The Apostle Paul writes of his yearning to the church in Philippi as a means of encouraging them in their own walk of discipleship. He writes of setting aside all that he had every right to claim for his own, all the past achievements in which he would boast—of knowledge, authority, experience—in favor of the “surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” The knowledge of Christ is unlike any other knowledge, for it reveals to us different priorities. Rather than what we achieve, we are asked to look to what God has done and is doing. Rather than lift our singular experience before all else, we are invited to witness the experience of others and see how this might inform our own.

The path of discipleship as we seek to know Christ by sharing in the sufferings of his death, is the path of the season of Lent. It is an invitation to shed that which puffs us up, that which is temporary and fleeting, for the sake of what grounds us, what is eternal. What if, in this season of Lent, we were to seek to be like Christ in his journey to the cross? Who would we encounter on the way? What do they have to teach us in order for us to attain more fully knowledge of Christ and the power of his resurrection?