Lenten Reflection 2b: Philippians 3:17-4:1

Philippians 3:17-4:1
3:17 Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us.
3:18 For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears.
3:19 Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.
3:20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
3:21 He 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.
4:1 Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.

Comment
Paul is speaking here of a politics – citizenship is a political category – that is “otherworldly.” But at the very moment when he says that “our citizenship is in heaven,” he limits access to this other world by deferring its arrival: we are still “expecting” the arrival/return of the Messiah. Furthermore, in the next verse he shifts from the present to the future tense: “He will transform…” It is important to keep in mind here that Philippi is a Roman colony and this is not a broad condemnation of worldly political involvement, it is a call for the followers of Jesus to withdraw their loyalty – if not their bodies – from empire.

Paul is speaking here of a biopolitics. Not in terms of the more recent phenomena of governmentality and medicalization that Foucault identified, but in terms of the locus of political struggle being essentially corporal. Both the preset order of the world and the order that is to come concern a bodily disposition. The “enemies of the cross,” as Paul says earlier in the passage, are those who are corporally disposed to the present order alone: “their god is their belly…their minds are set on earthly things.” There is no sign of Gnosticism here: the fault that Paul finds with these enemies is only the lack of a supplement to the immanent arrangement. These bodies of “humiliation” are the bodies that we are, there is no escape from them. But these bodies will “conform,” in the future, to another corporality: they will take the form of “glory.” The glorified body, the body of Christ, the resurrected body that still bears the marks of its permeability, is not completely other than the humiliated body, it is its supplement. There is no room here for a hyper-eschatological escapism: the content of the form of the glorified body is the humiliated body. The passage to redemption is corporal.