In the Form of God

Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Bishop Robert Barron

Spirituality, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality:christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 4.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2017

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Some skeptics suggest the divinity of Jesus is a myth, or a later invention of the Church, that Jesus was nothing more than an ordinary man or great teacher. But in today's text from St. Paul, an exceptionally early text traced to within a handful of years of Jesus' death, we find a clear declaration of the contrary. Jesus is described as being in the “form of God,” a staggering claim that affirms his divinity. Yet even still, he did not grasp at his godliness, but emptied himself and took the form a slave.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an
0:05.4	apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization using media both old and
0:11.4	new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate and encounter with
0:16.6	Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring
0:21.8	the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite
0:27.9	you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the
0:32.5	warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.
0:38.6	Peace be with you. Friends, how can I ever pass up an opportunity to come on one
0:45.4	of the most magnificent passages in the New Testament? Though our first reading
0:51.2	and gospel for today are wonderful indeed, I just want to spend this entire
0:56.2	homily speaking of the passage from Paul to the Philippians, which is our
1:01.0	second reading. Paul wrote the letter to the Philippians sometime old in the
1:08.0	early 50s of the first century. So maybe what 20 years or so after the death
1:15.4	and resurrection of Jesus. So the very early text, mind you, the Paul-mine letters
1:20.7	are earlier than all the gospel so the earliest texts we have.
1:25.6	Furthermore, the scholars think the section of the letter that we're looking at
1:30.6	today was Paul's adaptation of a hymn or a liturgical prayer that he had
1:38.7	inherited. So one that he heard within Christian circles. Therefore these words,
1:45.6	more or less, go back perhaps to the 40s, even 30s of the first century. See,
1:52.9	we're in very sacred ground here because with this text we're at one of the
1:56.8	earliest expressions of the Christian thing. And this famous hymn from the
2:03.0	second chapter, Philippians, I think constitutes one of the most illuminating
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