From: Isaiah 50:4-7
Third Song of the Servant of the Lord
[7] For the LORD GOD helps me; therefore I have not been confounded; there-
fore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame;
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Commentary:
50:4-9. The second song dealt with the servant’s mission (cf. 49:6); the third
song focuses on the servant himself. The term “servant” as such does not
appear here, and therefore some commentators read the passage as being a
description of a prophet and not part of the songs. Still, the context (cf. 50:10)
does suggest that the protagonist is the servant. The poem is neatly construc-
ted in three stanzas, each beginning with the words, “The Lord God” (vv. 4, 5, 7),
and it has a conclusion containing that same wording (v. 9). The first stanza
emphasizes the servant’s docility to the word of God; that is, he is not depicted
as a self-taught teacher with original ideas, but as an obedient disciple. The se-
cond (vv. 5-6) speaks of the suffering that that docility has brought him, without
his uttering a word of complaint. The third (vv. 7-8) shows how determined the
servant is: if he suffers in silence, it is not out of cowardice but because God
helps him and makes him stronger than his persecutors. The conclusion (v. 9)
is like the verdict of a trial: when all is said and done, the servant will stand tall,
and all his enemies will be struck down.
The evangelists saw the words of this song as finding fulfillment in Jesus—
especially what the song has to say about the suffering and silent fortitude of the
servant. The Gospel of John, for example, quotes Nicodemus’ acknowledgment
of Christ’s wisdom: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for
no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him” (Jn 3:21). But
the description of the servant’s sufferings was the part that most impressed the
early Christians; that part of the song was recalled when they meditated on the
passion of Jesus and how “they spat in his face; and struck him; and some
slapped him” (Mt 26:67) and later how the Roman soldiers “spat upon him, and
took the reed and struck him on the head” (Mt 27:30; cf. also Mk 15:19; Jn 19:3).
St Paul refers to v. 9 when applying to Christ Jesus the role of intercessor on
behalf of the elect in the suit pressed constantly against them by the enemies
of the soul: “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect?” (Rom 8:33).
St Jerome sees the servant’s docility as a reference to Christ: “His self-discipline
and wisdom enabled him to communicate to us the knowledge of the Father. And
he was obedient onto death, death on the cross; he offered his body to the blows
they struck, his shoulders to the lash; and though he was wounded on the chest
and on his face, he did not try to turn away and escape their violence” (”Commen-
tarii In Isaiam”, 50, 4). This passage is used in the liturgy of Palm Sunday (along
with Psalm 22 and St Paul’s hymn in the Letter to the Philippians 2:6-11), before
the reading of our Lord’s passion.
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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.
From: Philippians 2:6-11
Hymn in Praise of Christ’s Self-Emptying
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Commentary:
5. The Apostle’s recommendation, “’Have this mind among yourselves, which
was in Christ Jesus, requires all Christians, so far as human power allows, to
reproduce in themselves the sentiments that Christ had when He was offering
Himself in sacrifice—sentiments of humility, of adoration, praise, and thanks-
giving to the divine majesty. It requires them also to become victims, as it were;
cultivating a spirit of self-denial according to the precepts of the Gospel, willingly
doing works of penance, detesting and expiating their sins. It requires us all, in
a word, to die mystically with Christ on the Cross, so that we may say with the
same Apostle: ‘I have been crucified with Christ’ (Galatians 2:19)” ([Pope] Pius
XII, “Mediator Dei”, 22).
6-11. In what he says about Jesus Christ, the Apostle is not simply proposing
Him as a model for us to follow. Possibly transcribing an early liturgical hymn
(and) adding some touches of his own, he is—under the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit—giving a very profound exposition of the nature of Christ and using the
most sublime truths of faith to show the way Christian virtues should be prac-
ticed.
This is one of the earliest New Testament texts to reveal the divinity of Christ.
The epistle was written around the year 62 (or perhaps before that, around 55)
and if we remember that the hymn of Philippians 2:6-11 may well have been
in use prior to that date, the passage clearly bears witness to the fact that
Christians were proclaiming, even in those very early years, that Jesus, born
in Bethlehem, crucified, died and buried, and risen from the dead, was truly
both God and man.
The hymn can be divided into three parts. The first (verses 6 and the beginning
of 7) refers to Christ’s humbling Himself by becoming man. The second (the end
of verse 7 and verse 8) is the center of the whole passage and proclaims the ex-
treme to which His humility brought Him: as man He obediently accepted death
on the cross. The third part (verses 9-11) describes His exaltation in glory.
Throughout St. Paul is conscious of Jesus’ divinity: He exists from all eternity.
But he centers his attention on His death on the cross as the supreme example
of humility. Christ’s humiliation lay not in His becoming a man like us and cloa-
king the glory of His divinity in His sacred humanity: it also brought Him to lead
a life of sacrifice and suffering which reached its climax on the cross, where He
was stripped of everything He had, like a slave. However, now that He has
fulfilled His mission, He is made manifest again, clothed in all the glory that
befits His divine nature and which His human nature has merited.
The man-God, Jesus Christ, makes the cross the climax of His earthly life;
through it He enters into His glory as Lord and Messiah. The Crucifixion puts
the whole universe on the way to salvation.
Jesus Christ gives us a wonderful example of humility and obedience. “We
should learn from Jesus’ attitude in these trials,” Monsignor Escriva reminds
us. “During His life on earth He did not even want the glory that belonged to
Him. Though He had the right to be treated as God, He took the form of a ser-
vant, a slave (cf. Philippians 2:6-7). And so the Christian knows that all glory
is due God and that he must not use the sublimity and greatness of the Gos-
pel to further his own interests or human ambitions.
“We should learn from Jesus. His attitude in rejecting all human glory is in per-
fect balance with the greatness of His unique mission as the beloved Son of God
who becomes incarnate to save men” (”Christ Is Passing By”, 62).
6-7. “Though He was in the form of God” or “subsisting in the form of God”:
“form” is the external aspect of something and manifests what it is. When re-
ferring to God, who is invisible, His “form” cannot refer to things visible to the
senses; the “form of God” is a way of referring to Godhead. The first thing that
St. Paul makes clear is that Jesus Christ is God, and was God before the
Incarnation. As the “Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed” professes it, “the only-
begotten Son of God, born of the Father before time began, light from light, true\
God from true God.”
“He did not count equality with God as something to be grasped”: the Greek
word translated as “equality” does not directly refer to equality of nature but
rather the equality of rights and status. Christ was God and He could not stop
being God; therefore, He had a right to be treated as God and to appear in all
His glory. However, He did not insist on this dignity of His as if it were a treasure
which He possessed and which was legally His: it was not something He clung
to and boasted about. And so He took “the form of a servant”. He could have
become man without setting His glory aside—He could have appeared as He did,
momentarily, as the Transfiguration (cf. Matthew 17:1ff); instead He chose to be
like men, in all things but sin (cf. verse 7). By becoming man in the way He did,
He was able, as Isaiah prophesied in the Song of the Servant of Yahweh, to bear
our sorrows and to be stricken (cf. Isaiah 53:4).
“He emptied Himself”, He despoiled Himself: this is literally what the Greek verb
means. But Christ did not shed His divine nature; He simply shed its glory, its
aura; if He had not done so it would have shone out through His human nature.
>From all eternity He exists as God and from the moment of the Incarnation He
began to be man. His self-emptying lay not only in the fact that the Godhead
united to Himself (that is, to the person of the Son) something which was cor-
poreal and finite (a human nature), but also in the fact that this nature did not
itself manifest the divine glory, as it “ought” to have done. Christ could not
cease to be God, but He could temporarily renounce the exercise of rights that
belonged to Him as God—which was what He did.
Verses 6-8 bring the Christian’s mind the contrast between Jesus and Adam.
The devil tempted Adam, a mere man, to “be like God” (Genesis 3:5). By trying
to indulge this evil desire (pride is a disordered desire for self-advancement) and
by committing the sin of disobeying God (cf. Genesis 3:6), Adam drew down the
gravest misfortunes upon himself and on his whole line (present potentially in him):
this is symbolized in the Genesis passage by his expulsion from Paradise and by
the physical world’s rebellion against his lordship (cf. Genesis 3:16-24). Jesus
Christ, on the contrary, who enjoyed divine glory from all eternity, “emptied Him-
self”: He chooses the way of humility, the opposite way to Adam’s (opposite, too,
to the way previously taken by the devil). Christ’s obedience thereby makes up
for the disobedience of the first man; it puts mankind in a position to more than
recover the natural and supernatural gifts with which God endowed human nature
at the Creation. And so, after focusing on the amazing mystery of Christ’s humi-
liation or self-emptying (”kenosis” in Greek), this hymn goes on joyously to
celebrate Christ’s exaltation after death.
Christ’s attitude in becoming man is, then, a wonderful example of humility.
“What is more humble”, St. Gregory of Nyssa asks, “than the King of all creation
entering into communion with our poor nature? The King of kings and Lord of
lords clothes Himself with the form of our enslavement; the Judge of the universe
comes to pay tribute to the princes of this world; the Lord of creation is born in a
cave; He who encompasses the world cannot find room in the inn...; the pure and
incorrupt one puts on the filthiness of our nature and experiences all our needs,
experiences even death itself” (”Oratio I In Beatitudinibus”).
This self-emptying is an example of God’s infinite goodness in taking the initiative
to meet man: “Fill yourselves with wonder and gratitude at such a mystery and
learn from it. All the power, all the majesty, all the beauty, all the infinite harmony
of God, all His great and immeasurable riches. God whole and entire was hidden
for our benefit in the humanity of Christ. The Almighty appears determined to
eclipse His glory for a time, so as to make it easy for His creatures to approach
their Redeemer.” ([Blessed] J. Escriva, “Friends of God”, 111).
8. Jesus Christ became man “for us men and for our salvation”, we profess in the
Creed. Everything He did in the course of His life had a salvific value; His death
on the cross represents the climax of His redemptive work for, as St. Gregory of
Nyssa says, “He did not experience death due to the fact of being born; rather,
He took birth upon Himself in order to die” (”Oratio Catechetica Magna”, 32).
Our Lord’s obedience to the Father’s saving plan, involving as it did death on the
cross, gives us the best of all lessons in humility. For, in the words of St. Thomas
Aquinas, “obedience is the sign of true humility” (”Commentary on Phil., ad loc.”).
In St. Paul’s time death by crucifixion was the most demeaning form of death, for
it was inflicted only on criminals. By becoming obedient “unto death, even death
on a cross”, Jesus was being humble in the extreme. He was perfectly within His
rights to manifest Himself in all His divine glory, but He chose instead the route
leading to the most ignominious of deaths.
His obedience, moreover, was not simply a matter of submitting to the Father’s
will, for, as St. Paul points out, He made Himself obedient: His obedience was
active; He made the Father’s salvific plans His own. He chose voluntarily to give
Himself up to crucifixion in order to redeem mankind. “Debasing oneself when
one is forced to do so is not humility”, St. John Chrysostom explains; “humility
is present when one debases oneself without being obliged to do so” (”Hom. on
Phil., ad loc.”).
Christ’s self-abasement and his obedience unto death reveals His love for us, for
“greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”
(John 15:13). His loving initiative merits a loving response on our part: we should
show that we desire to be one with Him, for love “seeks union, identification with
the beloved. United to Christ, we will be drawn to imitate His life of dedication,
His unlimited love and His sacrifice unto death. Christ brings us face to face with
the ultimate choice: either we spend our life in selfish isolation, or we devote our-
selves and all our energies to the service of others” ([Blessed] J. Escriva, “Friends
of God”, 236).
9-11. “God highly exalted Him”: the Greek compounds the notion of exaltation,
to indicate the immensity of His glorification. Our Lord Himself foretold this when
He said, “He who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 14:11).
Christ’s sacred humanity was glorified as a reward for His humiliation. The
Church’s Magisterium teaches that Christ’s glorification affects his human nature
only, for “in the form of God the Son was equal to the Father, and between the
Begetter and the Only-begotten there was no difference in essence, no difference
in majesty; nor did the Word, through the mystery of incarnation, lose anything
which the Father might later return to Him as a gift” ([Pope] St. Leo the Great,
“Promisisse Me Memini”, Chapter 8). Exaltation is public manifestation of the
glory which belongs to Christ’s humanity by virtue of its being joined to the divine
person of the Word. This union to the “form of a servant” (cf. verse 7) meant an
immense act of humility on the part of the Son, but it led to the exaltation of the
human nature He took on.
For the Jews the “name that is above every name” is the name of God (Yahweh),
which the Mosaic Law required to be held in particular awe. Also, they regarded
a name given to someone, especially if given by God, as not just a way of refer-
ring to a person but as expressing something that belonged to the very core of
his personality. Therefore, the statement that God “bestowed on Him the name
which is above every name” means that God the Father gave Christ’s human
nature the capacity to manifest the glory of divinity which was His by virtue of the
hypostatic union: therefore, it is to be worshipped by the entire universe.
St. Paul describes the glorification of Jesus Christ in terms similar to those used
by the prophet Daniel of the Son of Man: “To Him was given dominion and glory
and kingdom, that all peoples, nations and languages should serve His Kingdom,
one that shall not be destroyed” (Daniel 7:14). Christ’s lordship extends to all
created things. Sacred Scripture usually speaks of “heaven and earth” when
referring to the entire created universe; by mentioning here the underworld it is
emphasizing that nothing escapes His dominion. Jesus Christ can here be
seen as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about the universal sovereignty of
Yahweh: “To Me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear” (Isaiah 45:23).
All created things come under His sway, and men are duty-bound to accept the
basic truth of Christian teaching: “Jesus Christ is Lord.” The Greek word
“Kyrios” used here by St. Paul is the word used by the Septuagint, the early
Greek version of the Old Testament, to translate the name of God (”Yahweh”).
Therefore, this sentence means “Jesus Christ is God.”
The Christ proclaimed here as having been raised on high is the man-God who
was born and died for our sake, attaining the glory of His exaltation after under-
going the humiliation of the cross. In this also Christ sets us an example: we
cannot attain the glory of Heaven unless we understand the supernatural value
of difficulties, ill-health and suffering: these are manifestations of Christ’s cross
present in our ordinary life. “We have to die to ourselves and be born again to
a new life. Jesus Christ obeyed in this way, even unto death on a cross (Philip-
pians 2:18); that is why God exalted Him. If we obey God’s will, the cross will
mean our own resurrection and exaltation. Christ’s life will be fulfilled step by
step in our own lives. It will be said of us that we have tried to be good children
of God, who went about doing good in spite of our weakness and personal short-
comings, no matter how many” ([Blessed] J. Escriva, “Christ Is Passing By”, 21).
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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.