“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Joseph Hellerman offers an interesting insight into this passage that commentators identify as one of the “high Christological passages” of the New Testament (alongside John 1:1-4; Col. 1:15-20; Heb. 1:1-3). He demonstrates that though the hymn clearly has much to say about the subject of Christology, the hymn is first and foremost ecclesiological. He writes
“...perhaps, more accurately, what we have in Philippians 2:6-11 is Christology in the service of an overarching ecclesiological agenda.”
This is because of Paul’s opening appeal to the brothers and sisters in Philippi to “have this mind in you” (v.5). Jesus’ humility in his self-emptying (ἐκένωσεν) involved him stooping lower and lower until he reached the lowest rung of the social hierarchy in the first century. Paul begins his appeal to the church by first calling attention to the “equality” that Jesus relinquished. In his self-emptying, Jesus did something mentally – he did not “count” his “equality with God” something “to be grasped” (v.6). Thus, his first action in the redemption of humanity was not first in the incarnation, nor his humiliation on Good Friday. Rather, it was in his mind. The Christ, in his estimating, concluded that he would temporarily release his rightful place of glory. In order for Paul to appeal to the “mind” of the church, he first appealed to the “mind” of Christ in his “counting” and “considering.” In a culture in which honor and status were prized above all, this would have struck the early readers as utterly unfathomable. The Divine Son of God of his own volition became a slave. Jesus’s entering as a person, in a specific place, assumed the position of the despised.