At the end of last year, my wife and I renewed our passports. It was a relatively simple process. Obtaining the proper photos to send was the part which took the most effort. Despite news stories and anecdotes about long delays in processing, our relatively simple renewals went through in about a month. One interesting result, however, is that though we mailed our renewal applications at exactly the same time, one of us received an updated passport in the older “ePassport” format while the other received a newer format, “Next Generation” passport (see the picture of examples from the government web site).
Either one of our documents will allow us to travel to go see our grandchild again or to make another excursion to British Columbia in Canada. These little blue booklets are proof of our identity as American citizens. But what is the proof of our identity as Christians, as followers of Jesus Christ? In our text for this Sunday, Philippians 3:17 – 4:1, Paul warns the church at Philippi against those who wish to base their spiritual identity, and citizenship, on false documentation.
Verse 17 begins with Paul enjoining his readers to imitate him as well as others who follow his example. We often think of the call to imitate Jesus (WWJD), which Paul has affirmed in chapter 2 verse 5. But we less often notice Paul’s occasional injunction to imitate him (see also I Corinthians 4:16 and 11:1). Here he adds to that call for imitation the models to be found in others like him, perhaps his apostolic companions or simply other faithful Christians in Philippi.
Paul then immediately jumps to a warning in verses 18 and 19 about those who are not to be imitated. While some may wish to imagine his tirade is against supposed Christians given to physical pleasures (“their god is the belly” in verse 19), his “I have often told you of them” in verse 18 should take us back to the beginning of this same chapter, verse 2, and his warning against those who are insisting on circumcision for Gentile Christians. Paul is concerned about what some supposed Christians are relying on as spiritual passports, both for themselves and others.
The old identity markers of Jewish identity, circumcision, a kosher diet, etc. are not only old style but obsolete for new Gentile believers in Jesus. There’s some debate about Paul’s meaning, but it’s likely circumcision again which is his focus here. “Their god is the belly” points to the physical region of the body they wish to emphasize and “their glory is their shame” indicates that “private parts” which one would be ashamed to display are in fact their claim to glory. These are Christians who suppose their “passport” to spiritual status is a certain human generated condition of their bodies.
That reliance on circumcision is why Paul says those he is warning about are “enemies of the cross of Christ.” They are relying on what they have done to themselves versus what God has done for them in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus. They are basing their identity on the wrong things, on their own physical makeup rather than on the grace of God.
So in contrast to that false documentation in physical flesh, in verse 20 Paul declares, “But our citizenship is in heaven.” That word “citizenship” might also be translated “commonwealth” or even “government.” He goes on to say how that heavenly citizenship consists in a hope which comes solely from that direction, “a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Just that word “Savior” continues the political imagery Paul is employing here. The emperor Augustus had been named “savior” because he had “saved” Rome and brought it peace. To use that name for Jesus, a rare thing at that time for Paul, after talking about citizenship or government, was to additionally make it clear that Christian identity and citizenship came from the heavenly Savior, not from an earthly political power.
That thought of a new and heavenly government in Jesus is carried forward in verse 21 as Paul argues that Jesus “will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.” As Paul has already said at the beginning of Philippians 2, Jesus overcame and was exalted by allowing himself to be humbled, like us, in His body. Our identity and hope comes from our Lord’s own movement from humiliation to glory.
The text’s last verse, the first of chapter 4, cements the idea of Christian citizenship in and through the work of Jesus on the Cross by Paul’s call to his brothers (and sisters) to “stand firm in the Lord” even while he calls them, those who faithfully learn from and imitate him, his own “joy and crown.” Paul places his own citizenship and identity and authority all in and with the community of those who, like him, look to Jesus and nowhere else for identity, country, citizenship.
Those new passports are important to my wife and me. They show who we are and where we belong for now. But much, much more important, even if passports are lost or expired, or a nation overrun like is happening in Ukraine, is our identity, our citizenship in Jesus.