If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. 7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in[a] Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. 10 I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.(Phil.3:4b-11)
The happiest retired people I have met have this in common: they have one or more worthy, compelling goals that get them out of bed just as surely as did going to work before they retired. Without such goals some people do not even survive the first few years of retirement. They risk becoming like the Eveready Bunny with the battery taken out.
Something there is to having goals, a purpose and a direction for life, not just for our working lives, but for all our lives, and even beyond. And it must be a goal that we deem more worthy than our own ease, or comfort, or even life, lest ease and comfort alone become our life goals. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “If we have nothing worth dying for, we have nothing worth living for, either.” In the absence of good and unifying goals, there is also the likelihood that into the vacuum will come bad, destructive and divisive goals.
A young man’s major life goal was to love and to be loved. So, how did he end up in jail for attempted murder? It was because he believed the promises of the street gang that recruited him, that they would give him the love he longed for. If we’re going to have goals in life, there must be nothing deceptive about them.
A young woman wanted to be a marathon runner. But her degenerative joint disease put an unfortunate end to that. So is the greatest goal in our life do-able and durable, come what may? Will it hold up and sustain us in the face of sickness, disappointment, disaster, even death? In all the complex and conflicting demands of just staying alive, will it fall by the wayside, found wanting or simply forgotten? In the face of life’s many surprises and distractions, will we be able to remember the best of our life goals, and keep attending to them?
As Paul does in today’s passage? It’s so fitting that today’s focus verse, Philippians 3: 10, has been displayed on this pulpit all throughout Lent, and so beautifully at that. The life goal that Paul expresses, “that I might know Christ,” is, I hope, the main goal of all our ministries and activities, our worship and our witness, to know Christ, and thereby to make Christ known. As full as this passage is, of inspiration, it is also full of some surprises.
For one thing, it surprises me that Paul’s goal had nothing to do with changing his terrible circumstances at the time he wrote these words. He was in prison with no inkling of when he would get out, or even if. Would he ever even be released? Or executed? You’d think then, that his main goal was to get out of prison and get back to his life’s work. And he did want that. But that goal was secondary to his main goal, “to know Christ.” And that goal was doable and durable, whether in prison or out.
It’s also surprising that Paul’s main goal was not professional. It was not about anything that he might achieve, but more about something he would receive: knowing Christ. And that even though Paul’s life’s work as a missionary, church planter and leadership developer was under threat by professional church parasites, people who called themselves apostles, even “super-apostles”, who would follow up Paul’s missionary work and say to the new churches, “You know, Paul and his missionary team left out something important; you have to add to your faith in Christ practices like circumcision and keeping a kosher kitchen if you are really to be saved.” Or “you need also to know these secret rituals and mystical mysteries that combine the best of secretive Jewish mysticism with Gentile mystery religions if you are to rise above the rank and file in knowledge and worthiness.” And so they made themselves important and powerful in these vulnerable new communities.
Those parasites upon the churches are the people Paul referred to in today’s passage, those “who put their confidence in the flesh.” That is, their faith was based on their own religious credentials, accomplishments, knowledge and pedigrees, and not on the faithfulness of God. Paul is fighting them and their influence in this letter; he’s fighting for the freedom and the maturity of the churches. But again, that’s not his main life goal. His labors are a result of his main life goal; his ministry flows from knowing Christ. Christ makes himself known through us, as he makes himself known to us.
For all of Paul’s ministry and missionary work, for all of his Bible exposition and theologizing, nor should we say that Paul’s overriding life goal is religious, not in the way most people think and talk about religion. As for religion, Paul says in this passage that he’s been there, done that, only to find that he had done God the supreme dishonor of trying to earn from God what God is more than willing to give, and freely. By means of religion, Paul was trying to achieve for God what God had already accomplished for him, and in so costly a manner. And people died because of his religiosity.
For in most religious systems and practices in the world, including many churchly Christian ones, religion means that we are in the driver’s seat of a relationship with God. Religion is people seeking God, or godly powers. Christ is how God is seeking us. By religion I mean us acting and thinking that, if our rituals, rules and regulations, our practices and principles, are right, and if we do them rightly, we cause God or the universe to respond to us in certain ways, even, that they owe us good things in response to our good deeds and good thoughts.
Often these are very good rules, regulations and rituals; usually there is some profound truth to them, like the first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: “Getting the things we crave won’t really make us happy; if anything, craving and getting them are often the cause of our suffering.” They may be excellent practices, too, like coming to worship with the church on Sundays, honoring our parents, telling the truth, and respecting people’s property. And doing these things usually lead to better results in life than not doing them.
But the dark side of religion is that we may do these good practices and principles, and observe these good rules and rituals, in order to get things, things which we think we thereby deserve. And how good is that, really? Isn’t that self-centered? Just as self-centered as lying and stealing are? And consider how easily we slip from thinking, “I’m doing good things; that makes me a good person,” to even “I’m doing better things than so-and-so and you-know-who; that makes me a better person than…..” fill in the blank. And then we may even think ourselves entitled, maybe even obligated, to carry out the judgments of God against those who fall short or leave the fold.
That’s where Paul was when Christ confronted him on the Road to Damascus: he wrote, “…Circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin,” he came from the right religious stock, “a Hebrew of Hebrews” he called himself. “..in regard to the law, a Pharisee… as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.,… as for zeal, persecuting the church.”
But Paul’s goal of being the most righteous, rigorous, religious, theological whiz kid did not only prove deceptive, it was not durable. It did not survive his encounter with Christ. He had a rude awakening to the truth that none of our best practices and principles, none of our righteousness and rituals, are ever entirely uncontaminated by sin and self-interest. As Paul would later write to the Roman churches, “sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death.’” For all his efforts to be the most righteous and religious, Paul became, in his own words, “The chief of sinners.”
Upon meeting Christ, Paul had to learn the hard way that only God’s righteousness and virtue are entirely holy, sinless and self-less. But that was also when he learned how deep and passionate are the love and mercy of God for even “the chief of sinners.” That’s when he first learned that the power of the gospel lies in God’s desire for us, more than in our desire for God. Compared to the joy of knowing Christ, all the other things Paul strove for, even most of the good and religious things, became to him like so much rubbish, he said. From that Damascus Road encounter with Jesus, Paul was left with only one thing of value: to “gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.” So, let’s never get too impressed with our own goodness and godliness. But let’s never despair either of how much God loves us.
In getting to know Christ, until we know him as well as he knows us, Paul found a life goal that stands all the tests of life. And so do we. This goal is also surprising because it is relational, not just intellectual; instead of manipulating God, it transforms us; and thirdly, it is durable, not destructible, whatever life throws at us. Even death. The encounters that Paul had with the Risen Christ only whetted his appetite to know Christ even more, just as a first date might whet the appetite of a couple to date each other some more, and then to marry. If anything, our human love stories are copies, images, of the divine love story that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the drama of our salvation, the greatest love story ever told.
This love story began in the first Garden, when God would walk in the cool of the day with Adam and Eve. It took a tragic, painful turn when God came for their companionship, they were hiding in shame, and he cried out, “Where are you?” That cry of God for his Beloved continues ringing through the ages. This same lover’s voice cried out through the Prophet Jeremiah and said, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness (31:3).” He came wooing his people through the Prophet Hosea and said, “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will know the Lord.”
This same said to his disciples, on the eve of his death, “My Father’s house has many rooms… I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am” (John 14) As I said during Donita Garber’s memorial service yesterday, that is the ancient language of courtship and engagement. Once a man had built onto his father’s home an addition for his bride-to-be and their future family, and once Dad said, “Yes, Son, your house is ready,” then the Son would come to claim his bride, have the wedding and take her home.
In keeping with the theme of Lent, “Living Ink,” the Bible then is a love story written in the Living Ink of God’s Spirit and Christ’s blood on the pages of our lives. But as love stories go, the Biblical one is about a very long, conflicted and difficult courtship, in which one party is distractible, distrusting and unfaithful, to the point where it even caused the other Lover’s great suffering, and death. And yet that Lover is surprisingly persistent and forgiving. He won’t force the Beloved’s answer, but he won’t give up on her, either. Not even death will stop his courting.
So, don’t confuse knowing Christ with just knowing about Christ. Knowing Christ is relational, not just intellectual. Yes, it’s vital, it’s crucial to know as much as we can about Jesus. So let’s study our Bibles, and read good books and authors about Jesus, and about walking with him. But we can know lots of stuff about Jesus, and still he’d be a stranger to us. When Paul says, “I want to know Christ,” he’s not talking like a scientist doing experiments to discover what makes gravity so steady, just so he can know more stuff and be right. That makes the scientist the active subject, and gravity the passive object of study. There’s nothing passive about Christ in relation to us. It is not we who first set out to know Christ, but Christ who first makes himself known to us. Even if we don’t have so dramatic an encounter with Christ as what Paul had on the road to Damascus, nor see a blinding light and hear a heavenly voice, God, through Christ, is still courting us: God initiates and we respond, yes or no; God courts, and we fight or fall ever more in love. Usually we do both, and in that order.
We know it’s Christ courting us whenever we experience both repentance and relief, both sorrow over our resistance, and joy over his steadfast love, both hatred for evil, and more love for all persons. There are many lovers’ spats in our spiritual lives, but our greatest fight is always about surrendering and opening another door in the house of our souls to the One who never stops knocking. All our prayers, study, worship and service do not earn anything from God; they are our responses to Christ’s initiative; they put us in the place where Christ can encounter us. We seek God only to find that God has long been seeking us.
As Christ finds us, he transforms us. No sooner does Christ enter as our welcome guest, than he begins rearranging things. His wondrous, winsome ways have a way of rubbing off on us. The evidence of how much we know Christ then is behavioral, in our character and our conduct. Jeremiah said something similar to the corrupt king Jehoiakim of Judah, six centuries before Christ. He should have known better than to put his impoverished, exploited and underserved subjects to work building him a great trophy palace of marble and cedar, and, worse than that, not pay them for their labor. His father, King Josiah had taught him better, as a lover of God and people. At great risk to his own safety, Jeremiah said:
“Does it make you a king to have more and more cedar?
Did not your father have food and drink?
He did what was right and just, so all went well with him.
He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well.
Is that not what it means to know me?” declares the Lord.
“But your eyes and your heart are set only on dishonest gain,
on shedding innocent blood and on oppression and extortion.”
Knowing Christ then is not just about personal piety or spiritual feelings. It is quite practical, even socially just and compassionate. According to Jeremiah’s words, the proof of how much and how well we know Christ then is how much like him we become in character and conduct. Christ makes himself known to us so as to replicate his character, and the pattern of his life, in and through ours.
Knowing Christ is also a durable goal, one that does not depend upon our circumstances, like most other goals in life. Paul acknowledges as much when he says, “I wish to know him, in “the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings.” So whether we are walking in resurrection power through glorious circumstances in life and triumphs of ministry, or in suffering, on the way to death even, either way, our journeys are always in fellowship with Christ. Christ can use good times or bad ones to make himself present and known to us. Even death Paul sees as a way of participating in the ongoing life of Christ in the world. Because it leads to the ultimate self-disclosure of Christ to us: our resurrection. The goal of knowing Christ does not only survive death; it unites life and death. Death becomes the doorway to the final, fullest self-disclosure of Christ. For it will take all of eternity for this goal of knowing Christ, as he knows us, to be complete.
Yet even before death, eternal life is already under way for us. For as Jesus prayed in John’s Gospel, chapter 17: “This is eternal life: that they might know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” I suspect then that, when our faith becomes sight and we shall know even as we are known, when first we stand before the One who has never stopped courting and calling us homeward, we shall not only be amazed at the holy, wondrous, joyous, glorious beauty, from which all beauty in nature and art are only borrowed and reflect; we shall be surprised at how familiar He is. When we stand before him and see no longer as through a glass darkly, I suspect that we shall remember all the times when he came courting and calling us through people who shared his love with us, through undeserved mercies and extravagant blessings, through truths that blessed us even as they broke us, through the majesty and mystery of creation. Then we shall realize how much Christ was courting us, calling us to know him even as he knows us.