The sentence begun at v. 20 lands here. Paul has told a Roman colony that its πολίτευμα is in the heavens and that it awaits a σωτήρ from there; the relative clause now says what that Savior does on arrival. The answer is not evacuation from the body but the refashioning of it.

Three things carry the verse:

1. A deliberate lexical rhyme with the hymn of 2:6–11. μετασχηματίσει picks up σχῆμα (2:8), σύμμορφον picks up μορφή (2:6, 7), and ταπεινώσεως picks up ἐταπείνωσεν (2:8). Christ’s own path — form of God, outward appearance of a man, self-humbling, exaltation — is the template the believer’s body is run through. The rhyme is not decorative; it is the argument.
2. A precise pair of genitives. τὸ σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως ἡμῶν does not mean “our lowly body” as though the flesh were intrinsically shameful. It is the body that belongs to, and is characterized by, our present state of humiliation — mortality, weakness, and the suffering of vv. 10 and 18. Its counterpart is τὸ σῶμα τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ, the body characterized by his glory.
3. A grounding in cosmic authority. The guarantee is not a promise but a capacity: the ἐνέργεια by which Christ is able to subject τὰ πάντα to himself. Paul reaches for the language of Ps 8:7 LXX, which he has already used christologically at 1 Cor 15:27. If everything is finally under him, a mortal body is no obstacle.

The register is elevated but not hymnic; this is the peroration of an argument, and the sentence’s weight falls on the future indicative μετασχηματίσει — a plain assertion of what will happen.

The two words are not synonyms and Paul knows it, having set σχῆμα and μορφή side by side in 2:6–8.

μετασχηματίσει — from μετά (change) + σχῆμα (outward appearance, the way a thing presents). BDAG glosses “change the form of, transform.” Paul’s other uses are instructive: at 1 Cor 4:6 he “applies” (transfers the figure of) a teaching to himself and Apollos, and at 2 Cor 11:13–15 false apostles μετασχηματίζονται into apostles of Christ, as Satan μετασχηματίζεται into an angel of light. In those cases the change is of presentation. Here the change of presentation is real and permanent, but the verb still names the outward alteration — which is exactly right, since what is refashioned is the σῶμα.

σύμμορφον — σύν + μορφή, predicate accusative, naming the state that results from the refashioning. Where σχῆμα is how a thing shows, μορφή is the form expressing what it is (glossary, on 2:6). So the sequence is: the outward appearance is altered so that the body genuinely shares the form of Christ’s glorified body. The adjective is rare — Rom 8:29 (σύμμορφους τῆς εἰκόνος τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ) is the only other NT instance — and it is cognate with συμμορφιζόμενος at 3:10. That link is load-bearing: present conformity to his death, future conformity to his glory.

English has no pair that reproduces σχῆμα/μορφή cleanly. “Transform … to share the form of” keeps both morphemes audible; “re-fashion … conformed to” is the wooden equivalent. Avoid “change our lowly bodies to be like his glorious body,” which collapses both terms into vagueness and turns two genitive constructions into adjectives.

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Both genitives — τῆς ταπεινώσεως ἡμῶν and τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ — are best taken as genitives of quality/characterization (a Semitic-flavored construction well represented in the LXX): the body that belongs to and is stamped by our humiliation, over against the body that belongs to and is stamped by his glory. The parallelism is exact and should be preserved in English by keeping both as “of” phrases.

Rendering them adjectivally (“our lowly body,” “his glorious body”) is smoother but does two kinds of damage. It loses the parallelism, and — more seriously — it locates the lowliness in the body as such. Paul’s noun is ταπείνωσις, the state of humiliation, not ταπεινότης or a term for baseness of matter. Per the standing glossary entry on the ταπειν- family, this is status-language: the LXX uses ταπείνωσις for affliction and low estate (Gen 29:32; 1 Kgdms 1:11; Ps 118:50 LXX; Isa 53:8, quoted at Acts 8:33). The body is not the problem; the humiliation it currently lives under is.

Note the singular σῶμα with the plural ἡμῶν — a distributive singular, standard Greek, and not an assertion of a corporate body here.

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κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν — norm/correspondence, per the standing policy on κατά + accusative: the transformation is measured against, and proportioned to, this working. ἐνέργεια in Paul is near-technical for effective supernatural operation (Eph 1:19; 3:7; Col 1:29; 2 Thess 2:9, 11), and per the glossary on the cognate verb ἐνεργέω it must not be rendered with “energy” derivatives, which import a modern impersonal-force concept.

τοῦ δύνασθαι αὐτὸν καὶ ὑποτάξαι — an articular infinitive in the genitive, with αὐτόν as its accusative subject and ὑποτάξαι as a complementary infinitive under δύνασθαι. Two readings of the genitive article are live:

• Epexegetical: the working which consists in his being able to subject all things. The capacity itself is the ἐνέργεια.
• Objective/subjective genitive of source: the working of his ability — the operation that his power produces.

The difference is slight in effect and the English “the working by which he is able” leaves both open. What must not happen is a purpose rendering (“in order that he may be able”), which the genitive articular infinitive can bear elsewhere but which here would make the subjection of all things the goal of the transformation rather than its ground. BDF treats this as the epexegetical type.

The adjunctive καί before ὑποτάξαι is ascensive and should be rendered: the same power that refashions a body reaches even to the subjection of everything. Dropping it flattens the a fortiori.

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ὑποτάσσω + τὰ πάντα is not a general statement about divine omnipotence; it is scriptural language. Ps 8:7 LXX reads πάντα ὑπέταξας ὑποκάτω τῶν ποδῶν αὐτοῦ (“you subjected all things under his feet”), spoken of ἄνθρωπος / υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου. Paul applies that verse to the risen Christ explicitly at 1 Cor 15:27–28, using the same verb five times in two verses; Eph 1:22 and Heb 2:6–8 do the same. Here the allusion is compressed to two words but the substrate is unmistakable, and it is reinforced by the fact that 1 Cor 15 is also the passage where Paul develops the transformation of the body at length.

The theological effect is that Phil 3:21 and Phil 2:9–11 close the same circle from two directions. There, every knee bows and every tongue confesses at the name given to the one who humbled himself; here, all things are subjected to him, and the humiliation-to-glory pattern that was his becomes ours. The Isa 45:23 substrate of 2:10–11 and the Ps 8 substrate here are both YHWH-texts or Adam-texts reassigned to Christ — which is precisely the divine-identity move Bauckham traces through the letter.

Per §1, κύριος in v. 20 is rendered “Lord” as the Greek stands; the underlying Hebrew tradition is noted, not substituted.

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NA28 prints αὑτῷ with rough breathing — the contracted reflexive ἑαυτῷ, “to himself.” The manuscripts themselves are silent on the question: breathings are not written in the majuscules, so the choice between reflexive αὑτῷ and the simple pronoun αὐτῷ is an editorial judgment, not a variant with manuscript support in the ordinary sense. Context decides, and it decides for the reflexive: Christ subjects all things to himself.

A genuine variant does occur in the same clause. Some witnesses read δύνασθαι αὐτὸν καί in varying order, and a scattered group substitutes εἰς τὸ δύνασθαι for τοῦ δύνασθαι. Neither affects sense.

The more visible transmission-level change is in the following words of some later witnesses, which expand and harmonize toward 1 Cor 15 — but the NA28 text here is not seriously in doubt, and Metzger’s committee gives the verse no entry, which is itself a useful datum about the stability of the line.

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The verse was a battleground for the resurrection body, and the patristic readings are worth having in view because they show that the anti-Platonizing point above was contested from early on.

Tertullian (De resurrectione carnis 55) seizes on μετασχηματίσει precisely because it is not a word for annihilation: reformabit, he says — the same flesh reshaped, not exchanged for another substance. His whole case against the Marcionites and Valentinians turns on the observation that a thing must exist in order to be transfigured.

Chrysostom (Hom. in Phil. 14) presses the ταπείνωσις genitive in the direction taken here: the body is called the body of humiliation not because the body is evil but because it now suffers, decays, and is subject to death — “not the body’s nature, but its present affliction.” He also notes that Paul says σύμμορφον and not merely “like,” to exclude a resemblance that falls short of real sharing.

Theodoret connects κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν directly to Ps 8, making the same intertextual link modern commentators make.

The Vulgate’s reformabit corpus humilitatis nostrae configuratum corpori claritatis suae is a fair rendering, though claritas for δόξα narrows the term toward brightness, and the perfect participle configuratum slightly obscures that σύμμορφον names a result rather than a prior state.

Read against vv. 18–19, the verse is an antithesis. The enemies of the cross have their τέλος in ἀπώλεια, their god is the κοιλία — a body-part standing for a body-bounded existence — and their glory is in their shame, because they set their minds on τὰ ἐπίγεια. Paul answers each item: our commonwealth is not earthly but heavenly; our end is not ruin but transformation; our body is not our god but the object of Christ’s saving work; and our glory is not in shame but in his.

Against 3:10–11 it is the promised term of what Paul there prays for. συμμορφιζόμενος τῷ θανάτῳ αὐτοῦ (present participle, ongoing) issues in σύμμορφον τῷ σώματι τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ (future indicative, accomplished by another). The believer’s part in the first is submission to suffering; in the second there is no verb of human action at all. Christ is the sole subject of μετασχηματίσει.

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• μετασχηματίσει → “will transform” in smooth text, “will re-fashion” in the literal tier, so that the σχῆμα root stays visible against σύμμορφον. “Transfigure” is reserved for the liturgical register (it carries Gospel-transfiguration freight the Greek does not import here).
• Both genitives kept as “of” phrases. “The body of our humiliation” is stiff English and deliberately so; the alternative adjectival rendering makes an exegetical claim about the body that the noun does not support.
• καί before ὑποτάξαι rendered “also.” Adjunctive particles are not dropped (§10).
• τὰ πάντα → “all things,” not “everything,” to keep the neuter plural and the Ps 8 echo audible in the literal line; “all things” retained in the smooth line as well since the phrase is a fixed Pauline formula.
• No verse-division break between v. 20 and v. 21 in sense: the relative clause is grammatically dependent, and the smooth text begins with “who” rather than restarting the sentence.