It is at least curious and more likely significant that the apostle Paul lodges such a pragmatic exhortation in the framework of a theological reflection upon Christ’s intelligent, self-aware humiliation:
Do all things without murmuring and arguing.
Paul’s argument is rich with counter-cultural nuance. It stands on its head the accepted, prudent, self-evident consensus about getting one’s way, getting ahead. It asks out loud whether life as strife is really the truth it claims to be or, rather, the most self-limiting of lies.
One wonders whether the fact that such counsel comes from a great battler like Paul adds or detracts from its credibility.
What Paul knows, even if his own biography is testimony both to the fact that it is not the whole truth and that it comes more easily in theory than practice, is that the aggressive activism that was the motor of influence in his day as in ours represents a damaging and enslaving pragmatism that does its practitioner little good. It is not healthy always to be persuading, maneuvering, corralling, obligating. It may not even be good.
By citing the example of Christ’s own humiliating and exalting career, as the primitive church likely taught itself by repeated hymning, Paul places his ethical urgings in the shadow of Jesus’ own open-handed renunciation of influence. The way down, as an early pastor of this writer once taught us, is the way up. The way up, conversely, is the way down.
Those who understand such things will not always be loud contenders in a public arena. They will not feel obliged to point out faults in their fellows that they may comprehend most fully.
Sometimes they will possess the clarity and the courage simply to let things be.
Canter Bridge 
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