{N}2,{/}6 {N}THE MYSTERY OF THE SON{/}
This text of Paul is one of the most important of the New Testament. It is known that from the very beginning of the preaching of the apostles, the great challenge of faith has been to situate Christ in relationship to the only God, his Father. The starting point of any effort to define the faith was the certainty that Jesus was "the Son:" this was his "name" in the biblical sense of the word (Heb 1,4-5), that is, the name that best expressed the essence of his being and his mission. The Resurrection had confirmed it and when the apostles reflected on the past, they remembered many words and insinuations of Jesus, as well as some of his gestures that confirmed this evidence: having come after many servants and prophets, he had acted with the authority and the freedom of the Son (Mt 11,26). Peter's first speeches assert the glorification and the lifting up of Jesus-Messiah to a divine rank (Acts 2,33) and for some time they were contented with these expressions. But now, in the letter to the Philippians, Paul is going to spell out the trajectory of the Son of God who came down to us.
It is clear that in these lines Paul attributes to Jesus the prophecy of the Servant that we read in Is 52,13-53,12: the Servant of Yahweh, going through humiliation, will attain his glorification. His sufferings will allow him to become the Redeemer. But in this place, Paul emphasizes the free decision of Christ who renounced everything thus becoming as nothing; in this way he gives the text a new meaning.
{C}Being divine in nature{/}. The text says precisely: "being in the form of God". But in Greek, the formmeans the way of being, what caracterizes the being of someone. Likewise we read in verse 7: he took on the form of servant.
{C}Taking on the nature of a servant.{/} The first meaning of the Greek word is "slave." But this was never Jesus' nature. Accepting that the punishment of the cross was reserved to the slaves, the text distinguishes this humble condition from the ensuing acceptance of the cross. The Greek term then, should be understood in the sense of servant it usually has in the Bible: Moses, servant of God; Paul, servant of Jesus Christ... Although Paul wanted to express very forcefully the self-abasement of Christ, he had, on the other hand, before his eyes the prophecy of the Servant. Christ {C}emptied himself {/}relinquishing the nature proper to God and taking on a fully human nature, that of the Servant redeemer.
We have here a very deep intuition of the mystery of Jesus, Son of God. His identity, or his personality is all encompassed in this self-{C}abasing{/} followed by an exaltation that leaves Paul astonished. We have to acknowledge that, too often, we are content with words when speaking about the mystery of the Trinity, and unconsciously we keep the image of three persons quite similar to one another, and inserted in one common nature. And without saying so, we imagine God as established in an unmovable and immutable eternity, as the philosopher Aristotle conceived him. We forget that God is {C}the Father{/}, the Father from whom all comes.
The Son shares all that God the Father is; the Son is the image of God the Father, but is God in a very different way. It would not be appropriate to press too much the word "image" that we read in Col 1,15, because it is part of a series of terms that in different ways translate the relation of the Son to the Father. He is the Word (Jn 1,1), the Radiance (Heb 1,3), the Wisdom... The Son is neither a reproduction, nor a rival of the Father. If the Father projects the Son in eternity, this is so because the dynamics of love is inscribed in the innermost part of the God-Love. The total generosity and the self-communication which is proper of the Father, causes this other face of love, which consists in being detached from oneself, emerge in front of him; and this losing himself in order to be retaken in the divine unity is proper of the Son.
So then, when Paul says that Christ emptied himself, this self-abasing is previous to the humiliations that Jesus experienced in his human nature. In saying that Christ did not claim equality with God, Paul does not refer to some privileges or some wellbeing that Jesus could have reserved for himself in the midst of humankind, because it is in God himself that the Son {C}emptied himself{/}.
Now then, the movement by which the Father projects his Word in eternity, continues with the creation of the universe: it is in this created universe that the Son attains the end of his self-abasement. In eternity he empties himself in order to enjoy again the riches of the Father and, if we are allowed this expression, he gives the divine life its rhythm and, as it were, its breath. But on entering the universe, he fixes there the moment which marks the unfolding of time, before and after his Incarnation. In that precise moment he is born in a little corner of our world, in order to undertake there the experience of our limitations, beginning with the experience of time that brings all created beings to death.
The Bible asserts that the Son has come {C}to seek and to save the lost{/} (Lk 19,10), and that God has sent his own Son to {C}destroy sin{/} (Rom 8,3). In this situation, if the purpose of his Incarnation is to make up for an original failure, it is necessary to confront these truths with what has just been said. How is it possible that this self-abasement of the Son be an eternal characteristic of his person and, at the same time, that the purpose of his coming and his Passion be to repair an original fall that happened after the creation? Any answer and discussion in this matter is futile, since we can understand neither eternity nor the mutual relations between eternity and time: for God there is no before or after. The Bible enjoins a vision of history where creation, sin and redemption follow each other but all of it is but one only reality in God's world.
It is therefore in the divine mystery itself that we encounter the model that Jesus would propose to his disciples (theologians like to respect the Greek word "kenosis" which means simply "to become nothing"). And it is known that, according to Mark 8,38, and even more in Luke 8,23 and John 12,24, Jesus speaks of this losing himself, not as a duty he would impose on his disciples, but rather something indispensable for all.
Therefore, Christ's Resurrection, which the Church places at the very center of its liturgy, is not merely a glorification of Jesus that we celebrate, at times, without deep conviction. Neither is it a posthumous honor prepared for him by God, an immortality of a higher category than that to which we aspire. It is not just the return to life of a certain Jesus through whom the Son would have made himself present on earth while remaining up there. It is truly the return of the Son to the Father. The Son who "for a little while was placed lower than the angels" (Heb 2,9) finds again the Name and the Glory (John expressly says so in Jn 17,5). At this point Christ is true God and true man. He is the man in God, or the glorified man. {C}Jesuschrist is Lord{/}, and he brings back with himself the whole of creation (Col 1,20).
The mysterious person of the Son, then, has two faces. In our world and in time, only the course of Jesus, of which Mary and the apostles were witnesses, can be seen. This manifestation followed other comings of the Wisdom to our world (Wis 9,10; Sir 24,8; Jn 1,5 and 8-10) and brought them to an end. And on the other hand, in eternity, the Son is born of the Father, but only to empty and lose himself and be taken up again. Then the mutual joy that the divine persons have in each other reaches its consummation. But Paul does not bring us to this point and it is in John's Gospel that we are somewhat enlightened in this respect (Jn 14,17).
We must acknowledge the poverty of our language, which will always be inadequate to comprehend the mystery of God. For centuries, Christians have torn one another in the name of those different expressions about faith, instead of humbly accepting that there may be others that are more sensitive than ourselves to certain aspects of the mystery. There is not just one way to express our faith, otherwise the Church would not have received the Gospels of Mark and of John at the same time.

{N}4,{/}5 {C}May everyone experience your gentle and understanding heart.{/} Paul uses a word that describes a person who is open, welcoming and of good character.

