Cruciform

Propers: The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 26), AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Long ago and far away, someone once asked me why the Cross is the symbol of Christianity. And I must admit, I found myself somewhat taken aback. It’s because of Jesus, I said; because His death and resurrection are the center of our faith and the axis of our history. “Oh,” this person replied. “Is that all? I thought there might be more to it than that.”

In our reading this morning from the Epistle to the Philippians, St Paul does something rather remarkable. He provides us with a cruciform ethic. He lays out a way of life, a way of wisdom, patterned upon Jesus and His choosing of the Cross. Christ said that whosoever would be His disciple must deny themselves, pick up their cross, and follow Him. Yet what does that look like in day-to-day life? What is our cross to bear?

The New Testament, we must recall, is written by Jews living under Rome. And that which Romans valued above all else, that to which they bent the knee, was what they called fama, or fame. But it wasn’t quite fame as we might understand it. Fama wasn’t just popularity or name recognition. It was who you were, your identity, your soul. Romans thought the truest self was that which others see. The interior mattered little, save for some philosophers gazing at stars. The real you was what people said.

If your name lived on, you lived on. To bring glory to yourself was to bring glory to your family, glory to your city, glory unto Rome. Thus the wealthy spent their fortunes pursuing a savage prestige, raising armies, conquering neighbors, accruing honors. As a young man, Julius Caesar was captured by pirates for ransom. And he was so offended at the low price they demanded for his release, that once freed he hunted them down and crucified them all. Later in life he killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more, all for glory, all for fame.

To this day we honor Caesar, whose name became synonymous with Emperor, Kaiser, Czar. I had to read his Gallic Wars in Latin. Shakespeare immortalized him onstage. Who cares about the people whom he killed along the way, the governments he toppled, the countries he destroyed? He was a winner. He was famous. He was divine. That’s the ideal Roman citizen: the general, the consul, the dictator, the god.

Perhaps our notions of fame aren’t all that different after all. Oh, the things we’ll overlook if you but be both rich and cruel, the billionaires we worship, the criminals we laud. What won’t we do for a “like” on social media, a follower on our channel? We think that that’s the real us, the image we project. We forget we have a soul, whom God alone can see. Remember, when we read our Bibles, that we still are Rome.

Yet Paul retains a different vision, a vision of Jesus Christ. And it turns all our notions of fame on their heads. “Do nothing from selfish ambition,” he writes, “but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” And then he breaks into song—or poetry, at the very least. This section sounds like a catechism, an early confession of faith. Scholars call it the Christ Hymn.

Though 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.

It is the descent of Jesus, the humility of Jesus, laying aside all glory and honors, all hope of worldly fame, to become a slave—God Himself a slave!—here to die in shame and pain, at the hands and for the sake of His murderers, the very people He had come to save. A Roman cross, with Roman nails. And what does He say of these soldiers, these workaday Roman mass murderers? “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”

This, according to St Paul, ought to be the model of our mind together, the pattern of Christian community. The verb that he uses in Greek is phroneō, which unfortunately has no clear English equivalent. Here we translate it as “having a certain mind,” but it’s more than that. Phroneō means to possess a depth of understanding, producing practical wisdom. The Cross is thus our wisdom, the fullness of our faith, and the font of this life that we share.

Laying down our lives for others. Placing first our neighbor’s need. Emptying ourselves of self-glorification so as to take the form of the slave, take the lowest place, precisely because that’s where we find God, who raises us up from the dead. “Therefore … work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you.” Now there’s a powerful paradox. Working out salvation, is God at work in us.

The Cross then is wisdom, both in the divine sense of God descending into Creation, revealing Himself to His children, and in the fully human sense, the fullness of life in truth and love. This is a counter-cultural moral pattern, truly a cruciform ethic. And the whole thing is communal, mind you. None of Paul’s instructions here are singular. Everything is plural. Paul assumes, as Christ assumes, that spiritual life is collective.

There is no sense in Jesus Christ of rugged individualism. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that there can be no individualist Christianity, for to love God is to love our neighbor. Christ reveals Himself to us in other human beings: friends, strangers, and enemies. As Jesus alone can bear the Cross, so the Church is Jesus’ Body. We live His life together.

Of course, not all suffering is the Cross. Much of suffering is senseless, and ought only to be  relieved. The Cross appears to bear four marks: First, the Cross is unjust. It comes about when those in power seek to silence truth. But Christians will not be silenced, not when it comes to our neighbor in need. Second, the Cross is a turning point, a fork in the road. We have the option of serving the mission of God or of backing down.

This leads directly to the third point: that the Cross is a moral choice. Now, by this I don’t mean that  we must earn our own salvation with a sovereign act of will. Rather, what it means is that we cannot impose the Cross on others. It must be freely accepted, freely taken on. We forget that one a lot. As Christians we must understand that it’s not our duty, not our place, to make others be like us, to force non-Christians to follow our rules. If a thing is wrong, we call it wrong. But we can never Christianize society with decrees from the top on down.

Fourthly, finally, a cruciform ethic centers on our willingness to forgo that to which we feel entitled—be it power, status, privilege, wealth—in order to serve instead the needs of someone else. To put the good of another before our own is the definition of love. And yes, this can be individual. Sometimes it has to be. But it’s more fundamentally communal, societal. We don’t bear the Cross alone, nor do we bear it for ourselves. And so Christianity will affect the way that we give, the way that we work, the way that we vote.

The Church cannot be partisan, but will always be political. The fact that for 2000 years we have held aloft an instrument of state-sponsored terror as our defiant symbol of everlasting life is one hell of a flex. The Cross remains radical.

And so there we have it, ladies and gentlemen: a way of life, a way of wisdom, a way of love, patterned upon the Cross of Jesus Christ. It flies in the face of what we call fame. And it will not be forced upon anyone; indeed, it cannot be; that’s not how love works. But we are called to bear the Cross, with all its mess and pain, simply so that others may see  Jesus in this world, to see Him in our brokenness, see Him in our faith. Ultimately it isn’t  even we who bear the Cross, but God who bears it in us!

When we live as Jesus lives and love as Jesus loves, then surely He is with us, even among but two or three. Thus is the Cross the source of our joy.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Credit where credit is due: This homily is inspired by and patterned upon the commentary of Jane Lancaster Patterson from Working Preacher.

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