The Triumph of Love

In The Triumph of Love, a rather fragmentary, difficult and dense poem by Geoffrey Hill, who was once Professor of Poetry here in Oxford, the poet betrays an intriguing fascination with the passage which we have just heard from St Paul’sEpistle to the Philippians.

Part of his fascination lies in the fact that many biblical scholars believe that St Paul is quoting an ancient Christian hymn. In the poem, Hill refers to ‘Paul’s reinscription of the Kenotic Hymn’, in other words, Paul is using an existing hymn to expand upon his own theological understanding, reinscribing it with a fuller meaning. And of course, we can see instantly how the use of a literary allusion or the repetition of a familiar theme might be a source of fascination to a poet like Hill. But at the heart of Hill’s reading of this passage of scripture is a word which he uses again and again in The Triumph of Love and in a number of other writings as well. Indeed, I have already quoted it. The word is ‘kenosis’.

This Greek word is literally translated ‘self-emptying’ and we find the Greek verb ἐκενωσεν/ ekenõsen at the heart of this passage: ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, through he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness’. The hymn draws us to the very heart of the Christian revelation, the doctrine of the incarnation. This hymn invites us to ponder how Jesus Christ can be at the same time ‘truly God’ and ‘truly human’, and what is fascinating about the doctrine of the incarnation is the fact that it challenges us to think about what we mean by ‘God’ and what we mean by being ‘Human’.

Charles Gore, who was once the Bishop of Oxford and had been the first Principal of Pusey House, delivered his Bampton Lectures from this pulpit in 1891. The theme of his lectures was ‘The Incarnation of the Son of God’. Gore himself drew on this passage from St Paul in order to help people think about the incarnation. For Gore, the incarnation was characterized by an extraordinary act of self-restraint. The Son of God took on human nature in order to redeem it, and in taking it ‘limited both His power and His knowledge so that He could …. live through all the stages of a perfectly human experience and restore our nature from within by a contact so gentle that it gave life to every faculty without paralysing or destroying any.’ In other words, this act of ‘self-emptying’ sought to preserve the integrity of Christ’s humanity in its union with his divinity.

In the course of the nineteenth century, more radical theologians, particularly in Germany, had suggested that the divine Son abandoned the attributes of deity (things like his omnipotence, omniscience and cosmic sovereignty, in order to become man). Gore seems to adopt a more moderate tone (as perhaps befits the pulpit of the University Church), suggesting that, within the sphere of the incarnation, the Son of God restrained his divine nature so as to allow the existence of a genuinely human consciousness, with all the limitations that involves. The issue that Gore was wrestling with was simply this: how could the Son of God utter the cry of dereliction from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ and remain omniscient and omnipotent all at the same time? St Paul’s reference to ‘kenosis’, to ‘self-emptying’, provided a prompt and a cue for his theological exploration of this question.

But there is much more going on in this passage in Paul. The idea of ‘kenosis’, the act of self-emptying, this extraordinary language about ‘adopting the form of a slave’, should alert us instantly to the fact that all our ideas of divinity, about what the word ‘God’ means, are being quietly subverted – for the ‘emptiness’ of the Redeemer, in the poverty and humility of His historical existence points to the ‘emptiness’ of God in and through His eternal activity. We are accustomed to think of God as ‘almighty’, as sovereign, as powerful. That kind of thinking has a powerful grip on our imagination. Think of so much of our hymnody, which reinforces a sense that God is powerful, remote, transcendent, immune, impassible. And that theological accent is sometimes used in turn to reinforce all sorts of narratives about power and authority, and so often we deploy that kind of language so casually and dangerously in the church.

We see this question of authority being played out in our gospel reading today. The chief priests and the elders of the people come to Jesus in the Temple. These people are the establishment, the elite of Jerusalem, and they have just witnessed Jesus cleansing the Temple, throwing out the traders, healing the sick, and people hanging on to his every word, because what he says has such authenticity that people want to listen to what he has to say. And of course they can only think about this in their own terms, by questioning his authority. But Jesus refuses to play the game, for if Jesus appeals to any authority other than himself he will betray who he is. Instead, he alerts the reader to the hypocrisy of those powerful elites. They lack authenticity. They cannot bring themselves to tell the truth about John the Baptist. Instead, they must cultivate their own fictions of power.

Note that this encounter takes place in Matthew’s gospel just before the passion begins to unfold. This is no accident. Matthew is telling us that if we want to understand the truth embodied in Jesus Christ, then we need to ponder the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. And this is what Paul is telling us in Philippians – ‘the one who became obedient to death on a cross’ – even in that moment of humiliation and emptiness – ‘God also 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 should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father’.

The danger is that as we bear witness to the truth of Christ’s resurrection, we can so easily fall prey to the temptation to reinscribe those fictions of power. But then we can too easily forget, that in the words of that ancient collect, God declares his almighty power ‘most chiefly by showing mercy and pity’, or as we say in the Prayer Book’s Prayer of Humble Access, ‘you are the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy’. The Kenosis of God teaches us that at the heart of the eternal is a life of authentic love, which is limitless and free, which is never diminished or destroyed, even in its vulnerability and precariousness.

The language of kenosis serves to disrupt our projections and fantasies about God. God is not a thing we can use to validate and reinforce our own desires and ambitions. The language of kenosis alerts us to the depths that we have not begun to plumb. The language of ‘self-emptying’ invites us to attend to the God who shows us that divine power and authority and sovereignty is revealed most eloquently in mercy and compassion and pity. And in this extraordinary paradox, we discover the triumph of self-giving love.