Lenten Reflection 5b: Philippians 3:4b-14

Philippians 3:4b-14
3:4b If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:
3:5 circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee;
3:6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
3:7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
3:8 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
3:9 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, the righteousness from God based on faith.
3:10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,
3:11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
3:12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.
3:13 Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,
3:14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Comment:
Paul here sets up a series of oppositions: between life according to the law and life according to faith, and he himself is the test case. The structure is not symmetrical, however. Paul’s list of credentials with respect to the “flesh” (sarx) are extensive: Circumcised, Israelite, Tribe of Benjamin, Pharisee, Zealous, Righteous. Yet on the other side, his achievements under Christ, we find only “the loss of all things” the greatest possible attainment: to become like Christ in his death. The shift from law to faith, from flesh to Christ (or spirit) represents a kind of emptying or hollowing out, a negation. (There is almost a hint of resentment here -- “look what I had, look what I have given up!”). This experience is not, for Paul, an exchanging of one religious content for another, it is the undoing of all religious content, the subjective appropriation, not of a ritual, but of a singular – indeed the most singular – act: death. But this total emptying, this taking up of death stops short of a Heideggerian “being-towards-death” insofar as there remains, for Paul, a life beyond death – the most proper or authentic possibility is not, as it is for Heidegger, the possibility of one’s own impossibility. There is a need to go through this impossible possibility but there is a possibility in excess of this: resurrection. A resurrection, not guaranteed, but hoped for, “strained towards.” The life of faith is a life negated, emptied. Thus, a kind of lack remains in place of religious content, a lack that induces desire for “what lies ahead.”