The Humiliation of the Eternal Son.
I. In looking into these words, we observe (1) that St. Paul clearly asserts Jesus Christ to have existed before His birth into the world. By saying that Jesus Christ existed in the form of God before He took on Him the form of a servant, St. Paul would have been understood by any one who read him in his own language to mean that, when as yet Christ had no human body or human soul, He was properly and literally God, because He existed in the form, and so possessed all the proper attributes, of God. (2) St. Paul goes on to say that, being God, Jesus Christ "thought it not robbery to be equal with God." This sentence would be more closely and clearly rendered, "Christ did not look on His equality with God as a prize to be jealously set store by." Men who are new to great positions always think more of them than those who have always enjoyed them. Christ, who was God from everlasting, laid no stress on this His eternal greatness; He emptied Himself of His Divine prerogatives or glory. (3) Of this self-humiliation St. Paul traces three distinct stages. The first consists in Christ's taking on Himself the form of a servant or slave. By this expression St. Paul means human nature. Without ceasing to be what He was, what He could not but be, He wrapped around Himself a created form, through which He would hold converse with men, in which He would suffer, in which He would die. The second stage of His humiliation is that Christ did not merely take human nature on Him; He became obedient to death. The third stage in this humiliation is that, when all modes of death were open to Him, He chose that which would bring with it the greatest share of pain and shame. "He became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." When on the cross of shame He endures the sharpness of death, He is only completing that emptying Himself of His glory which began when, "taking upon Himself to deliver man, He did not abhor the Virgin's womb."
II. Why may we suppose that God, by His providence acting in His Church, places before our eyes this most suggestive passage of Holy Scripture on the Sunday next before Easter? (1) We stand today on the threshold of the great week which in the thought of a well-instructed Christian, whose heart is in its right place, is beyond all comparison the most solemn week in the whole year. It is of the first importance that we should answer clearly this primary question: "Who is the Sufferer?" That which gives to the Passion and death of our Lord its real value is the fact that the Sufferer is more than man; that, although He suffers in and through a created nature, He is personally God. (2) The lesson which St. Paul draws for the benefit of the Philippians from the consideration of the Incarnation and Passion is a lesson which is as valuable to us as members of civil society, as it is valuable to members of the Church of Christ. If Christ did not set store on glory which was rightfully, inalienably His, why should we? All who have lived for others rather than for themselves in His Church have been true to Him, true to the spirit of His incarnation and death, true to what St. Paul calls "the mind that was in Christ Jesus."
H. P. Liddon, Passiontide Sermons,p. 18.
The Mystery of the Cross.
I. We all agree that God is good; all, at least, do so who worship Him in spirit and in truth. We adore His majesty because it is the moral and spiritual majesty of perfect goodness; we give thanks to Him for His great glory because it is the glory, not merely of perfect power, wisdom, order, justice, but of perfect love, of perfect magnanimity, beneficence, activity, condescension, pity, in one word of perfect grace. But how much must the last word comprehend as long as there is misery and evil in the world, or in any other corner of the whole universe! Grace, to be perfect, must show itself by graciously forgiving penitents; pity, to be perfect, must show itself by helping the miserable; beneficence, to be perfect, must show itself by delivering the oppressed.
II. The Apostles believed, and all those who accepted their Gospel believed, that they had found for the word "grace" a deeper meaning than had ever been revealed to the prophets of old time; that grace and goodness, if they were perfect, involved self-sacrifice. If man can be so good, God must be infinitely better; if man can love so much, God must love more; if man, by shaking off the selfishness which is his bane, can do noble deeds, then God, in whom is no selfishness at all, may at least have done a deed as far above hisas the heavens are above the earth. Shall we not confess that man's self-sacrifice is but a poor and dim reflection of the self-sacrifice of God? Shall we not find, as thousands have found ere now, in the Cross of Calvary, the perfect satisfaction of our highest moral instincts, the realisation in act and fact of the highest idea which we can form of perfect condescension, namely, self-sacrifice exercised by a Being of whom perfect condescension, love, and self-sacrifice were not required by aught in heaven or on earth save by the necessity of His own perfect and inconceivable goodness?
C. Kingsley, Westminster Sermons,p. 1.
References: Philippians 2:5-8. G. Huntingdon, Sermons for Holy Seasons,p. 75; T. A. White, Church of England Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 159; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iv., p. 88. Philippians 2:5-9. Ibid.,vol. vi., p. 148.