A Defiant "Nevertheless!"

If there is one word that continues to dominate public discourse, it is “confidence”. There is this game that the government is playing with the markets and a major part of that game is to do things that will encourage banks to lend money to other banks again. So far the game isn’t working and confidence is sorely lacking in the worldwide economy. Without confidence that money loaned will be repaid, the banks won’t lend money. If the banks won’t lend money, the economy can’t grow. If the economy can’t grow, we all feel the pinch. Confidence is a sort of faith, faith that things will turn out as we think they should, but confidence—and faith—is placed in something or someone. Banks place their confidence in the market—that in the marketplace things will naturally sort out for the benefit of the market. It’s faith in the process; a confidence in the system. The market has become a “power” in the Biblical sense of Paul’s “principalities and powers” and that power is coming under deep suspicion as it seems to be faltering. Paul, in last week’s text, had placed his confidence in himself, viz., in his lineage and his ability to follow Jewish teaching with consistency, integrity, and zeal. The transformation that affects Paul is that in knowing Christ he discovers that his own righteousness is futile compared to Christ’s righteousness and that Christ has offered his own righteousness for Paul. Therefore, Paul is freed from his own efforts and instead can rest in the righteousness of Christ! Paul’s confidence is transferred from himself to Christ. It is this confidence that Paul recommends to the Philippians and to us:

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ [or, the faithfulness of Christ] the righteousness from God based on faith. (Phil 3.7-9)

For Paul, it is not that suffering had ceased, or that hardships were done away with, but rather that he had gained a new way of seeing the world as he saw it in the light of Christ. Instead of seeing life as a challenge to be overcome through hard work and zealous effort at following Torah, he discovered in the faithfulness of Jesus that it was God at work in the world—not himself. Life was not about Paul and what Paul would accomplish, but rather it is about God and what God had accomplished in Jesus. And beyond this, it is about what God is accomplishing in and through people like Paul and us—disciples of Jesus—for the sake of the world. Because of this, Paul was able to place his confidence in God—the only one truly worthy of confidence. What you and I are supposed to see in this is that the turmoil of the markets, the back and forth of election politics, and the uncertainty of many confusing circumstances in our own lives, are put in right perspective by the story of Jesus. For in Jesus God is at work redeeming and reconciling the world to himself. And this touches ground in the particularities of our lives. It offers a critique of our misplaced confidence in the markets. It critiques our misplaced confidence in ourselves. It critiques our misplaced confidence in our political process. It draws our lives into the story of Jesus and only in that story do we truly find hope and peace—and joy.

This week’s text introduces another word that may seem odd at this time: rejoice. Paul calls us to “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice!” [here I'm following Stephen Fowl's commentary on Philippians] The difficulty we usually find in following this exhortation is most likely because we think of joy as an emotional response, a spontaneous emotion that is the result of happy circumstances. But this is not how Paul uses it. Consider Phil 1.18 in which rejoicing is in the context of false motives of preachers, or his own deliverance. In Phil 2.17-18 he writes, “But even if I am being poured out as a libation over the sacrifice and the offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you—and in the same way you also must be glad and rejoice with me.” Here we see rejoicing in the context of suffering. In Phil 4.10 we see Paul rejoicing even in the context of his having need—or being content when others would be attentive to their lack.

I know that I find rejoicing hard to do when the bills are piling up, when the prospects for the economy look so bleak and our house continues to sink in value, when the kids throw fits, when I’m not sure where the next job will come from…all of these things make rejoicing hard. What circumstances in your own lives make rejoicing hard? Yet these are just the same or similar circumstances that surround Paul’s exhortation to us to rejoice. So Markus Barth tells us that “Joy in Philippians is a defiant ‘Nevertheless!’ which Paul sets as a full stop against the Philippians’ anxiety.” Joy is what comes when we consider the circumstances we are in and compare them to the goodness of the world seen through the story of Jesus.

Essential to understanding this story is not that by rejoicing and releasing our anxiety then all our problems will go away. It is that the future is in God’s hands. This is what Paul means when he speaks of the Resurrection. To rejoice is to defiantly claim the Resurrection in the face of the economy. To rejoice is to defiantly claim the Resurrection in the face of illness. To rejoice is to defiantly claim the Resurrection in the face of uncertainty, persecution, and suffering. To rejoice is to see the world as the arena in which God is working his salvation.