Whether by Life or by Death

Philippians 1:12–26

Read Philippians 1:12–26 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

My confident hope is that I will in no way be ashamed but that with complete boldness, even now as always, Christ will be exalted in my body, whether I live or die. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.

Philippians 1:20–21

What Has Happened to Me

Paul’s chains have been in the background of every verse so far. He has greeted the Philippians as one of two slaves of Christ Jesus; he has thanked God for partners who have stood with him through his imprisonment; he has named himself a partaker of grace with those who suffer with him for the gospel. But he has not yet turned to look directly at his own situation. In verse 12 he does. I want you to know, brothers and sisters, he writes, that my situation has actually turned out to advance the gospel.

The word translated advance (prokopēn, a noun in Greek) is a striking choice. The noun is often explained by the picture of pioneers cutting a road through dense terrain ahead of an advancing army, or of a ship making headway against the wind. Whether or not Paul had that picture in mind, it fits what he describes. What has happened to Paul has cut a road for the gospel. It has driven the gospel forward into territory it would not otherwise have reached. The chains, which one would expect to be the great obstacle to Paul’s mission, have turned out to be the very means by which his mission has been extended.

What Paul means by this becomes clear in the next verses. He tells the Philippians that the whole imperial guard and everyone else knows that he is in prison for the sake of Christ. The Greek phrase here, en holō tō praitōriō, refers most likely to the Praetorian Guard, Caesar’s elite household troops, the body of soldiers responsible for the personal security of the emperor and the supervision of his most important prisoners. Paul, awaiting his trial before Caesar, would have been guarded by rotating shifts of these soldiers. Acts tells us that during his Roman custody he was permitted to live in his own rented quarters with a soldier guarding him. We can imagine how the days went. Paul preached to whoever came to see him. Paul prayed. Paul dictated letters (perhaps Ephesians, perhaps Colossians, and, most likely, this letter to the Philippians) while a soldier sat across the room. The conversation could hardly have been avoided. The soldier would have heard the prayers. The soldier would have overheard the letters being dictated. The soldier would, sooner or later, have asked what this man’s case was about. And the answer would have come back: it is about Christ.

Over months, this happened with shift after shift of the guard. The unit talked. We can imagine the talk in the barracks: “Did you hear about the prisoner under house arrest, the Jew from Tarsus? He says his trouble has nothing to do with Caesar. He says it has to do with someone called Christ, raised from the dead, who is the rightful Lord of all.” The gospel, by the slow work of the imperial schedule, had reached the very household of the emperor. Paul will say so explicitly at the end of this letter: All the saints greet you, he writes, especially those who belong to Caesar’s household. The chains had cut a road into Caesar’s own palace.

And the same chains had stiffened the spine of the church in Rome. Most of the brothers and sisters, Paul writes, now have confidence in the Lord because of my imprisonment, and they more than ever dare to speak the word fearlessly. One might expect Paul’s imprisonment to have intimidated his fellow Christians into silence: if Paul could be arrested, what would happen to anyone else who spoke? But it had worked the other way. Paul’s perseverance in chains had given the brothers fresh courage. If Paul could speak Christ in irons, they could speak Christ in their homes and shops and synagogues. The chains, far from silencing the church, had made it louder.

There is a Lutheran instinct here that is worth naming. The theology of the cross teaches that God works His best work where, by every human measure, He should be least at work. The crucified Lord is the visible center of divine power. The hidden God acts in suffering, weakness, foolishness, and shame. If we asked, before the fact, where the gospel would make the most rapid progress in the Roman Empire, we would not have answered, “in Caesar’s personal guard, by means of a chained apostle awaiting execution.” But that is what God did. And it is the kind of thing God is always doing. The kingdom of God does not run on the rails of human strategy. It runs on the cross.

Pretense or Truth

Then Paul tells the Philippians something startling. Not everyone preaching Christ in Rome is doing so from love.

Some, to be sure, are preaching Christ from envy and rivalry, he writes, but others from goodwill. The good-willed preachers, he says, do it from love, knowing that Paul is placed here for the defense of the gospel. These are the ones who see Paul as a co-worker, a fellow soldier in the gospel cause, and whose preaching of Christ continues and amplifies what Paul himself has been doing. The motives are pure. The work goes forward.

But the others proclaim Christ from selfish ambition, not sincerely. Their aim, Paul says, is to cause trouble for me in my imprisonment. We have to pause over this. There were Christians (Christians, men who proclaimed Christ) who were doing so with the specific aim of making Paul’s life harder. Perhaps they hoped to draw away his supporters. Perhaps they hoped to increase the suspicions of his Roman captors by making the Christian movement seem larger, more numerous, more threatening. Perhaps they simply resented his apostolic authority and wanted to make a name for themselves while he was off the stage. The text does not tell us their precise motives, but it tells us their aim. They wanted to wound Paul through their preaching.

What does Paul say to this? Listen carefully. What is the result? Paul asks. The answer: it does not matter. In every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is being proclaimed, and in that, Paul says, he will rejoice. Then he says it again, because he wants us to hear it: Yes, and I will continue to rejoice.

This is one of the most counterintuitive sentences in the New Testament. Paul cannot mean that motives do not matter; he is in fact distinguishing the two motives quite carefully. He cannot mean that the men preaching from envy are saved by their preaching; bad motives in ministry are not a small thing in any of his other letters. What Paul means, in this particular moment, in his particular situation, is that the proclamation of Christ, even when carried by ambition, even when delivered with the wrong heart, even when aimed at hurting him, is still the proclamation of Christ. And what that proclamation accomplishes is not finally up to the preacher. It is up to the One being proclaimed.

The Lutheran tradition has a way of speaking about this that we should not miss. We confess that the ministry is given by Christ for the giving of the gospel and the sacraments (AC V). We also confess that the validity of the ministry does not depend on the moral perfection of the minister (AC VIII). The water of baptism cleanses even when it is poured by an unworthy pastor. The bread and the cup are the body and blood of Christ, even when consecrated by a man whose heart is not what it should be. The Word preached is the Word of God even when the preacher’s motives are mixed. This is not because we are indifferent to the character of pastors; the Confessions and the Scriptures both speak much of what kind of men should hold the office (see 1 Timothy 3; Titus 1). It is because we know that the gospel does not finally rest on the preacher. It rests on Christ. The preacher is the instrument; Christ is the substance.

Paul has internalized this. He can rejoice that Christ is proclaimed even by men who are aiming their preaching at him as a weapon, because he knows that Christ proclaimed is Christ at work. The work the gospel does is the work of Christ. And so the man trying to hurt Paul through preaching is finding, despite himself, that the only thing he can do with the gospel is to give it to people who need it. The hostility is real; the wound to Paul is real; but the gospel is doing its work anyway. In this I rejoice. Yes, and I will continue to rejoice.

There is a pastoral lesson here that runs in two directions. To the parishioner who has come to suspect that the preacher’s motives are mixed, Paul says, in effect: the Word can still come to you. Listen for the gospel. Receive the Christ who is being proclaimed. The unworthy preacher cannot rob you of Him. To the preacher whose motives are mixed (and what preacher’s motives are not mixed?), Paul says, in effect: preach Christ anyway. The Word is greater than your heart. The gospel is greater than your ambition. Preach Christ, and let Christ do the work He has always done with His own Word.

Christ Will Be Exalted

Paul now turns from what is happening around him to what is happening in him. For I know, he writes, that this will turn out for my deliverance through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

The word deliverance (sōtēria) is the standard New Testament word for salvation. Paul does not say that he will be acquitted at his trial; the word he uses leaves the outcome of the trial open. What he says is that whatever happens, acquittal or conviction, life or death, this will turn out for his deliverance. He is echoing, perhaps deliberately, the Greek Old Testament: the words this will turn out for my deliverance are, in the Greek, the very words of Job 13:16. Job, in the depths of his trial, refused to despair. Paul, in the depths of his trial, takes Job’s confidence as his own. Whatever the court of Caesar decides, the court of heaven has already ruled. Paul is on his way to deliverance.

He attributes this confidence to two things. First, your prayers. The Philippians have been praying for Paul, and Paul receives those prayers as real assistance. They are not pious wishes. They are active partnership in his ordeal. The prayers of the saints, Paul believes, accomplish things. The Lutheran tradition is sometimes nervous about exalting prayer in ways that obscure the priority of the means of grace, but the Catechism is also clear that prayer is something Christians are commanded and invited to do, and that the prayers of believers are heard by the Father for Christ’s sake (SC III; LC III). Paul is counting on this. He believes the Philippians’ prayers are doing real work in his life.

Second, the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. The phrase is striking. Paul does not say the help of the Holy Spirit in his usual idiom; he says the Spirit of Jesus Christ. The Spirit who is helping Paul is the Spirit who belongs to Jesus, the Spirit who proceeds from the Son as from the Father, the Spirit who does the work of Jesus in the lives of Jesus’ people. The help Paul expects is not the assistance of some general divine presence; it is the very personal help of the very personal Spirit of the very personal Christ. The same Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation, who descended on Jesus at His baptism, who raised Him from the dead, who poured Himself out on the apostles at Pentecost, is helping Paul in his Roman cell. Of course Paul is confident.

And the confidence comes to its sharpest expression in verse 20. Paul names his confident hope: that he will in no way be ashamed but that with complete boldness, even now as always, Christ will be exalted in my body, whether I live or die.

The verb translated exalted (megalynthēsetai) is rendered magnified in older versions. The word means to make great, to enlarge, to show the greatness of. Paul prays that Christ will be made great in my body. His body is the stage on which Christ is to be shown great. Whether the play ends with the prisoner walking free or with the prisoner being led to execution, the part Paul has to play is the same: to make Christ visible, to show Him great, to be the body in which He is exalted.

This is the Christian’s posture toward his own life. The Christian’s body is not first of all his own; it is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the member of Christ’s body, the vessel through which Christ shows Himself to the world. Whether by health or by sickness, by success or by failure, by long years or by sudden death, the question that orients the Christian life is always the same. Will Christ be magnified in this body? Will the watching world, looking at this Christian in this moment, see something of the greatness of Christ?

Whether I live or die. The disjunction is starkly stated and starkly real. Paul is not engaging in rhetorical flourish. He genuinely does not know whether he will leave his Roman imprisonment alive. But the not-knowing does not unsettle him. Either outcome is a means by which Christ may be magnified in his body. If he lives, he will live to magnify Christ. If he dies, he will die to magnify Christ. The Christian’s life and the Christian’s death are alike instruments in the hand of his Lord.

To Live Is Christ

And so we come to the verse that gives this volume its title, which keeps the traditional wording. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.

The sentence is so compact in Greek that translators have struggled to bring it into English without padding it. The original is barely more than five words: emoi gar to zēn Christos kai to apothanein kerdos, literally, for to me the living, Christ; and the dying, gain. There is no verb of being in the Greek. Paul does not say living is like Christ or living means Christ. He says living, Christ. The NET’s living is Christ stays close to this, supplying only the “is” that English requires. Christ is the substance of his life. Christ is what his life is. To remove Christ would be to remove not part of Paul’s life but all of it.

This is a hard saying in any age, but it is hardest in our own. We are accustomed to thinking of religion as one compartment among many: a part of life, perhaps an important part, but a part. We have work, and we have family, and we have hobbies, and we have political commitments, and somewhere in the array we also have church. Paul will not let us divide his life this way. He cannot, because for him there is nothing to put in the other compartments. There is no Paul-apart-from-Christ to allocate to other purposes. Christ has eaten up the whole of him.

The Lutheran tradition has always been at home with this language. Luther’s great hymn, “A Mighty Fortress,” confesses of Christ, Lord Sabaoth, His name, from age to age the same, and He must win the battle. The Small Catechism’s explanation of the Second Article begins from the same total claim: that Jesus Christ is the believer’s Lord, who has redeemed the believer from sin, death, and the power of the devil, not with gold or silver but with His own precious blood (SC II, Second Article). The Christian belongs to Christ entirely, in body and soul, in life and in death. Paul is not the only one who can say for to me, living is Christ. Every Christian can say it, because of what Christ has done. The question is whether we have grasped the magnitude of what is being said.

And dying is gain. This is the second half of the equation, and it is just as startling. Death, for the Christian, is not a loss. It is a gain. Not because death is good in itself (Paul will speak elsewhere of death as the last enemy that must be destroyed), but because death, for the one who belongs to Christ, is the entrance into Christ’s full presence. To depart and be with Christ, Paul will say in a moment, is better by far. Paul wants this. He says so. And he can say so without being morbid because he has seen, by faith, what death is to the one whose life is hid with Christ in God. Death is a door. On the other side of the door is the One who is the substance of life.

But there is a tension here, and Paul names it honestly. If I am to go on living in the body, he writes, this will mean productive work for me, yet I don’t know which I prefer: I feel torn between the two. The Greek verb behind I feel torn (synechomai, traditionally rendered hard pressed) is the verb for being squeezed, constrained between two opposing forces. Paul feels pulled both ways. He wants to depart and be with Christ. He also wants to remain and serve the church. He cannot have both at once.

Notice that Paul says I don’t know which I prefer (the Greek verb, hairēsomai, is literally “I will choose”), as if the choice were his to make. We should not press this language. Paul is not suggesting that he literally has the power to determine when he will die. He is using a rhetorical figure to express the tension between his two desires. He could long for either; he could not, by longing, make either happen. The choice is the Lord’s, not his. But the choice the Lord has made, Paul becomes convinced as he writes, is the choice for remaining. And since I am sure of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you.

Why? Not for Paul’s sake. For the Philippians’ sake. For the sake of your progress and joy in the faith. Paul is going to live a while longer because his ministry to the Philippians, and to all the churches he has fathered in the gospel, is not yet finished. There is more progress to be made; there is more joy to be ministered. Paul’s remaining is for them. His life is, like everything else about him, not his own. It is given over to Christ for the sake of Christ’s body.

And so the session that began with Paul’s imprisonment ends with Paul’s vocation. The chains have served the gospel. The bad-motive preachers have served the gospel. The trial and its outcome will serve the gospel. Even Paul’s life and Paul’s death will serve the gospel. There is, in this passage, nothing that is not serving the gospel. Everything has been gathered into the service of Christ. Everything is Christ’s.

This is what it looks like when living is Christ. It is not a slogan. It is a way of seeing the whole of a life, including its hardest passages, as material from which Christ may make something for His own glory. The chains become roads for the gospel. The hostile preachers become carriers of the gospel. The cell becomes a workshop for the gospel. And the question of life or death becomes simply the question of how, in this body, today, Christ may be magnified.

May the Lord grant us, in our own much smaller troubles, the same set of eyes.

Gathering the Threads

Philippians 1:12–26 is one of the great pastoral passages of the New Testament. Paul is in chains. Some of his fellow preachers are aiming their ministry at him as a weapon. He does not know whether his next court appearance will end in his release or his execution. And from inside this situation, he writes a passage of such serenity, such confidence, such joy that the Church has been drawing from it for two thousand years.

The Lutheran theology of the cross runs through every paragraph. The kingdom of God advances by means that look like setbacks. The imprisonment that should have shut Paul up has, instead, opened doors into Caesar’s palace. The hostile preachers who hoped to harm Paul have, instead, been used by Christ to spread the gospel further. Paul’s own physical body, whether kept alive or given over to death, has become the means by which Christ is magnified. The world looks at chains and sees a man defeated; the eyes of faith look at chains and see the road the gospel is cutting toward its next conquest.

Behind everything is the great confession of verse 21. Living is Christ and dying is gain. The Christian’s whole life is Christ’s; the Christian’s death is, for that reason, not loss but entrance into Christ’s full presence. The same Lord who began the good work in us at our baptism is the One in whose hand both our living and our dying are held. He decides whether we remain. He decides when we depart. And whether we remain or depart, our calling is one: to be the body in which Christ is exalted.

There is a pastoral comfort here for every Christian who has ever wondered whether the difficulty he is passing through has any meaning. Paul’s chains had meaning. Ours do too. Not because suffering is good in itself, but because the Christ in whose service we suffer is good, and He is making, out of every chain, a road.

For Discussion

Paul’s reflection on his imprisonment moves from the surprising effects of his suffering, through the mystery of mixed motives in ministry, to the central confession of the Christian life. The questions below invite you to think about your own chains, the work God may be doing through them, and the deepest commitments that orient your life.

1. Paul says that his situation has actually turned out to advance the gospel, that the chains themselves became a road. Where in your own life have you seen God use what looked like a setback, a closed door, or even a real loss as a means by which Christ became known or believed more deeply?

2. The gospel reached the whole imperial guard because Paul was guarded by rotating shifts of soldiers who could not avoid overhearing his prayers, his teaching, and his letter-dictation. In what unexpected places do you find yourself a witness, not because you planned it but because that is where God has put you?

3. Paul rejoices that Christ is proclaimed even by preachers whose motives are mixed or hostile to him. How does this affect the way you listen to preaching? How does it affect the way you yourself speak about Christ, knowing that your own motives are never entirely pure?

4. Paul’s hope is that Christ will be exalted in his body, whether I live or die. What does it mean, in your own present circumstances, for Christ to be magnified in your body? Where do your daily life and ordinary vocations become the stage on which the greatness of Christ is shown?

5. For to me, living is Christ. If you took this statement seriously as a description of your own life, what would have to change? What things in your life currently function as competing centers, and what would it look like for Christ to displace them, not in slogan, but in substance?

6. And dying is gain. The Christian’s hope is that death is the doorway into Christ’s full presence. How does that hope shape the way you think about your own death, the deaths of those you love, and the temporary character of all the goods of this present life?

Looking Ahead

In Session 3 we move into Philippians 1:27–2:11, where Paul calls the Philippians to live worthy of the gospel, to stand firm together against opposition, and to have the same attitude toward one another that Christ Jesus had. The session culminates in the great Christ Hymn: Paul’s hymn of the One who, though he existed in the form of God, emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave; who became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross; whom God highly exalted; at whose name every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Read Philippians 1:27–2:11 before our next session.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, who was magnified in the body of Paul whether by his chains or by his preaching, by his life or by the prospect of his death, grant us the same single-eyed devotion. Teach us to see our own troubles as roads You are cutting for Your gospel. Make us bold to speak Your name where You have placed us. Forgive us our mixed motives, and bring forth Your work in spite of them. And grant that in our living and in our dying, our bodies and our days may be the stage on which You are exalted, until the day You return in glory. To the praise of Your name, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.