Forsaking everything for the One thing

Philippians 3:4b-14

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ the righteousness from God based on faith. 10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal, but I press on to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it, but one thing I have laid hold of: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. 

The Apostle Paul surely thought he had his life together.  Within his social context he was a man of high status and was enjoying considerable professional success.  He was a Jew of good standing, hailing from the prestigious tribe of Benjamin, tracing his ancestry back to the beginning.  He had become a Pharisee, teaching and adhering to the most rigorous interpretation of the law.  

Often Christians mistakenly think that the law was this list of rules that no one could ever obey and that the attempt was misguided and futile, but of course the law was given by God and, in fact, it was possible to keep it.  When Paul says he was blameless with regard to righteousness under the law, he means it.  Paul suffered no existential angst as to his standing before God; he was always a confident man.  Paul even cites his persecution of the church as kind of credential.  He was the best of the best.  

He runs through his CV (and you get the impression he kind of enjoys doing it) to make the point that, though he of all people had a lot to boast about, he now considers these things to be effectively worthless compared to knowing Christ.  

Paul often wrote of his experience meeting Christ on the road to Damascus, and we often refer to this as his “conversion”, as if in that moment he swapped one religion for another.  But, although that encounter was a dramatic reorientation of his life - he was literally blind and regained his sight - he understood what happened as more like a revelation of the truth he had always been after.  Paul is not interested in finding fault with his former life - he was following the best path available - but the blinding light of Christ illuminated his reality such that everything seemed drab and dreary in comparison.   There was now only one object worthy of desire.  

I think it’s fair to say that Paul was a fanatic.  He said and did some fairly extreme things.  But really he was merely following things to the logical conclusion.  

Although Paul speaks of his previous status and accomplishments as rubbish, his point is not to trash his former life, but simply to say that, compared to what he knows now, there is no comparison.  The difference between any finite thing and the infinite is absolute.  

There is an essential point here which I barely grasp myself and struggle to explain anything like adequately.  But here goes… The first confession of faith is that God is one - not only that God is a category of one -  but it doesn’t really make sense to put God in category at all because God is the infinite and enteral source of all that is, and the ultimate goal of all things.   We compare God to other things because that’s the only language available to us, but ultimately God is incomparable.  Our ultimate destiny of those created in God’s image is unity with God, oneness with the One.  This is the very logic of eternity.  

On the road to Damascus Paul had an encounter with the Christ - an encounter which revealed to him that this God who he had always worshipped and served was ultimately found in the crucified and risen Lord.  Paul had, of course, always believed in God, and all the evidence suggests that Paul even continued to obey the law for the rest of his life.  But what changed for Paul was who this God actually was and is.  If God is most truly, most fully, revealed in Jesus Christ then this changes everything, not least the very character of God and the very nature of existence itself.    Christ is the fundamental Truth upon which every other truth depends, the ground in which anything and everything find its meaning or is shown to be meaningless, the one who is the end, the telos, of all things, the one who makes all things new.  

If this claim is true then it makes complete sense to want to know it more fully, to know it completely, even to abandon all else in the pursuit of this truth.  And the truly remarkable thing, which we must never lose sight of, is that God came to us as one who suffered.  So Paul, in his desire to know Christ, inescapably wants to know Christ in Christ’s suffering.  To know Christ, in fact, necessarily entails suffering.   For Paul knowledge of Christ requires imitating Christ, suffering like Christ for Christ and thus being raised with Christ as Christ himself was.   Paul’s forsaking his former life echoes the very arc of Christ’s life, who,  “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a human,

    he humbled himself

    and became obedient to the point of death—

    even death on a cross.

Thus for Paul, suffering - at least suffering that participates in Christ’s own - is not something to avoid but rather to embrace, leading as it does to the heart of the mystery of faith.

It must be said that this is all rather abstract and also not obviously true.  In some some sense Paul’s ministry was an attempt to communicate a universal truth revealed in his personal experience; in fact, he based his authority on the fact that he had a direct encounter with Christ.  This gave him special knowledge; the Gospel was entrusted to him.  The question Paul’s first hearers would’ve asked themselves and the the question we must also ask ourselves, is simply, Is this true?  and, if so, how would we know?

Any life, in order to be coherent, needs to be oriented to something; there is, for all of us, some fundamental truth toward which our lives are oriented, some organizing principle, even if we’re unaware of it - in fact, usually we take it as a given, unreflectively, in much the same way that Paul initially oriented his life towards mistaken goal. Of course, these days it’s harder to believe that there’s Truth toward which our lives are oriented, and most of us live with a hodgepodge of values, priorities, desires, and goals.   We center ourselves as the moral index of the universe.  

The challenge Paul makes to us is not only that there is foundational truth, but that - if there is - it is worth forsaking everything in order to know it, that this is, in fact, the point of our lives.  And, of course, the more specific claim that Paul makes to us is that Christ is that truth.  If Paul is right, then perhaps we ought to be a bit more fanatical ourselves, following the story to its logical conclusion, becoming like the one who, having discovered the pearl of great price, sold everything in order to buy it.  If Christ is the one thing, then Christ is worthy of our singular pursuit.  

Of course, there aren’t many Christians who live their lives quite like that.  For most of us, Christ is more of like a supplement or enhancement to our lives, not the one thing to which everything is oriented.  We have our plans, our desires.  And often these plans and desires are actually quite good, we may even have achieved many worthwhile things.  But it might still be true that none of this is worth comparing to actually knowing, in the fullest sense of that word, the One.  

Even Paul did not think that he’d reached that kind of knowledge, but rather it was something he must continually press on toward, a goal that he would not achieve in this life but only when, in the fullness time, he finally knew fully even as he had been fully known.  And this, I hope, is exactly why we are here, out of a desire, even a compulsion, whether we can articulate it or not, to orient ourselves to this goal and to know Christ more fully.  There is a way in which we might honestly say that we know Christ even as any of us must acknowledge that there is infinitely more to know.  To be satisfied in one’s knowledge is, in fact, to reveal that you don’t really know at all.  To know in part is to long to know in full.  

Perhaps what prevents us from growing in the knowledge of Christ is simply our aversion to suffering.  Now, I’m no fan of suffering; I generally avoid it.  But even so my limited experience suggests that righteousness suffering, when we bear the cost of faithfulness, actually is rewarding.   Paul determined that social standing and professional success were well worth sacrificing in order to reach his goal, and perhaps that is calculation that is a determination we need to make as well.