Teaching Summary: The Way of the Cross - Part 3

Teaching Text: Philippians 2:5–11

There is a word in the Greek of this passage worth sitting with: harpagmon. It is related to the word for grasping, or seizing. It has the feel of clutching something tightly, refusing to let it go.

Paul uses it to describe what Jesus chose not to do. Jesus, who had every legitimate claim to divine status and honor, did not grasp. Instead, he emptied himself (the Greek is ekenosen) and descended. From the heights of eternal glory, to servant, to human, to obedience, to death. Even death on a cross.

The Carmen Christi, the Hymn of Christ, traces this movement with breathtaking economy. It is possibly one of the oldest pieces of Christian worship we have. And its central claim is this: the cross does not just save us. It redefines what greatness looks like.

Every human community has a social calculus: who has status, who is deferred to, who is noticed. Theologians call the underlying impulse concupiscence, the disordered desire that curves the heart inward on itself. Augustine described it as incurvatus in se.

Most of us have learned to dress this instinct in respectable language. We don't say we want status; we say we want to make an impact. We don't say we want recognition; we say we want to use our gifts. The line between genuine service and desire for recognition is thinner than most of us like to admit.

Paul writes his letter to Philippi from prison, to a church fractured by rivalry and status-seeking. His response is not a conflict resolution strategy. He sings them a hymn.

The hymn begins at the top, with the eternal Son of God, who had every right to grasp his divine prerogatives. Then it traces a staircase descent: servant, human, obedient, death. Then, and Paul pauses here, even death on a cross.

In the ancient world, crucifixion was not merely painful. It was designed to maximize shame. The Roman orator Cicero argued that the word 'cross' should be kept far not just from a Roman citizen's body, but from his eyes, ears, and thoughts. Too degrading even to mention in polite company. The Alexamenos Graffito, scratched into a Roman wall around 200 AD, shows a man worshipping a crucified figure with a donkey's head. It is mockery. The earliest surviving image of Jesus is a joke.

Into that world, Paul says: this is what God looks like. This is what greatness looks like.

Every culture has a ladder. In first-century Rome it was explicit: slaves, freedmen, citizens, equestrians, senators, Emperor. Every knee bowed before Caesar. Every tongue confessed: Caesar is Lord.

Jesus arrives and gets off the ladder entirely. He washes feet. He touches lepers. He rides into Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey. And then he is executed as a criminal.

This is not the posture of someone managing his reputation. This is someone who has completely reordered what greatness means.

Where am I grasping for status or control?

The text doesn't invite us to admire the descent from a safe distance. It says: have this same mindset. Which means an honest audit is required.

Grasping tends to show up in four specific places:

In our need to be right. Status-seeking hides behind intellectual confidence. The need to be right is often less about truth and more about position.

In our difficulty receiving help. Needing help is a posture of dependence. Grasping, self-sufficient people find that kind of lowering uncomfortable.

In resentment when someone else is recognized. When someone is praised and our first instinct is not gladness but something smaller and darker, that is harpagmon.

In how we handle being overlooked. Do we sulk? Subtly retaliate? Tell our own story louder to compensate?

Therefore, because of the descent, the emptying, the cross, God exalted him to the highest place. Paul borrows language directly from Isaiah 45, where God says of himself: before me every knee will bow. He is applying it to the crucified Jesus.

The one mocked in Roman graffiti. The one executed as a criminal. Every knee. Every tongue.

And crucially, the exaltation doesn't change what Jesus was on the way down. He doesn't become a different kind of Lord because he's been raised. He is fully revealed as the Lord he always was, the one whose power looks like love, whose greatness looks like descent.

This is the grain of the universe. Self-giving love is not just a noble quality. It is how reality actually works.

It's not hard to agree with this intellectually. Servant leadership, the last shall be first, we nod along. But we live in a world optimized for visibility, recognition, and ascending the ladder. The church is not immune.

The cross doesn't shame us into performing humility. That's just grasping with better optics. It invites us into something more radical: an actual reordering of what we want. Where we genuinely stop calculating who is noticing. Where we can celebrate someone else's recognition without it costing us something. Where we can serve without needing the service to be seen.

That kind of freedom doesn't come from trying harder. It comes from being captured by a vision of Jesus, who, being in very nature God, made himself nothing, and finding, slowly, that his pattern is becoming our own.

Sit with Philippians 2:5-11 as a prayer this week. Read it slowly, more than once. Let it ask its question of you.

When you find the place where grasping lives, and you will find it if you're honest, don't rush past it with self-criticism. Just bring it to Jesus. He's already there, at the bottom of the ladder, saying: you can let go.

Jesus, you did not grasp. You poured yourself out.

Show me where I am grasping, for status, for recognition, for control.

Give me the courage to release it.

And form in me the mind that was in you.

Amen.