OBEDIENT ONE UNTO DEATH

My devotional reading today quoted Phil 2:5-8.

        Have the same mindset toward one another that Christ Jesus had:
            Who existing in the form/essence of God,
                    did not regard equality with God to be grasped,
                    but he emptied himself,
            having taken the form/essence of a slave,

            having become in the likeness of humans,
                    and having been found in the state of a human,
                    he humbled himself,
            having become an obedient one unto death – death of a cross!*

What caught my attention was “having become an obedient one unto death" (v 8).  (The death of loved ones is always a horror, bringing shock and fear of living with the loss.  So, that is another topic.)  But one’s own death, that is different.  Of course, none but Jesus follow his path of divine humiliation and incarnation carried through to obedience to death.  However, as God’s creature, I, too, am called to be an obedience one unto death.  "Obedience unto death" does not proclaim or rest upon resurrection faith.  I think it is a "deeper" faith -- if that makes sense.  Obedience to death has its grounding in a right relationship with God today; that is, we trust God unto death.  ("My flesh and my heart fail, but my heart's rock and my portion is God, forever!" Psa 73:26.)  That is “righteousness,” the right relationship.  That is faith sufficient for today.

Lord, you are my Creator to whom I belong.  In you I trust.  May I walk in obedience to you today and tomorrow and unto death.  Amen.

*My tentative translation.  Notes: 1) I awkwardly use “form/essence” for morphe, because the better choices, "quintessence" or "quiddity," are not used much.  2) Most translations render the aorist participles as present participles, possibly because this is poetry or out of conformity to older translations, but I have tried to capture the “pastness” of the actions (e.g. “having taken the form” rather than “taking the form”).  3)  In the last line, the phrase is often translated, “being obedient,” but since the phrase is parallel to “having become in the likeness of humans,” I think the adjective is being used nominally, “obedient one,” a rendering which to me emphasizes Jesus’ obedience as a human.  4) I have also tried to capture the poetic, balanced, thought-structure.