When I was younger, I looked up to a lot of people. I wanted to be just like them—I would wear the same clothes as certain celebrities or watch the same shows and listen to the same music as my friends. I wanted to emulate the things that I liked the most about those people. When I became a Christian as a teenager, my desires changed. I wanted to be more like Christ, and I tried to figure out what that meant by reading scripture.

I read passages such as this one, where Paul’s fervor and zeal for Christ is especially palpable. He asserts how deeply he wants to know Christ. For him, one way of knowing Christ is emulating Christ. One of the things Paul names is “becoming like him in his death” with the hope that he would also be able to attain resurrection. He sees attaining this as a future goal that Christ will secure for him. In the time that these letters were written, this resurrection was seen as happening imminently.

It’s important for us to remember that Jesus’ death was strongly political. Crucifixion was a means of death reserved for political insurrectionists and criminals and was meant to be an especially humiliating and public way to die. When Paul says, “I want to die like him,” he is saying he too wants to have a life and a cause worth dying for—a cause rooted in grace and inclusion of the marginalized.

Let us slow down as we read Paul’s words so we can really absorb the depth of what he is saying. What would it look like for us to press on toward this goal, to be so radically rooted in love that we are willing to die for it?