“For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ”: words of St Paul from our first reading. Scholars suggest that Paul had a special affection for the Church he founded at Philippi, to whose members he wrote this letter. He knew they shared many of the problems and afflictions he was facing, he admired their resilience and endurance, and valued their love and support for him. Now he writes to them, from his own imprisonment, in terms of affection and fellow-feeling.
Philippi was a city of some importance, in Greek Macedonia, which is a part of the Roman world Paul had felt specially called to as a missionary. The small Christian church there was formed mostly out of the poorer folk of the city, and yet the people of that church had shown themselves to be both firm in their faith and open-handed in their generosity.
But they are surrounded by opposition; and we might well feel we’re in much the same boat when Paul uses words like “Their end is destruction; their god is the belly, and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.” Their end is destruction - I find my thoughts drawn to our sisters and brothers in the embattled Christian communities of the Middle East, and especially to the many Christian refugees fleeing from Isis and other hard-line Muslim forces. Their god is their belly - I find my thoughts drawn to secular society in which we have to be constantly entertained, in which the highest aim can seem to be to grab as much as you can get, and in which consumption and celebrity are prized and applauded.
Having said that, Paul was writing to a small new church surrounded by the pagan religions that dominated the Roman Empire of his day. There are similarities to our situation, but some big differences too, which I’ll come to later. But what Paul writes next is surely as appropriate to us as it was to the Philippians to whom he was writing: for he tells them that we are already citizens of heaven.
In saying that, what he means is that whatever other powers or authorities or cultural norms may seek to govern and direct our lives within the world in which we live, we are to be kingdom people, who always find our example for living in our Lord Jesus Christ, and take our instruction and command from God. Jesus spoke a lot about the kingdom: not as a far-off piece of wishful thinking but as something that was already present wherever he was preaching and teaching and healing. When Jesus talks about the kingdom it isn’t an area of land with geographical borders. Kingdom is what happens when we serve God as our King, when we think of ourselves as belonging to him. Where there’s love in action, changing and restoring lives, the kingdom is being lived it is present among us.
The kingdom is both present reality and future hope, as we read Paul and visit the Gospel stories of our Lord, there is always a sense of “now but not yet”. The kingdom is present among us when people are living and working and loving as disciples of Jesus; but the kingdom will not be fully established until, as Paul writes to the Philippians, Christ returns from heaven to make all things subject to his rule.
For now “many live as enemies of the cross of Christ”: now the Church is surrounded by people who challenge what we believe. In some places Christians are openly persecuted: they need our prayer and our practical support. Here we probably won’t face anything worse than ridicule or argument, or more likely, most of the time, simply apathy. “You live your way, we’ll live ours,” people say, in today’s pick-and-mix western society. Churches are mostly surrounded by people who think quite fondly of us in fact. People are generally happy to support us and even come along to the odd event. Maybe church is thought of as dated and quaint, not the sort of thing younger folk would want to be part of; but it’s nice that it’s still around, for all that.
But that could be the most insidious threat of all; and it points up the main difference between the church of today and the young church at Philippi to whom Paul was writing. They were young and unknown, and there was nothing of the status quo about them. Whereas we bear the weight of generations of faith and service and witness, and people have expectations and make assumptions when they look at the church, as to what it should be doing, and what role it should be playing.
A supportive one mostly; an institution of the establishment, and part of the fabric of society. Bishops sit in the House of Lords, and ‘living a good Christian life’ is thought of as much the same as being nice, a good neighbour, and a loyal and law-abiding citizen. When people tell me, as they do, that they don’t have to come to church to be a good Christian, that’s probably the definition of Christian they mean.
I’m sure all of us here can tick that box. For the most part we’re nice, we’re good neighbours and law-abiding citizens. But Paul would not have recognized that description as an adequate description of the Christian faith he taught. “Our citizenship is in heaven” he told the Philippians. Good citizens we may be, but Christians can never be uncritical citizens: our first allegiance is to our Lord, and we judge in his light what earthly powers require of us.
Our Gospel reading shows us Jesus setting his feet on the road to Jerusalem - not in order to take part in its government or to support those who do, but to face the death that is their only answer to his message. The way of God often runs counter to the way of the world; as we follow Christ, his cross is both our salvation and our example. He calls us to live cross-shaped lives, by which I mean lives shaped by the cross, and all that our Lord has won for us, and lives that, whatever the world decides or determines, reach upwards into fellowship with God, and outward into fellowship with our neighbour.
In his letter to the Philippians Paul is bold enough to offer himself as an example to them of what cross-shaped living is like. “Be like me,” he dares to say. In their lives, Paul and his companions have done their best to model Christ - in love, in self-giving and self-offering, in their endurance of all kinds of disappointment and opposition: in a fundamental change of mindset in which Christ is given in their lives the dominion they pray he will come to have on earth.
The easiest thing for the church to do in a society like ours is to be quiet and nice and unobtrusive. Church can then become just one more community activity among the many that people might choose to do. It’s a safe and comfortable place to be, but it would never have been enough for Paul. He urges the Philippian church to dare to live in a way that is new and different and truly Christ- and cross-centred. In him we find the truth we need, the sense we need of purpose and identity. “Life is ours to lose in the service of others,” someone once said. Paul would have okayed that, I think: Christlike, cross-shaped living. His message to us, as to those at Philippi, is this: we are citizens of heaven already - practise for heaven by living better lives on earth.
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