PHILIPPIANS 2:9-11

9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Verse 9 How could God the Father exalt God the Son any further? Clearly he couldn’t; within the Godhead Father, Son and Spirit exist in equality. But in taking on human form, the Son had “made himself nothing”, and so the question is: on what basis does he now return to heaven? For as we’ve seen, his assumption of human form wasn’t a temporary expedient for thirty-three years. It was a permanent change in his nature:

And didst Thou love the race that loved not Thee?
And didst Thou take to Heaven a human brow?
Dost plead with man’s voice by the marvellous sea?
Art Thou his Kinsman now?

But in fact what did happen, says Paul, is that the One with the nature of a servant was taken right to the top. (“Exalted him to the highest place” is all one word in Greek, meaning roughly “placed him above”.) And the ordinary human name “Jesus” – one of the most common boys’ names in first century Palestine – is now the one to which not only heaven and earth, but even hell itself, must bow in submission.

Why does Paul make this point? Is he trying to say, “And if you live as the servant of other Christians, one day God will exalt you”? Well, possibly; that’s true enough – the last will be first, and he who gives away his life will find it again. The Bible reminds us often enough that we will reign with Him.

But Paul doesn’t make the comparison here, and I suspect it isn’t in his mind. Rather, he’s concerned to say: if Jesus is now the greatest person in the universe, there is no greater example to follow anywhere. And if he commands us to be servants of one another, as he did in John 13, then the authority with which he speaks has got to be absolutely determinative for our lives.

Verse 10 There’s the submission of the knee ­– physically demonstrating Jesus’ authority – and the submission of the tongue – acknowledging it in explicit words. Our submission to Jesus needs to be a matter of both life and language, heart and mouth. After all, that’s how we become Christians: confessing with the mouth and believing in the heart (Romans 10:9).

It isn’t enough just to speak the words; we need to prove we mean them by the decisions of our heart and the practice of our lives. And it isn’t enough just to have a heart commitment; we need to admit it openly so that everybody knows where we belong.

But of course what’s in the back of Paul’s mind is an Old Testament passage he knew well (and had already quoted in Romans, just a couple of years before): that part of Isaiah where God is explaining his greatness to Cyrus, arguably the most powerful human being in the world:

22 "Turn to me and be saved,
all you ends of the earth;
for I am God, and there is no other.

23 “By myself I have sworn,
my mouth has uttered in all integrity
a word that will not be revoked:
Before me every knee will bow;
by me every tongue will swear.”

Not everybody in Philippi would have known this reference (few of them would have been Jewish, which is why Philippians is the only letter of Paul’s to contain not a single direct Old Testament quotation). But what Paul is clearly implying by this citation – as if he hadn’t made his opinion abundantly clear before – is that the Jesus who died on the cross is actually just as much God as the Father who exalted him. The cosmic ruler of Isaiah and the exalted Christ of Philippians are actually one and the same.

Verse 11 “Jesus Christ is Lord”. Tom Wright has written powerfully about the revolutionary implications of these words – especially in a letter to Philippi, so proud of being Roman, so dependent on its links to a succession of Emperors. What did it mean to say Jesus was “Lord”? Wright says this:

The main challenge of the term, I suggest, was not to the world of private cults or mystery-religions, where one might be initiated into membership of a group giving allegiance to some religious "lord". The main challenge was to the lordship of Caesar, which, though certainly "political" was also profoundly "religious". Caesar demanded worship as well as "secular" obedience; not just taxes, but sacrifices. He was well on the way to becoming the supreme divinity in the Greco-Roman world, maintaining his vast empire not simply by force, though there was of course plenty of that, but by the development of a flourishing religion that seemed to be trumping most others either by absorption or by greater attraction. Caesar, by being a servant of the state, had provided justice and peace to the whole world. He was therefore to be hailed as Lord, and trusted as Saviour. This is the world in which Paul announced that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, was Saviour and Lord.

If we truly believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, this conviction will radically alter the way we relate to the world around us. We can’t share the same priorities as most people, and we can’t live complacently in the presence of systems and arrangements that brush aside Jesus and his kingdom distinctives:

When we say "Alleluia! Christ is risen!" we are saying that Jesus is Lord of the world, and that the present would-be lords of the world are not. When we sing, in the old hymn, that "Judah's Lion burst his chains and crushed the serpent's head," are we ready to put that victory into practice? Are we ready to speak up for, and to take action on behalf of, those even in our own local community, let alone farther afield, who are quietly being crushed by uncaring and unjust systems? Are we ready to speak up for the truth of the gospel over the dinner table and in the coffee bar and in the council chamber?

For more excellent thinking about the Lordship of Christ, see Marianne Meye Thompson’s brilliant, thoughtful analysis of what the term means, and how it applies to the tensions of living in a pluralistic age.

Finally, notice how Paul ends: “to the glory of God the Father”. Jesus’ concern was always to bring glory to his Father: in the past he did it by completing the work he was given to do (John 17:4), and in the present he answers our prayers in order to bring glory to the Father (John 14:13). In the future, he will return “in his Father’s glory” (Matthew 16:27).

Jesus doesn’t seek glory for himself, he explains, but the Father seeks it for the Son (John 8:50). So both Father and Son work to bring glory to each other. And if God the Father, exalts Jesus to the highest place, and gives him the name above every name, Jesus’ use of that position will be calculated to achieve just one end: he wants to enhance the glory of the Father.

So there’s a final reminder, right at the end of the hymn, of the importance of our living in mutual submission to one another. If even Father and Son defer to one another, and make it their aim to bring glory to each other, rather than themselves – how can any Christian pursue a career plan of self-promotion?