York Minster

Liberation and Change

Date: 15th March 2009
Preacher: The Reverend Canon Dr Jonathan Draper

Two of the great biblical themes come together in our readings for this evening: themes which should characterise our understanding of the life and death of Christ and how we are to live the Christian life; that is to say, these are two of the great themes for Lent.

In our OT reading from Exodus we have the beginning of the story of Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt: the defining story in the long history of the Jewish people. In our NT reading from St Paul’s letter to the Christians at Philippi we not only have St Paul’s understanding of our liberation from sin and death in Christ, we also have his challenging understanding of what that should do to us as we seek to follow Christ.  

The exodus of the Israelites from Egypt has become the proto-type of all liberation stories. An oppressed people are led by an inspired leader to throw off their oppression and to make their own way in the world. And as many liberation movements have found, throwing off oppression is the easy bit, as it were; discovering what it means to live as liberated people is quite another. In our own day I think it is fair to say that South Africa, having had its exodus experience is now in the desert of self-discovery as it seeks to become a new people, a people no longer defined only by their oppressed past but by a future being built and imagined as they go along. The Israelites, having thrown off the Egyptian yoke found themselves in the desert for 40 years trying to learn what it means to be God’s people. Liberation does not immediately lead to the promised land.

St Paul’s letter to the Philippians proclaims and develops what it means to have been liberated from sin and death by Christ. In it we have one of the most important theological themes for understanding the nature of Christ: who he was, what he did and how we are to understand him. This is the idea, from the Greek word, of kenosis, or self-emptying, and is used to understand how Jesus could remain God and also participate fully in our humanity. The key passage reads,

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

Christ empties himself in order to be fully human, to experience what we experience, and to live God’s will in our world. Christ humbled himself, as St Paul puts it, and became obedient to God in the world to such an extent that he was willing to die, and even to die a cruel and horrible death on a cross.   

But in St Paul’s view, this is simply to state the truth about our liberation, and not the end of the story. In much the same way that throwing off the yoke of oppression led the Israelites to keep moving towards the goal held out to them of the promised land, so St Paul urges the Philippians to move on, to understand that what Christ has done for them is not the end, but only the beginning of the story. We are now to leave behind what was, and building on Christ’s continuing work of liberation within us through the work of the Holy Spirit, to press on towards the goal of complete immersion in and commitment to living God’s will and being God’s presence in the world. To know the power of Christ and his resurrection in our lives we have to move on from it and live it out for ourselves in our life in the world: or, as St Paul puts it, ‘forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead’. Part of the point of this journey through Lent is to understand that our pilgrimage, like the one Jesus makes through his ministry towards the cross, is one in which there is nowhere to stop along the way as we seek to reach our goal, that full and final liberation where we are at one with God in Christ.

Amen.