Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.
Colossians 1: Good News
Imagine waking up tired. The news of the day is heavy. The economic outlook is bleak. You check your social media and are bombarded with instructions on what you should and shouldn’t be doing to stay safe. It feels like no matter what you do, someone is looking over your shoulder letting you know you blew it and should feel ashamed of yourself. You are a spiritual person who heard of Jesus and you’ve been trying your best to stick with it, but it’s hard. There are people who think you’re a fool and admonish you to get back to the way most other people seem to be believing. You hear this from deeply religious people and deeply unreligious spiritual people alike. Oh, and imagine great political and economic uncertainty. All of this together makes your stomach hurt, weighs on your heart, and makes your mind churn. Imagine how this impacts how you feel about yourself and your future. Can you imagine this?
Of course, I’m talking about waking up in the city of Colosse during the second half of the first century CE. Might as well be talking about Napa, CA, in 2020!
Knowing that early Jesus followers (Christians) were struggling with all of the above, the Apostle Paul wanted to send a letter of encouragement. As you read the opening paragraphs below, I wonder how it would make you feel as a recipient?
This letter is from Paul*, chosen by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and from our brother Timothy.
We are writing to God’s holy people in the city of Colosse, who are faithful brothers and sisters in Christ.
May God our Father give you grace and peace.
We always pray for you, and we give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. For we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all of God’s people, which come from your confident hope of what God has reserved for you in heaven. You have had this expectation ever since you first heard the truth of the Good News.
This same Good News that came to you is going out all over the world. It is bearing fruit everywhere by changing lives, just as it changed your lives from the day you first heard and understood the truth about God’s wonderful grace.
You learned about the Good News from Epaphras, our beloved co-worker. He is Christ’s faithful servant, and he is helping us on your behalf. He has told us about the love for others that the Holy Spirit has given you.
So we have not stopped praying for you since we first heard about you. We ask God to give you complete knowledge of his will and to give you spiritual wisdom and understanding. Then the way you live will always honor and please the Lord, and your lives will produce every kind of good fruit. All the while, you will grow as you learn to know God better and better.
We also pray that you will be strengthened with all his glorious power so you will have all the endurance and patience you need. May you be filled with joy, always thanking the Father. He has enabled you to share in the inheritance that belongs to his people, who live in the light. For he has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his dear Son, who purchased our freedom and forgave our sins.
The opening words above provide a classic example of a letter written in the first century CE in the Greco-Roman world. Paul lets them know up front that he is deeply grateful for them and recognizes their good work as Jesus followers, and alludes to some themes he is going to flesh out in the body of the letter to come. You feel quite honored receiving a letter from the big cheese, the Apostle Paul! And it turns out he’s proud of you! How wonderful! He obviously knows your church’s story because he mentions Epaphras, the leader who founded your community. You are thrilled to hear that the message that captivated you is having a similar impact all over the world. So far, this is good stuff! You read on to hear that Paul himself is praying for your church! Paul himself! Wow! And it seems from what he is praying for that he really knows what you’re struggling with. He knows you’ve been thrown off a bit by all the noise from people with their own ideas which happen to be quite popular. Being in the minority has made you question the whole message and made it more difficult to follow. Paul’s words are a salve to your wounded, heavy heart. You hear him praying for strength directly from the Spirit of God to help you patiently endure living in such a reality, to not give up, because the Way of Jesus leads to a fruitful, good, hopeful life. Then Paul pens the words to a hymn that poetically reminds you of Christ, the foundation of the Good News message that changed your life:
Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.
He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation,
for through him God created everything
in the heavenly realms and on earth.
He made the things we can see
and the things we can’t see—
such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world.
Everything was created through him and for him.
He existed before anything else,
and he holds all creation together.
Christ is also the head of the church,
which is his body.
He is the beginning,
supreme over all who rise from the dead.
So he is first in everything.
For God in all his fullness
was pleased to live in Christ,
and through him God reconciled
everything to himself.
He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth
by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.
And then Paul applies the core content of the hymn to their daily living:
This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.
But you must continue to believe this truth and stand firmly in it. Don’t drift away from the assurance you received when you heard the Good News. The Good News has been preached all over the world, and I, Paul, have been appointed as God’s servant to proclaim it.
When you consider what Paul has written so far, your heart swells. The way the world around you thinks about the cosmos is that the gods are in constant need of reminders of your sincere allegiance to them: offerings of various sorts and strict adherence to following the letter of the law, all with a sorrowful, repentant, sincere frown on your face. A joyless, hopeless life where you can’t help but feel like a loser. According to the loudest religious voices around you, your origin story is bad, making you bad. You’ve been told this story in a hundred ways since you were born.
Some of you can really relate to this. Maybe for you the religious tradition may have claimed to be good news, but once you were in it became a prison of legalism with no escape – toe the line or lose your salvation. You were a loser from birth – don’t you forget it! Grovel for the rest of your life like a dutiful slave, and be happy you haven’t been tortured more than you have. Maybe for some of you it wasn’t about religion, but rather very painful messages you received from unhealthy people who, out of their brokenness, communicated to you that you were an object to be used and abused. You bear the scars of a crushed self-esteem from such an awful origin story.
Hearing Paul’s words, however, you are reminded of the Good News that captivated you in the first place. The presence of God was not just the cause of creation, but is also infused in it. God isn’t “up there” in heaven. God is everywhere. Everything is anointed by God. Everything, therefore, is inherently good. Even the worst form of capital punishment, designed to humiliate those so sentenced, did not defeat the Good News. The witness of the life-after-death resurrection of Christ declared victory over death, our greatest nemesis and source of our fear. God is eternal and forever good. So is the anointed, God-infused creation, which includes us. What is of God is not defeated by death. That within us that is the reflection of God is eternal and will never perish. The grave is not our end. Building our lives on this good news origin story has the power to overcome whatever bad news we’ve been sold. So much so that even if we find ourselves in deep trouble, we can still find ourselves buoyed by deep joy.
Christ is a game changer. Our whole view of our lives is radically changed if we’ll embrace it. The old, destructive voices are dead and gone and replaced by new, more beautiful voices that echo from Godself. As biblical scholar Andrew Lincoln observes (The Letter to the Colossians, New Interpreters Bible):
If this status of Christ is truly appreciated, then both the dualistic tendencies and the world-denying spirituality that are always in danger of creeping into the life of the Christian church are undercut. Since Christ is the one at work in creation as well as in redemption, then the created world is immeasurably enhanced, not relegated to some inferior status by the work of reconciliation. Salvation is not rescue from a totally evil world but the claiming of the rightful possession of this world by the one who was an agent in its creation. The scope of salvation is as broad as life and as vast as the cosmos.
The effect of such a belief should be to make redeemed humans more fully human. It should enable them to appreciate the creation and to work to transform the structures of this world rather than to produce a private piety or spirituality that attempts to cut itself off from the body, ignores the natural environment, and disdains culture. If reconciliation of all things in Christ is at the center of God’s purposes, then the pursuit of peace and acts of reconciliation by Christians serve those purposes. Working for a fair distribution of the world’s resources, being concerned for animal welfare, and struggling to prevent the collapse of the ecosystem through the pollution of air, soil, and water have everything to do with this passage’s celebration of cosmic reconciliation.
Lincoln is blowing the lid off of a small Christianity that is mostly about personal spirituality. The Good News of Jesus of Nazareth, who fully embraced and modeled what it means to live anointed (Christ), is a lifelong, global project for Christians (literally little Christs/anointeds) to enjoy and advance. As Richard Rohr notes (The Universal Christ, 67):
We must reclaim the Christian project, building from the true starting point of Original Goodness. We must reclaim Jesus as an inclusive Savior instead of an exclusionary Judge, as a Christ who holds history together as the cosmic Alpha and Omega. Then, both history and the individual can live inside of a collective safety and an assured success. Some would call this the very shape of salvation.
First Century Colossians had their faith rekindled. Their hearts swelled. The remembered what they had signed up for, a Way the leads to the richest, deepest experiences of life now leading to the very source of life after our bodies wear out. Rohr (201) distills the orientation and invitation like this:
The way things work and Christ are one and the same.
This is not a religion to be either fervently joined or angrily rejected.
It is a train ride already in motion.
The tracks are visible everywhere.
You can be a willing and happy traveler,
Or not.
Questions.
1. How closely did the opening paragraph describing the world of the early Colossains parallel your current experience?
2. Bad origin stories come from lousy theology and cultural sources: what are some of the bad origin stories you were told to embrace and where did they come from? If you give it some thought, you may be surprised just how many messages from various sources have informed you.
3. The “Christ Hymn” isn’t talking exclusively about the human Jesus, but something much bigger. How would you put the concept of Christ into your own words?
4. Christ changes the origin story from deeply flawed and already condemned to inherently and eternally good. How have you embraced this truth in parts of your lives? Where have you not yet fully integrated this Good News into your life? What’s keeping you from boarding the train?
*Nerd Note: There is ongoing debate regarding the authorship of this letter. It clearly credits Paul, and at the end of the letter he apparently signs it personally. For those who believe the Bible to be inerrant and infallible, ready to be taken at its word, the answer is clear: Paul wrote the letter. However, scholars over the last 100 hundred years have challenged that assumption, noting that this letter and two others called the “prison” letters (because they were reportedly written by Paul while he was under house arrest in Rome) are composed with such different language from letters undisputedly written by him that it is highly unlikely that Paul was the author. It was common practice for followers/disciples to write in the name of their leader – even signing their name – to give what they wrote authority. So, Paul may not have written the letter. Does that mean we can’t trust the Bible? No, it means we should examine our held assumptions about the Bible in light of good scholarship. If Paul did not write the letter personally, those who canonized it probably knew it and kept it in the earliest Christian Bible anyway – it wasn’t a deal-breaker for them. We hold an arrogance in our Post-Enlightment Western culture. We need to get over ourselves and allow the Bible to be what it is, which is not an airtight, perfectly written collection of writings from God’s mouth. For simplicity sake, I am going to refer to Paul writing Colossians, even though I believe it was his disciples’ work.
Meditate on this:
If your Divine Mirror cannot fully receive you in this way,
Then it is certainly not God.
Remember that regret profits nobody.
Shame is useless.
Blame is surely a waste of time.
All hatred is a diversionary tactic, a dead end.
God always sees and loves God in you.
It seems like God has no choice.
This is God’s eternal and unilateral contract with the soul.
If you cannot allow yourself to be fully mirrored in this way,
You will never fully know who you are, much less enjoy who you are.
Nor will you know the heart of God. Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, 208