On this Passion/Palm Sunday, we both celebrate the triumphal procession that was due to Jesus as the Christ, and look forward to his betrayal and death just a few days later. And so, this passage from Philippians is exactly right for our text this morning. In it, Paul is quoting an early Christian hymn, a hymn that triumphantly extols Jesus, not just for the amazing work he has done on our behalf, but also for the very essence of who he was and is.

It begins by stating a basic Christian belief, that Christ "was in the form of God." In order to understand this, we have to understand the Greek idea that all of reality exists on two levels: the basic, underlying reality of what is (morphos) and the exterior appearance of the thing (schema). For example, all apples are easily identified as ap…