Colossians 1:15-23

02/06/11

Colossians 1:15-23

Hudson UMC

When I first started seminary, I imagine I thought about the significance of the Trinity about as much as most everyone else does:  that is to say, I didn’t really think about it at all.  However, I spent my whole first year with Dr. Colyer, who has thought long and hard about the Trinity and showed me that John Wesley was actually much more concerned about the Trinity than we often think.  All of a sudden, I was confronted with the fact that something that I just kind of checked off my “to believe” list was actually fundamental to Christian faith.  It was an amazing experience.

At the beginning of my second year of school, I set myself to the task of finding out just exactly what lay at the very root of Christian faith.  What is it that we believe from which everything else flows?  I thought about it pretty hard for a couple of weeks.  Then, Alli and I were in the car and I exclaimed, “I’ve got it!”  She replied, “Got what?”  “I know what the single most important doctrine of Christian faith is.”  “Really?  What is it?”  And I said very seriously, “The Incarnation.”  Now, if you haven’t picked this up from me by now, the Incarnation is the technical term that is used to describe the fact that the God of the universe took on flesh and lived among us as the man Jesus.  Alli just looked at me and said, “Really, Travis?  Jesus?  Jesus is the most important part of Christianity?”  You see, even though I had struggled mentally to try to really get down to the roots of my faith and what I perceived to be the faith of the church throughout history, my conclusion wasn’t anything that a fourth grade Sunday School student couldn’t have told me.  Jesus is the most important part of Christianity.

It might sound incredibly simple and self-evident, but the more I think about it and the more I look at the world around me, the more I realize that this simple idea so easily gets swept under a rug, so easily gets forgotten, or rather, gets pushed to the side.  If you forget everything you learned growing up in the church, or, if you, like me, didn’t grow up in the church, forget everything you have learned in the church, and just looked at what gets talked about in our culture when they talk about Christianity, would you tend to get left with the idea that, when we talk about our faith, we are talking first and foremost about the centrality of Jesus to everything?  I don’t think you would.  I think that you would find two or three key issues that are probably moral and ethical in nature that tend to divide the nation, each side looking down on the other.

Why is it that when we, as a society, stand up for our faith, we end up standing up, not for the true divinity and true humanity of Christ, for the incredible love that God has for us that he would take on the brokenness of the world and heal it from the inside out, that we have been forgiven and so we show our gratitude by forgiving others, but for various aspects of legal policy, one way or the other?  I think it is because it is so easy to get worked up over what the culture is worked up about and it is hard to stay focused on central things when everyone around seems to be focused on peripheral things.

Believe it or not, this is exactly what was going on in the Colossian church.  We will see it more clearly as we continue through the letter, but the Colossian Christians seemed to be entirely obsessed with things other than Christ.  There were some who were insisting that, since Christianity began as a group within Judaism, that even Jesus was a Jew, for example, Christians can and indeed should engage in all of the ancient Jewish laws, not just the ones that deal with morality, but also with those that tell us what we should eat and what we can and cannot touch.  On the other side, there were those who understood that Jesus came so that God’s love might come to everyone, Gentiles as well as Jews.  Since God came and met them where they were, it seemed to mean that they could continue in all their pagan ways of thinking, considering their philosophical systems to be as important, or even more important than Christ.

Once we understand that Paul is responding to a tendency to push Jesus out of the central place because of some kind of ideology, whether Jewish or Gentile, whether moral or cultural, we can begin to understand just what he says in our passage for today.  It is, perhaps, one of the most beautiful and strong declarations of the centrality and significance of Christ in the entire Bible.  Speaking of Jesus, Paul says, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him.”  Here is Paul affirming in the strongest terms that Jesus is God.  One of the key things that the Jewish tradition in particular affirmed only God could do is create, and here is Paul saying that everything that was created was created in Christ, Christ is the one through whom the various rulers of the world were created, meaning that Christ is far greater than all of them put together.

“He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.”  The classical Jewish conviction was that, before we were alive, before our great-grandparents were alive, before our nation came into existence, before the mighty kingdoms of the ancient world rose and fell, before there was anything at all, there was God.  The question, “What was before God?” does not only meet with the answer, “Nothing.”  It is also seen as a totally irrational question.  To even ask the question means that we expect to find something that came before God and, since God has always been, it is an utterly meaningless question.

Think about what else this is saying.  It is saying that Jesus is the head of the body, the church.  It is Jesus who is finally in charge, he is the highest ranked person in the whole church, he is the one from whom the church draws its life.  Without Christ, there simply is no church.  Paul is also saying that Jesus is not just raised from the dead, but that he is the firstborn from the dead.  Though we talk about the resurrection, we need to always remember that, though Jesus was the first to be resurrected in glory, he won’t be the only one.  In fact, we are promised that each of us will participate in Christ’s resurrection before the end.  That is why, though we weep when a loved one dies, we do not grieve as if death were the end, for we hope in the power of the resurrection, that, just as God raised Christ from the dead, he will also raise us from the dead.

Now we move into the climax of Paul’s exclamation.  “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”  This is one of those statements in the Bible that is absolutely packed with meaning.  First, we read that, in Christ we have the very fullness of God dwelling among us.  We could spend all day unpacking that.  It means that in Christ we get to see who God really is.  Everything we saw Jesus doing in the Gospel of John was the very activity of God.  Jesus is not just a prophet, not just a great moral teacher, but truly the presence of God in our midst.  When we look into the face of Christ, we see the face of God, a face that we have never seen anywhere else and that we could not have seen any other way.

To a certain extent, if that is all that Jesus was and did, it would be enough.  In a world where we are surrounded by voices that tell us either that we can never know God because God is so far removed from us ordinary people or that God is whatever we choose to make God be, it is an amazing thing to have God meet with us in such a dynamic and personal way as he does in Christ.  Sometimes people get upset with Christian faith because it says, “If you want to know God, you need to know Jesus.”  People don’t like that, of course, because it seems so restrictive.  Why can’t we come to know God in a completely different way?  But if we are really dealing with a God who is so completely different than anything we know in our daily lives, the amazing thing is not that there aren’t many ways to know God, but that there is even one!  When we think about how amazing it is that, in Christ, we come face to face with God, we should be astonished that God has loved us so much that he has actually gone out of his way to meet with us, to show his love in a way we can understand, and give himself for us completely.

What is more is that this really shouldn’t be all that surprising to a culture that is so enamored with the natural sciences.  After all, if you want to investigate subatomic particles, you don’t get to make up your own mind how you are going to do it.  There are some ways that are simply incompatible with such an investigation.  You can’t look at atoms with a telescope nor with a standard microscope.  And yet, nobody complains that atomic theory is exclusive.  In any field of investigation, we have to go where we can encounter the reality we seek to know and we have to treat it in accordance with what it actually is, not what we wish it was or how we decided ahead of time how it would be fair if it was.

However, Jesus is not only the definitive revelation of God in our midst.  Jesus is also the means by which we, who live in this broken, hurting world, can be united to God and live with the very Spirit of God dwelling inside of us.  The language that Paul uses here is that Christ makes peace “through the blood of his cross.”  We live in a world that holds up self-sacrifice as the ultimate form of love and yet lives as if this made no difference because we tend to get caught up in our own problems.  But it is important that we remember that with Jesus, we are not just dealing with a great example of human love and mercy but with the incredible mercy and compassion of God.

What this means for our investigation of Colossians is that Paul is setting out the very most basic of Christian experience.  Whatever else might be different from congregation to congregation, all Christians are bound together by this basic encounter with God.  God has made peace with us.  It is a peace that only God could make but that, because of God’s amazing mercy and kindness, we are presented to God holy, blameless, and irreproachable.  This is crucially important.  This is the foundation upon which he will build the rest of his argument.  If Jesus is central and of primary importance, it means that absolutely nothing else can be.  It is as Scottish theologian, Thomas F. Torrance has said, “In the great hierarchy of truths, to be absolutely related to what is of permanent and paramount importance in the center, carries with it a requirement for us to be only relatively related to everything else.”

Paul finishes up this passage by reminding the Colossians that faith in God is not a blank check, as if we can say, “Well, now that I’ve made that decision and prayed that prayer, nothing else is required of me.”  He says, “Provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised in the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.  I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel.”

This is, again, incredibly important to remember as we continue through this amazing letter.  Paul is going assert over and over again that Christ is primary, Christ is central and that, if we allow anything, even if it seems to be good, to take Christ’s utterly central place, we have effectively turned our back on the gospel.  He is so concerned that they “continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised in the gospel” because this is exactly what is happening in Colossae.  For some, Christ has been kicked out of his central place by Jewish ethical practices, which, while by no means externally evil, have become more important to those people than the living Son of God.  For others, it means that Christ has to stand in judgment over the way their pagan culture teaches them to think, which while, again, not overtly evil, tends to treat Christ as something considerably less than the way we have access to the mystery of God.

Indeed, we will see many more references to mystery and the mystery of God before our time in this letter is done.  I think that you will find that, the more we dig in to what was going on in Colossae, the more we begin to understand our own culture, both conservative and liberal, both young and old.  Some of the specifics have changed, but the Colossian culture is so close to what we see in our context today that it gives me goose bumps.

So, just as Paul wanted to remind the Colossians about the amazing majesty of God in Christ, through whom we have been made new before he gave his corrective advice, let us stop here and be deeply impressed by this fact.  We have a God who loves us and does not only love us in the abstract but in the concrete.  We have a God who does not just say loving things to us from his throne in heaven, but goes out of his way to leave that throne and meet with us where we are, to spill his own blood for us and our salvation, to suffer and endure much hardship just so that we, broken and sinful people though we are, get to be with him, both now and forever.  Our God is far greater than we can even imagine and what we learn about God in Christ continues to break through our preconceived notions and enrich our understanding and lives.  Let us go into the world in utter amazement at the love of God and let that amazement inspire us to share the good news we have received with others, for it is good news for them, as well.  Let us pray.

AMEN