Philippians 2:5-11 is as familiar
to my ear as John 3:16 (“for God so loved the world”) or 1 Corinthians 13 (“but
have not love, I am but a clanging cymbal”). And it’s familiar for the same
reason: I had to memorize these verses for Bible class at least once a year. I
really didn’t like this passage—I thought it was rhythmically unsatisfying, and
it seemed to me to have that extended anaphoric quality that Paul probably
enjoyed writing but that middle schoolers hate memorizing.
But it
turns out that Paul probably didn’t write this little apparent list, and in
fact, it’s not so boring as it first seemed to me. These seven verses were
originally a hymn, an early Christian hymn, earlier than the Gospels, sung by
the faithful when they gathered. I wonder, what was it like to sing this, back
then? What would it be like, to sing these words in a world where you were not
really welcome? What could it be like for a group of people from traditionally
disparate even antagonistic backgrounds to sing this hymn together? “Let the
same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of
God, emptied himself, humbled himself, and become obedient to the point of
death.”
This word,
“mind,” the mind of Christ, is translated from the Greek word “nous.” It
doesn’t really mean “mind” as in the mind and the body, the thinking mind, mind
and soul, brain, head, intellect. Rather, “nous” in Greek has the sense of a
way of comprehending, a way of coming to comprehend.
As
Frederica Mathews-Green explains in her essay on the Jesus Prayer, the nous is
the receptive faculty of the mind, the part of the mind that engages directly
with life, which comprehends and takes things in. The nous is also the
perceptive faculty, the part that perceives truth in a direct, intuitive way. “Nous”
is our understanding.
“Let the
same nous—the same understanding—that was in Christ Jesus be in you.”
On Ash
Wednesday this year, I had a very different hymn going through my head. There’s
a song by the Alabama Shakes whose
refrain says, “You—you ain’ alone / Just let me be / Your ticket home.” These
words are sung over and over again to close the song; they sound almost wrung
from the singer after she has described another’s confused sorrow. But there’s
a kind of triumph or strength in them too—the same triumph we hear when she
sings, “If you’re gonna cry / Come on, cry with me.” She sings all these words
slowly, heavily, hitting every sound in every word, the lines equal part
invitation—and challenge.
Today on
Palm Sunday, it strikes me that these lines are the lines that Lent sings to
us, that Christ sings in his Passion. “So if you’re gonna cry / Well come on,
cry with me.” “You, you ain’ alone / Just let me be / Your ticket home.”
This is the
nous, the mind, the way of understanding that Christ shows us in his Passion.
Did you notice, in his triumphant entry, he’s all but silent, letting his
followers and friends praise him, but keeping quiet himself. In the Passion
according to St. Luke, though, he has many words to share. Not words of pain or
petition, but words of compassion and forgiveness.
As he makes
his way to the place called The Skull, he turns to the women wailing for him. He
says, Don’t weep for me, but for you yourselves, and your children. He knows
that Jerusalem
will see more suffering in the future than he is feeling now, and his response
is to warn them, to share their pain.
And then,
crucified, humiliated, he asks for forgiveness for those who have done this to
him. Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing. Even in
pain his gaze is on these people’s hearts and souls. He sees a way they can be
redeemed, transformed.
And again, almost
the last thing he says—words of comfort to the criminal dying next to him. This
man’s heart was still open even as he hung there and in a desperate moment asks
this innocent man just to be remembered. And Christ doesn’t say, You should’ve
thought of this earlier, before you committed a crime—he doesn’t pause and he
doesn’t hold back. He responds with generous, generous love and forgiveness:
Today you will be with me, in Paradise.
Let the
same mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus.
That passage
in Philippians is one of the foundations for “the imitation of Christ”, an understanding
of Christian discipleship as an attempt to become more and more like the Christ
we know in the Gospels. (That’s why my Bible teacher had us memorize these
verses so many times.) We should imitate Christ.
Let the same mind be in you that
was in Christ Jesus, who emptied himself, humbled himself, and became obedient
to the point of death.
The mind, the nous, the
understanding of Christ that we see in the Passion is not just servanthood and
humility, but generous love. On the cross, Christ set a pattern for us to
imitate, and this pattern is a way of comprehending our own and others’
suffering. A way of responding to impossible outcomes, the death of innocents,
the unacceptable pain in the world. Theologian Simone Weil says that the glory
of the cross—the point of the cross—was that Jesus felt himself lost and
abandoned, but he kept (as she says) loving into the void. He loved the women
who were crying; he loved these people killing him slowly; he loved the two men
hanging there beside him. THIS, is the mind of Christ. This is what we should
imitate.
In this, in Christ’s Passion, it’s God who says, “So if
you’re gonna cry, come on / cry with me. / You, you ain’ alone / Just let me be / Your ticket home.” Amen.
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