I am trying to make head or tail of the readings I chose for this Sunday (from lectionary sources) and which seemed a good idea at the time, and now I'm not so sure.
Philippians 1: 21 - 30.
For me, says Paul, to live is Christ and to die is gain. I have long struggled with this attitude to life and recall a house group discussion many years ago, where most of us agreed we actually quite liked being alive and really weren't in such a hurry to die as the apostle seems to have been. And then he says he's torn between the two and doesn't know which to choose - but surely it isn't his choice anyway? He'd rather 'depart' (whatever that means) and be with Christ, but 'it is necessary' that he remains in the body for the sake of others. I do find all this puzzling to read and try to make any sense of (apologies for bad grammar). Somehow I find myself as a reader feeling guilty that Paul is held up on my account.
Then he tells the people that they are to stand firm as a sign, to those who oppose them, that they (the opposition) will be destroyed whilst you (the Philippians) will be saved. Oh, and by the way suffering is somehow a blessing (or that's what it seems to imply). I can't honestly say I want to be a sign to anyone that they're going to be destroyed, zapped, judged, condemned or whatever: I'd much rather be a sign towards salvation, hope, forgiveness, reconciliation etc. As for the privileges of suffering, well, hmm, there are times to say such things and times to stay very silent. I have never quite forgotten (even if I have forgiven) the person who told me that I must be very special that God was allowing me to experience such a pig of a time during initial ministerial settlement. Well, if that's so, I'd rather not have been special!
So, I'm not quite sure what I'll do with this passage yet but right at the moment it feels that somehow it is its very irritatingness (if there's such a word!) that makes it worth wrestling with. I guess sometimes we'd all like the realities of life to be replaced by some idealised version of eternity with Christ but we all have to get on with staying faithful in the messyness that is life. If we can be a sign of hope rather than despair, if we can show that our faith sustains us through struggles, questions and even doubts, then maybe it is somehow redeemed - but not in some kind of simplistic "gosh, God must really love you to kick you so hard" kind of way.
If anyone actually understands this letter (like people who wrote DPhils on it for example) perhaps they can explain it to me.
In the meantime, I am going to start playing with Matthew 20:1 - 16 which I might take from the angle not of rewards but opportunities for service (i.e. even late comers can find work to do in the Kingdom).
Comments
Its all a rhetorical strategy. If you say that dying is the best thing, but that you will nevertheless stay to be with the church, that makes the church feel really, really special. My own hunch is that Paul wasn't even facing death. Suffering takes its shape from the cruciform nature of Paul's theology and ethics which is why Phil 2.5-11 lies at the heart of the letter.
Or something like that.
Thank you. So, the last line of a successful doctoral thesis could be "or something like that" - I'll keep that in mind! :o)
Some of my university friends went around saying this sort of stuff while doing an engineering degree in North Lancashire at the age of 19 and 20. It didn't cut much ice with many of their fellow students. Probably because Lancaster wasn't on the top of Open Doors' persecution index even then (though someone did once argue with me about something) and the only thing that might have actually carried them off was the proverbial double decker bus - or a badly judged end of term practical.
More seriously, there may be people living on the edge for whom the task in hand genuinely becomes more important than mere survival. Then the perspective shifts. John Simpson talks about that sort of living beyond fear in his work as a foreign correspondent - waiting for the cruise missiles to hit his hotel in Baghdad, for instance because he was determined to report to the world what being under a late 20th century, high tech bombardment was like.
Christians reading this passage in situations of great danger may well find it connecting with their situation in ways we couldn't possibly imagine. As Sean has already said - and I think quite rightly - Paul may be laying it on with a trowel here to buck up his audience. But, if he wasn't in danger himself, might his readers have been?
...OSLT.
I really identify with this passage (with most of Phillipians, come to that, but particularly this bit and 3v10-11).
I can understand that people might be afraid of dying, but I don't get why people would not prefer life in heaven to life on earth. I mean, we are surrounded by suffering and pain, by oppression and greed and death and disease and raging poverty and war and rape and fear. Don't get me wrong, there's good stuff too - but don't you yearn to be free of all that crap and exist in the world of Revelation 7? But once we get there we can't play a role in transforming this world into that image - this life is the only chance we'll get to do that.
I also think it's best not to think of it as a choice between going on living and suicide or whatever, but as Paul wrestling with logic to persuade himself to go on persevering. And this is not just why he thinks it's a good idea to go on living - it's also presumably why God wants him to go on living since God surely has his best interests at heart and wants him in heaven too.
I don't think Paul was facing death and I don't think most of the references to suffering mean persecution (I think we tend to have a persecution-centric view of suffering in the church that leads many in the West to feel they are being persecuted when they're not.) "I want to share in his sufferings" - I want to share in Jesus' task and work, to identify with and empathise with the vulnerable and oppressed through sharing in their suffering and thus being able to act with them to transform their situation - to reject privilege and position and become a suffering servant like him. Not because suffering is an end in itself or somehow desirable but because Jesus did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made himself nothing to suffer with us and identified with those who suffered the most in his crucifiction - it IS a privilege to share in some small way in Jesus' work and suffer empathetically, however difficult it might be.
Thanks Tim, some useful thoughts to add to my mulling.
Sometimes I think it depends how life is for us when we read passages how they 'speak' to us - the whole "Baptist" thing about contextual, communal hermeneutics. I am currently working hard not to burn some Bible-reading notes on Job that are really annoying me with simplistic, pious claptrap, and this is probably shaping the way I read this passage. Also in my congregation there is no persecution or global scale suffering but plenty of people with difficult personal circumstances, so anything cheap or trite needs to be avoided even (more than usual).
As for wouldn't I rather be in Rev 7 than here and now - er no, sorry, I wouldn't. If that makes me mad, bad or a heretic, well so be it. I am content to be in this time and space (but that's another Pauline idea somewhere else I seem to recall!). It's not that Rev 7 wouldn't be fantastic, but any way I might begin to understand it would be flawed and humanistic. Anyway, there's so much stuff to do in the messyness of this world I don't really have too much time to speculate on the eschaton.