Although he was in the form of God, he did not regard
equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the
form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form,
he humbled himself, and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a
cross.
Therefore God highly exalted him, and gave him the name that
is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, in
heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
This hymn faithfully interprets Psalms 111 and 112. Heaven’s
wealth (Psalm 111) is here poured out onto the earth and the righteous man,
Jesus, (Psalm 112) in turn pours himself out in obedience to the Father. He
loans to the needy and gives to the poor from his heavenly form. And, for that
reason, the Father lifts him up and fills his house with wealth and riches,
making him the Sovereign over heaven and earth. Moreover, as Sovereign, his
children are now endowed with his own cruciform life and they, in turn, become
the truly powerful ones in the Land. In their obedience to the Father, they
await their inheritance, when they too will be the children of this psalm who
look back to their ‘father’—Jesus—and see in him the fountainhead of their
blessing. In the gospels this is clear but in Revelation it comes out visually
in a staggering way—it is not simply the wealth of earth that flows into the
Heavenly City Now Come To Earth, but heaven itself seems to have been
unleashed, and the flood of heavenly riches now descends. This is not a ‘spiritual’
blessing, but a real, and tangible descent of Heaven to Earth. The ‘house of
the Earth’ is filled to overflowing, as if the more that pours in, the more it
can hold, in an ever-greater, ever-expanding wine-skin.
But again—this wealth that pours down does so precisely
because of Jesus, the one who is poured out. As much as Heaven, in a type of
reckless abandon, fills the earth, so too has, and does, Jesus pour himself out
in a reckless abandon, even to the point of death. And, so too do his disciples
(his children), his martyrs.
One final point--in the gospel of Mark, the reaction of ‘fear’
is almost never a good thing. It signals not simply a lack of understanding and
a lack of trust but also seems to indicate an almost demonic blindness, a sense
that this age operates and sees only through a veil that routinely prohibits us
from seeing things from God’s point of view. A good example of this is the
scene on the boat where Jesus “sleeps” while the disciples fear that the boat
is about to drown. They ‘wake Jesus’ and Jesus rebukes the storm—and then the
disciples. The disciples had just been told that while the ‘farmer sleeps’ the
seed grows to a harvest. The should have seen that Jesus’ ‘sleeping’ is not due
to his lack of concern, or his lack of control, but quite the opposite—that is
resting in the assurance of he and his Father bringing to completion the
Kingdom of God. But the disciples miss it all. Instead, they become like the
demonic chaos that is surrounding them. In this psalm, the righteous man (and
his children), has a firm mind, is steady, and is not afraid in the face of bad
news. This is not, in Mark, so much of a ‘virtue’ that can be cultivated from a
purely human standpoint. In fact, it is not entirely clear in Mark how this
would come about except to say this—after the failure of the apostles and the women
and the remaining disciples a ‘young man’ tells the women that Jesus is going
before them to Galilee. Galilee is where everything began. Jesus is telling
them to ‘start over’ with him, now in his resurrected power. And this time,
their being “with him” will, or should, bring with it a lack of fear. They
should stand within the sphere of Jesus’ resurrected Presence, the Presence
that itself resulted in a contagious outflow of power (to the hemorrhaging
woman).
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