Philippians 2:1-11: Perfect Humility

“Jesus, Thou art all compassion,
Pure unbounded love Thou art;”

These words are from Charles Wesley’s memorable hymn, “Love Divine, all Loves excelling.”  They stress a key aspect of the Incarnation; in the absolutely unique event in which the “Word became a Flesh and dwelt among us,” God reveals the depth of his compassion for his creatures.

“Compassion” means “to suffer with” another.  But does it make sense to speak of God actually suffering?  God is perfect; God lacks nothing.  He is omnipotent and omniscient.  And God is holy, “set apart” from creation in all its finitude.  How could God suffer without being somehow less than God?  There have always been those who have insisted that God could not have truly become human, since that would have compromised His divine character.

In Philippians 2: 6-7, the apostle Paul tells us what it takes for an all powerful God to take on our humanity so completely that he can actually share in our sufferings.

The phrase, “Though he was in form of God…” refers to the “pre-existence of Christ outside of time and space.  To say he was in the “form” of God indicates that he shared perfectly in the exact nature of God, that he was, as Paul says, “equal to God” and fully divine. 

Yet he did not count equality with God “a thing to be grasped” but he “emptied himself.”  This phrase “emptied himself” has been the subject of debate over the years.  Some have thought it indicates that the divine Son divested himself of certain aspects of his divinity, that he shed certain attributes of God – ominiscience, perhaps, or omnipotence – in order to be human.

Instead of suggesting that the one who was “equal to God” became less than God for a time, this "emptying" is perhaps it is best to understood as an expression of his divine freedom.  God is not limited by some static, abstract definition of what God is supposed to be like,  In His freedom, God takes on “the form of servant” – he becomes human, fully equal to us.  Yet in sharing our humanity and “being born in the likeness of men,” he has not shed his “equality to God,” he has rather demonstrated a remarkable aspect of his sovereign freedom, the capacity for perfect humility. 

Karl Barth said,"If then, God is in Christ, if what the man Jesus does is God's own work, this aspect of the self-emptying and self-humbling of Jesus Christ as an act of obedience cannot be alien to God."

In his humility, God the Son is able to come alongside us and share fully in human suffering.  He is “all compassion” – suffering with us.  In his “pure unbounded love,” he is not limited by his majesty and omnipotence from meeting us face to face on our own ground as one of us.