As Perfect As Possible – Philippians 3

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.

A reflection:

Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus, had spent his whole life being as perfect as possible. He was blameless according to the law. He was zealous in his faith life and he was confident. Extremely confident. He was absolutely sure that the followers of Jesus were out to destroy the one true faith and he was going to stop them, no matter what it cost. And he was just the man to do it, because he was as perfect as possible.

And then came Jesus, appearing to him on the road to Damascus, knocking him off his horse and blinding him. When Saul asked who the powerful deity was who had stopped his party on the road, Jesus said clearly to Saul who he was. When Saul asked what Jesus wanted him to do, he told Saul to go into the city and follow the instructions he would be given.  Saul’s perfection, his zeal, his confidence were all erased. He had to reckon with the fact that the Son of God had put him in the situation of needing to turn, to repent, to rethink, to start from square one with a new set of instructions. And the learning from square one onward had not yet been completed as he wrote this letter. He was still running the race, keeping in his mind and heart the finish line he hoped to obtain.

How can we as Christians or even as faithful seekers of truth stay open to the idea that we do not have things all locked down – that we do not know all the answers – that we are maybe on square four but there is a lot of ground left to cover? Praying for answers, or maybe even praying for questions, is a way to practice this openness daily. May we remember to stay open to seeing our world through God’s eyes.

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for turning Saul, for giving him new instructions that sent him out to open the way for us to believe in you. Help us every day to recognize that we may not know what to say or how to say it, but that someone we will meet needs God’s love shown to them in exactly the way that we can show it. Amen.