On Philippians 3.4b – 14
Imagine a chick inside an egg. It decides at a certain moment to start pecking at the eggshell. Eventually it sticks its head outside the shell and looks around. And I think, surely it must say to itself something like “Cor blimey – I never imagined all this!” All it had ever known was the inside of a shell. What is beyond utterly astonishes and amazes.
In today’s first reading, Paul is talking about an experience like this. He was a Pharisee, an expert in it all – totally committed. At a certain point he dropped the lot. He had stuck his head out of that world, and discovered a dimension that overwhelmed all of it. He had found Christ.
It wasn’t a switch from one perfection to another. The Pharisees’ way was perfect in itself. All of a piece. But this new way with Christ is different – it’s perfect but also imperfect.
The experience of being a Pharisee was perfect in that he thought he was complete. It was all perfectly as it should be. That is not so with following Christ. Paul knows he has to hold on fast to what he has found – he can never rest on his laurels in the way he did as a Pharisee. He strains forward to what lies ahead. He must press on. He has not yet reached the goal.
So Paul moved from a world where everything was sorted, to a world where, paradoxically, everything was, yes, sorted, but also unfinished process. Christ has already made Paul his own, Christ’s end of the situation if perfect, but Paul still has to strive and strain to reach the goal. He is seeking to grow in his knowing, but paradoxically he is already completely known. We are called to know even as we are known.
In Christ there is not a simple truth that we can capture. The truth dances around. We can never rest on our laurels – we need to be alert, always growing and developing. This will lead to some degree of struggle and battle within us, for
we live in two worlds. We are part of the world that has made us – the modern world with its values, some of them good, some of them false. The false values are not always easy to gauge. We can recognise some of them fairly easily – the individualism and self-cultivation which have become so important for many people. The consumerism, and all the rest. Each of us in our lives is our own version of this. Like Paul, we have to press forward, straining to change. To grow into that second world in which, since our baptism, we have a foot.
You can’t live two lives. But we all do. All of us here live a life of sin, selfishness, judgement of others, poor judgement in general, wangling things for ourselves, failing to put ourselves in others’ shoes, failing to love. Yet at the same time we in Christ, and growing up into Christ.
Any human being’s life needs to be one. One life. Whatever we are doing – working, relating with other people, eating candy floss on the pier at Brighton, cutting our toenails, whatever it might be. Each of those situations finds its truth in Christ. Even my feet, to go back to toenails, are absolute miracles; and everything surrounding us is miraculous in a way we cannot begin to take in – it is all Christ, alive all around us, hidden behind a veil. There is a gradual lifting of the veil, as our pressing-on brings us more and more to see his face, and we grow in wonder. The amazing world around us is an emanation from God – it has come from God and will return to God. God is to be contacted in all of it. We can’t treat it in two ways at once, partly according to the ways of the world, and partly according to life in Christ. Our day out on the pier at Brighton can’t be seen with different eyes from our participating in the Eucharist and our daily prayers. Life is for living as one, not two persons.
Paul talks about pressing-on and straining towards the goal. Now – this has to be done in the new way, not the old way. The old way, that of Paul the Pharisee, was, he says, his own. His new lif, he says, is not his own. It didn’t come from himself – it came from Christ.
The secular world around us is energetically pressing on and straining forward, to goals that are often questionable. We need to be careful: growth into Christ can be approached just as another thing to be achieved by our own efforts, self-motivated, driven by our own energies. To escape from that we look to Christ. For a start, it’s important simply to be aware of the difference between self-striving and striving in Christ. We get on the right track when we are looking to Christ.
How do we gain as sense of Christ being in our lives? He comes to us in a variety of ways:
I have already mentioned the very world around us, if we open our eyes.
In the liturgy, especially the eucharist. If I start cutting corners on that, Christ’s face grows dimmer in me.
In daily prayer: if my prayer stops being daily I start slipping away, going dim.
In the corporate life of the people of God, in his body the Church.
In our service of our neighbour, we meet Christ in them.
Paul’s language about striving is fact not about individual effort, but about co-operating with Christ. Co-operating with him.
It’s not an anxious striving, but a growth in love, the love divine, all loves excelling. We are made in the image of God. So we are glorious already. The hymn we shall shortly sing says that we change – we are changed from glory to glory until we come to see his face.