Matthew 21:1-11 (NRSV Updated Edition)
When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet:
Look, your king is coming to you,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. 8 A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”
~
"Jesus is doing something deliberately. He knows what he is doing, he is coming for a particular purpose: he is enacting the prophecies concerning the offering of the definitive sacrifice of the Davidic priestly, kingly figure, the Messiah.
"Over the next few days, if you read the Gospels that follow, you will see that he spends time in the temple trying to enable temple authorities to understand who he is and what he is doing. They are asking, by what authority are you doing these things. It's not much of them trying to catch him out as they wanted to be absolutely sure that he is who he says he is - after all, there had been any number of charlatans saying they were this person. But he is trying to make them understand who he is from within their own frame of reference, so they don't have to stone him for blasphemy, if they understand for themselves. But as we know, they are not going to, they are going to be frightened. And Jesus will go to his death.
"As we go through this week meditating on the Passion, following our Lord, try to think of the heart of the love that accompanied this intention. He was doing something for people for a particular purpose. And it's that purpose which has opened up for us, about which we are going to learn this week."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Palm Sunday 2020 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqUVcPuo25E)
~
Philippians 2:5-11 (NRSV Updated Edition)
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but 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.
Therefore God exalted him even more highly
and gave him the name
that is above every other name,
so that at the name given to Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
~
"What I want to talk about today in this text are two key terms. The first is going to be 'harpagmos' and that occurs in verse six. It's often translated like this: “Who although being in the form of God did not consider equality with God *a thing to be grasped*,” - as though equality was something to 'grasp at'. And then the second term we're going to look at occurs in verse 7, it's the verb 'kenoĊ'. It means to empty and in this case 'he emptied himself' and the noun for that is 'kenosis'. So when I refer to harpagmos it's a reference to what most of your translations have as a thing to be grasped. And when I refer to kenosis, it refers to that self-emptying.
[...]
"Harpagmos means 'to grasp'. Now, we're accustomed to translations that soften the edge of this, “something to be grasped,” as though the hymn were concerned with whether Jesus possessed equality with God or whether he refrained from clutching it. But the more provocative hearing is the active one. And I've got the insight for this from an essay by [C.F.D. Moule], in a volume called Apostolic History in the Gospel. [...] And so if we turn harpagmos from a thing to be grasped, where it's passive, to active, harpagmos is grasping: the act itself, the reflex of seizure that defines power in a rivalrous world.
"And once that comes into view the question “What does equality with God consist of?” becomes unavoidable. Is equality with God the right to take, to secure, to win, to compel recognition, to stand above the other? Or is equality with God disclosed precisely in the refusal of that whole mechanism? Paul's hymn, I'm going to argue, presses toward that second answer. And it doesn't do this by turning Jesus into a moralist, but by unveiling the divine life itself as non-competitive, non-acquisitive, not organized by scarcity, and not sustained by victims. The hymn is therefore profoundly anthropological. It places Adam and Christ as virtual mirror doubles, with the decisive difference located in grasping and its refusal.
[...]
"So the hymn is anthropological, it places Jesus and Adam as these mirror doubles with the decisive difference, again, located in grasping and refusal. But this is why when the hymn says “He emptied himself,” it should never be heard as a metaphysical self-erasure. 'Kenosis', to empty oneself, is not a subtraction problem. It's not a romanticizing of weakness. It's the historical form of non-grasping. It names what the refusal of seizure looks like when it becomes embodied life rather than just spiritual sentiment, rather than some kind of naive humility.
"The text the text itself joins these two movements - not grasping (harpagmos), and self-emptying (kenosis) - with the little adversative but which is not a grammatical hinge only but it functions kind of like a theological knife. [...] Grasping generates a world where rivalry escalates and sacrifice becomes the means of social repair. [...] Non-grasping generates self-giving, and self-giving in a world disciplined by rivalry is what the crowd calls failure. The hymn doesn't hide this: “even death on a cross” appears as an inevitable collision between a life not governed by grasping and a world that cannot tolerate such freedom because it exposes the world's own lie.
"Note what the hymn doesn't do: it doesn't employ sacrificial vocabulary to interpret the death of Jesus. This is not an oversight. It's an exposure. The cross is not introduced as a cultic requirement demanded by a violent divinity. It's seen as the end of a rivalrous social mechanism that needs victims to regain peace. The passion narrative itself is saturated with the mob, with accusation, with the unjust verdict, the public execution, and the hymn refuses to call this sacrifice in the way religious violence typically names its own work. Instead, the hymn moves toward vindication - “that he highly exalted him” - because the resurrection and the exaltation aren't add-ons to make Jesus death a tragedy in a meaningful way. They are God's verdict against the verdict of the crowd. They say the mechanism is a lie. The victim is not guilty. The order built on exclusion is not holy. And true lordship is not the right to destroy but the power to give oneself without retaliation.
"[...] [W]hat's at stake here is not about divine attributes but about the very definition of power itself. In the competitive field, power is grasping, it's taking, it's possession, it's control. It's the ability to secure an outcome, the ability to protect one's place by diminishing another. In the hymn, power is the refusal to turn being into possession, the refusal to make the other a rival, the refusal to secure the self by taking. This refusal is not just passivity. It's a decisive kind of agency, one that cannot be understood from within rivalrous reason because it refuses the very calculus by which rivalrous reason measures success. The world reads it as weakness because the world's never encountered agency that doesn't aim at superiority.
"And this is why the hymn is offered from Paul's perspective as an imitation: “Have this mind in you which also was in Christ Jesus.” Paul doesn't quote this as a curiosity. He sets it forward as a pattern by which the communal life, the ecclesia, any group of two or three or more gathered together is to be constituted. And one can say without exaggeration that the hymn is Paul's attempt to retrain the church's imagination about what it means to be like God. The line “have the same mind” is not an exhortation tacked onto doctrine. It's the very point at which doctrine becomes therapy - remember 'doctrine' and 'doctor' both come from the same root. Doctrine is meant to heal. The community will either model itself on the rivalrous world and baptize that rivalry with pious language or it will model itself on the one who will not grasp and therefore become slowly and often painfully a new kind of people."
- Michael Hardin, from teaching series "Jesus and the Transformation of Desire", session 2
[For analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for Palm/Passion Sunday (Year A), see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/passion_a/]
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