesus on Good Friday. What ought to come home to us is the active obedience of Jesus.

Jesus is no victim. He is a man on a mission to reach out to the people of Israel with the most costly offer of reconciliation available to Israel’s God — sending a beloved son to bring good news to those who would rather devour him than receive it. He began his ministry preaching “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”. This was not a joke. Jesus was making a genuine offer to Israel. But as he continued to proclaim the will of God for Israel, it became clear to him that to deliver this message, the messenger would perish. Indeed, the perishing messenger would become the message. The only way to manifest God’s severe love for Israel and the world as it actually is was to provoke the powers of sin and darkness, and expose them once and for all. As Paul writes elsewhere, “We speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.  None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

In summary, Jesus dies because of his obedience to God. He is no martyr. He provokes the powers to either surrender to him or strike him down, and perishes refusing to either compromise or shrink back. He is the stone that the builders rejected, and having been rejected, God exalts him. God’s exaltation of Jesus is God’s repudiation of the powers that rejected him. God’s exaltation of Jesus is God’s declaration that God’s power is made perfect in weakness, another phrase from Paul, and an apocalyptic rebuke to the notion that might makes right. God’s exaltation of Jesus is God’s invitation for us to become like him in his death — that is, people who are obedient to God according to the pattern of Jesus, empowered by the same Spirit that led Jesus to his cross. Those who know Jesus Christ know him in the present by sharing in the same power that empowered his obedience. That which they suffer is not merely the hardship that falls upon each of us in due course. It is the sufferings that inevitably come from willing the good in a world bent on evil, from manifesting a power made perfect in weakness among those for whom might makes right.

“If somehow I might attain the resurrection from the dead”

Kierkegaard, and Paul before him, reminds us that Christ seeks imitators. Worshiping Jesus is dangerous because we can quickly find ourselves admiring Jesus rather than imitating him. However, we only really know Christ by imitating Christ, by becoming contemporary with him in his abasement, driven to obedience by the same Spirit that was at work in him, the spirit of resurrection power. It is this struggle with the Spirit of Jesus that gives Paul his confidence and hope for the future. To know Christ in the sense that Paul describes and models is a tremendous source of peace and power. I’m reminded of the passage in the Gospels where Jesus articulates a basis for confidence in resurrection. Jesus reminds those who came to debate him that they too believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then, he adds, God is not the God of the dead but of the living.