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Have you ever encountered "insider language" - those buzzwords, phrases or names, that others know but which sound mystifying to you? They can be a part of a toxic corporate culture, a shared language of particular enthusiasts or those with similar interests, or a less than subtle means of keeping people on the outside making it hard for them to engage. They can also happen across cultures and generations without any negative intent at all. Well, for many who encounter our passage today - insider language is a problem. What does Paul mean by all this talk about "flesh?" Why does he consider his former status "garbage" and why must we suffer in order to "know Jesus"? Let’s take a look.
In chapter three of Philippians, Paul seems a bit obsessed by “flesh.” Now, if you saw a movie advertisement which highlighted the word FLESH, you would know what it meant. If a preacher warned you against “sins of the flesh” you’d probably think he was talking about the same thing – or similar sins that have to do with your physical body – gluttony, drunkenness, etc. But when Paul warns the church at Philippi about the flesh he means something much more subtle. By “flesh” Paul doesn’t mean our physical bodies or sexual desires but a belief in Jewish privilege - that the people of Israel’s physical ancestry and ethnicity made them superior; and that that identity should be accepted by Gentiles to truly express proper Christian faith. Paul is not repudiating Jewishness, he’s not hating his ancestry, he’s challenging the notion that circumcision is necessary to be a part of the people of God and that Jewishness was the normative means for religious faith and the superior advantage for those who shared it. So Paul will ironically claim the very best of that identity and that characterize it by a very vulgar word.
A word that if I read it on the radio or said it on the t.v. would receive the “beep” by censors – the NIV says “garbage” which isn’t all-together wrong but “dung, excrement or poop” gets us a lot closer. So Paul is challenging the notion that Gentile converts must adopt Jewish identity in order to full-fledged members of the church. In fact, he now argues that it is those who simply know and follow King Jesus that are “the circumcision,” in vs. 3. The only thing necessary for a proper identity is being “in Christ.” No further qualifier is necessary. No other status is required. As I was preparing for this sermon I became aware of an odd sub-culture of poop stories. I have one thing to say, “Don’t bring your poop stories into church.” And so are you an American – great, but that’s not necessary for being “in Christ’; in fact, it’s poop by comparison. Are you a democrat, a republican, well-educated, not so much, Oregonian, transplant? Well, whatever benefit you gain from such, whatever identity you wish to claim – it’s all poop when it comes to obtaining righteousness. Only one thing is necessary. Only one thing is needed – knowing King Jesus. And friends, the freedom from such a perspective is that it allows us to tell the truth about ourselves. It will even allow Paul to confess the harmful part of that other identity – persecuting the church, vs. 6. What are the identity markers that you boasts about, that you might look down upon others for lacking? Make a list and then write – it’s all just poop and don’t track it into God’s house.
I’ve been a Christian for many years in evangelical circles and know that “knowing Jesus” is something frequently talked about but only vaguely described or, at worst, terribly misunderstood – often a sort of spiritual 8-ball that we shake when we don’t know what to do – “Should I marry this person?”; “Should I quit my job?”. So I would like to unpack this a bit. What does Paul mean when he says he wants to “know Christ”?
For Paul, it clearly means knowing about Jesus outside of one’s own personal experience through the testimony of the eye-witnesses found in Scripture. Despite his personal encounter with the resurrected Jesus, Paul himself acknowledged that he learned many things about Jesus’ life from others, e.g. 1 Cor. 15:3, Gal. 1:18-19. For those of us, outside of Paul’s day and age, this outsider’s perspective means the gospel stories. This will keep us from vain wish-fulfillment or a Jesus of our own making and place our faith not simply in an emotive context but a real, flesh and blood and historical one. Illus. students who struggle emotionally with historical figures. It means that whatever personal encounter we might have with Jesus – it must always be with the Jesus we find in the pages of the Bible, from the testimonies of those who did the hard work of writing the gospel biographies about him. So when Paul is talking about the knowing Christ in the “power of his resurrection” he is referencing first and foremost not some personal experience of power per se but the real event declared by those who were there – who saw, touched, spoke and ate with Jesus, risen from the dead. Furthermore, this is why Paul can talk about something so strongly that he himself says he has not experienced yet and yet fully trusts. The “power of the resurrection” is the whole reason we have the NT and is a promise that we can know, even while we wait. It’s saying “know Jesus” because he has won, he has conquered the grave, he is LORD. If you are not regularly reading the gospels – you can’t know Jesus.
But Paul is also saying something else. Paul is not saying that we know Jesus like one might know about George Washington or Amelia Earhart, simply by encountering facts about their lives. While you can hardly know someone intimately without facts it is equally true that facts are not enough. We are asked to do more than believe but to follow him as well, to put his teachings into practice, to shape our life like his. And what’s interesting here is that Paul stresses not some personal intimacy or even prayer but “sharing his suffering and becoming like him in his death.” What does it mean to share “his sufferings”? On the one hand, “sharing in his sufferings” is living his teachings in our broken world. Try forgiving a person who has deeply wronged you, loving your enemies, confessing your sins, believing that your life or possessions are not your own.
But I would also argue that this goes beyond personal suffering. The word “sharing” or “participating” is an interesting word – it’s koinonia in the Greek which is also the word for the church in the NT. So Paul is suggesting that we don’t simply know Jesus by living his teachings personally but also bearing with one another corporately as the body of Christ. Philippians 3:10 could be read as “I want to know Christ – yes, to know the power of his resurrection and churching in his suffering, becoming like him in his death,” Philippians 3:10.
Churches should be places where we come to hear the story of Jesus and share our own. That’s how we find out how the two relate and help us know Christ. All of us long for relationships that are authentic, examples of others trying to figure out how to follow the Lord Jesus in the joy and wreckage of life.
This is what the church has been trying to say all along through a doctrine of providence – there is no place where God is not and therefore nothing is empty of meaning. In God’s amazing economy he makes horrible places contain the potential to serve his purposes because he is present. And in a world filled with pain – that’s good news. And friends that, Paul tells us, is an act of faith.
To know Jesus, in other words, is an act of faith to live a “radically unprotected life,” a cruciform life, shaped by the cross, to live dangerously open to others, revealing all that we genuinely are, and receiving all the pain and sorrow the world will give back in return. Why? Because that’s what God has done, that’s where God is, because God is that One who is most real. He conquered the grave.
