The Message Remix (353 page)

Glory to God in the church!

Glory to God in the Messiah, in Jesus!

Glory down all the generations!

Glory through all millennia! Oh, yes!

Wake up from your sleep,

Climb out of your coffins;

Christ will show you the light!

INTRODUCTION
PHILIPPIANS

 

This is Paul’s happiest letter. And the happiness is infectious.
Before we’ve read a dozen lines, we begin to feel the joy ourselves—the dance of words
and the exclamations of delight have a way of getting inside us.

But happiness is not a word we can understand by looking it up in the dictionary. In fact, none of the qualities of the Christian life can be learned out of a book. Something more like apprenticeship is required, being around someone who out of years of devoted discipline shows us, by his or her entire behavior, what it is. Moments of verbal instruction will certainly occur, but mostly an apprentice acquires skill by daily and intimate association with a “master,” picking up subtle but absolutely essential things, such as timing and rhythm and “touch.”

When we read what Paul wrote to the Christian believers in the city of Philippi, we find ourselves in the company of just such a master. Paul doesn’t tell us that we can be happy, or how to be happy. He simply and unmistakably
is
happy. None of his circumstances contribute to his joy: He wrote from a jail cell, his work was under attack by competitors, and after twenty years or so of hard traveling in the service of Jesus, he was tired and would have welcomed some relief.

But circumstances are incidental compared to the life of Jesus, the Messiah, that Paul experiences from the inside. For it is a life that not only happened at a certain point in history, but continues to happen, spilling out into the lives of those who receive him, and then continues to spill out all over the place. Christ is, among much else, the revelation that God cannot be contained or hoarded. It is this “spilling out” quality of Christ’s life that accounts for the happiness of Christians, for joy is life in excess, the overflow of what cannot be contained within any one person.

 

 

From:
Paul was under house arrest in Rome for disrupting the peace. House arrest was a holding tank for the accused before his trial. Paul had been waiting several years for that trial. Under the Roman system, the accused paid for his own rent, food, blanket, pen, ink—everything. Hence, Paul depended on money from friends. It was dangerous to support someone accused of an imperial crime, but the believers in the distant town of Philippi sent funds anyway. Despite being chained to a Roman soldier, Paul spent his time dictating letters. Colleagues wrote them out and then hand-carried them to their destinations, as there was no postal service.

 

To:
Philippi was a Roman colony in the mountains north of Greece. It was full of fiercely patriotic Italian war veterans who despised Jews like Paul. There was no synagogue, but only a place by the river where a few women met to pray. One of those women was Lydia, a dealer in luxury fabric and the matriarch of a large household. Paul had met Lydia during a brief stay in town (before the veterans ran him out). She and some of her relatives, clients, and slaves had embraced Jesus, and since then these embattled believers had not only hung onto their faith but financed Paul repeatedly.

 

Re:
The early 60s A.D. Patriotism in Roman cities involved festivals in honor of Caesar, the goddess Roma, or other gods. The whole town poured into the streets for processions with banners and images, sacrificial rites, speeches, food, and sometimes cult prostitution or self-mutilation. Jews and Christians who didn’t show up were considered unpatriotic, antisocial, and atheistic. Worse, there were rumors that Christians ate flesh and blood at their “love feasts,” where all manner of incest and vice supposedly went on.