Given this week’s location between Palm and Easter Sundays, this week’s New Testament reading from the Ancient Christian Devotional seemed particularly appropriate.

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

–Philippians 2:5-11

The Devotional includes five responses to this passage from different church fathers. Beginning today, I will post one of these responses each day as a way to lead into Easter. Here’s the first one:

You see that he reveals Christ to be a man but not merely so, since he is the mediator of God and humanity… He is trueborn God by nature with respect to his Father, but with respect to humanity he is Mary’s trueborn son by nature, begotten without the seed of a man.

-Epiphanius the Latin, Ancoratus 44.