02/13/11
Colossians 1:24-2:5
Hudson UMC
There is always a certain amount of doubt about what exactly is going on in the communities to whom Paul sends his letters. Part of the reason for this is that we do not have any letters that people wrote to Paul, only what Paul wrote to them. What this means is that, if we want to understand what was going on in a particular community, we have to do a kind of “mirror reading,” where we look at what Paul has to say and try to figure out the situation that provoked his letter. This might seem at first glance that this is a remarkably arbitrary way of doing things and indeed I have raised this very issue in classes. However, it isn’t as bad as you might think. Paul wrote many letters that we have today. We can compare and contrast what he says to one church with what he says to another church. There is, understandably, a great deal of overlap between them, but there will often be one or two things he emphasizes in a particular letter that are simply not present in others. When we look at what sets a particular letter apart, we have at least narrowed down our possibilities.
I say that because, when we look at Colossians, especially this passage, that way, we find an interesting issue that, the more I read the letter, the more I am convinced lies at the heart of the Colossian situation. Paul uses the word “mystery” four times in Colossians, more than just about any letter. Three of those times are in this passage. Listen to how the word comes up in our text. “I became its servant according to God’s commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory…I want [your] hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”
If I were to try to say clearly and directly what I think is lying under the surface here, I would say this: The Colossian Christians are very much interested in the mystery of God. In fact, they are so interested in what they call the mystery of God that they are convinced that, at the end of the day, it is what really matters. The only problem is that they don’t all agree on what the mystery of God is.
As we will see from some of the next discussion, there seem to be two major ways people have been trying to know the mystery of God. The first and most obvious we could say takes a Jewish form. There seemed to be a revival of ancient Jewish practices in Colossae at the time, with people looking back at the Old Testament and saying, “Hey, God gave these commands to his people a long time ago. Why aren’t we doing them, too? If God commanded it, doesn’t it have to be good?” Even if we, along with Paul, disagree with this, it has a certain logic to it. The other way that people were trying to know the mystery of God was through pagan philosophy and cosmology. We will hear more in the next passages about “the elemental spirits of the universe,” which is either referring to true paganism, a theory of the four elements, earth, fire, air and water, or the basis of a logical system. To people who had lived so long in a pagan context, this tendency cannot possibly be surprising.
However, there is a deep problem with all of these ways of thinking. After all, the Colossians that Paul is writing to are not just secular citizens of Greece, they are Christians. When we look at the alternatives that are mentioned, Christ is conspicuously absent. If these people are supposed to be Christians, shouldn’t Christ, perhaps, have something to say regarding their approach to God? Paul obviously thought so. After all, he just spent many verses praising Christ as the image of the invisible God, as the one in whom the fullness of deity was pleased to dwell, the one who reconciles us with God through his own blood. To be a Christian and to try to find some way to God that somehow bypasses Christ is simply irrational.
Let’s take the three times that Paul uses the word “mystery” in this passage to see what he has to say about the matter. “I became its servant according to God’s commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints.” Paul speaks of this mystery as having been around throughout all the ages, but has now been revealed in an unprecedented way. What can he possibly be talking about? He isn’t talking about a new system of theoretical ethics. After all, if you look at what the earliest Christians believed about right and wrong, they were remarkably similar to what the Jews of their time believed. Paul is not speaking about a fundamental change in what is right and what is wrong. He is also not speaking of a shift in how we should approach practical ethics. It is true that the earliest Christians were well-known as being particularly moral people, but, though they did tend to apply their ethics more completely in their lives, if we took each of their actions by itself, none of them were totally surprising.
The question that we need to ask is, “What has been around, in some hidden form, since the very beginning, but has now been revealed to the saints?” The only answer that makes sense with Paul, is Christ. To Paul, Christ has, in a sense, always been around, because all things were created in, through and for, him. He is the Son of the one God of Israel, who has been with him since the very beginning, which means he has been present throughout the long history of Israel. However, this Son of God, who has always existed in deep and dynamic fellowship with the Father and the Spirit, has been revealed among us as the man Jesus of Nazareth.
Now, if we look at Paul’s words again, it might be argued, “Paul is equating the mystery with the word of God, not with Jesus.” The problem with this is that, in our modern American context, when we hear “the word of God,” the first thing that often comes to our mind is the Bible. This way, when we hear that Paul wants to make the word of God fully known and that the word of God is indeed the mystery we are talking about, our tendency is to think that Paul wants to explain the Bible to us really really well. However, one thing I hope you remember from the Gospel according to John is that Jesus is referred to as the Word of God who was with God and who was God. When we realize that, when the New Testament speaks about the word of God, it is first and foremost speaking of the living word of God made flesh in Christ, we realize that, when Paul speaks about making the word of God fully known, he is saying that he wants the Colossians to know Christ, that it is devotion to Christ that will enable them to understand the mystery of God, for the mystery of God is Christ.
When we look at the next sentence, we see the second time Paul talks about mystery. “To them, [that is, the saints,] God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” At this point Paul is speaking, not so much about the mystery itself, but of the riches of the glory of this mystery. When we look at what he says the riches of the glory of the mystery of God is, what do we find? We find that these riches are Christ in us, the hope of glory. This is incredibly important because, just as Paul’s point, that Christ the word of God is the mystery of God, is so important because people were hoping to find a deeper and more profound mystery than Christ, his point here, that the riches of the glory of this mystery is Christ in us, is important because it seems that the people wanted the glory of the mystery of God to be something greater, or at least different, than Christ in them.
The last time the word mystery appears in our passage is when Paul says, “I want [your] hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that [you] may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” In ancient Greece, there were a huge number of religious and philosophical schools, where you could go and be instructed in a particular way of thinking and living. If you didn’t like one school of thought, you could go to another. If one group kicked you out, there was always another one to go to. In fact, when Paul goes to Athens, the writer of Acts pokes fun at the people who lived in this center of learning. “Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.”
Why were there so many different schools? Why would people always be developing new ways of thinking and living? A big part of the reason is that Greece was a nation that was full of people who had become so well organized that they had more free time than other people had, so they were able to dedicate more of their time to thinking about life, the universe, and everything. The problem is that, once you start really thinking about the complexities of life, you realize that there is no end to the questions you could ask. It is easy to confuse a new way to look at the universe with a genuine insight that brings you closer to the truth. We have accounts from the early Christian centuries that various philosophers would modify the views of their schools ever so slightly, then found their own school, just so they could seem more important. As a side note, it bears a striking resemblance to some of the splintering of the church that has happened in the past and is still happening now.
Part of the reason that people were and are so interested in new and different ways of thinking and living is because we have this sneaking suspicion that there is something more out there. We seem to want something sufficiently simple that we know that we are capable of it but something sufficiently complex so that we can feel that we are actually doing something and so we can have a good reason to explain why some people don’t have the same insights that we do. We deeply hope that truth is accessible to us but we also are fully convinced that knowing the truth means we have to make some serious changes to our life and way of thinking.
This is exactly what is happening in Colossae. People have heard the good news of Jesus Christ, that God has come among us and has radically changed the way we relate to him, that somehow it is through Christ that we receive grace and are reconciled to God. The only problem with this, at least in the eyes of the Colossians, is that it just seems too easy. Where is the deep soul searching? Where is the detailed and organized rule of life that we crave to be able to show the whole world that we know something that they need to know? Surely, there must be something more; surely it cannot be that easy.
And yet, this is precisely what Paul is saying. He has already, at the end of only one chapter, made extravagant claims about the centrality of Christ. He is trying to show these people who want to follow Christ but feel the need to engage in all kinds of philosophy and ancient Jewish practices in order to really get at the mystery of God, that the only answer they need, indeed, the only answer there is, is Christ. Paul is saying, in so many words, “There is no mystery of God beyond Christ.” To push Christ out of the central place because he doesn’t fit our definition of what is sufficiently mysterious is to say to God, “You don’t seem to understand the mystery of God as well as I do. You, after all, say that Christ is enough. I disagree.”
What is Paul implying about the whole attempt to get behind Jesus through these other means? If we were to paint it as strong as possible, it would be to say, “To engage in these other searches for truth when the real truth has been presented to you is to show that you have not yet come to know the truth.” While that certainly gets at the root problem, Paul, in spite of his feisty nature, is not usually so harsh. His words are not nearly so much geared at condemning those who are intentionally trying to throw the gospel out, but at showing compassion toward and giving guidance to those who have not yet understood the full implications of Christ. The danger of substituting other things for Christ is very much real and we can see it all around us if we have eyes to see it, but we are not usually dealing with barefaced hypocrites who are actively trying to undermine the gospel, but people who need some help connecting all the dots. I know this because I am just barely beginning to understand what Paul is saying here.
At the end of the day, when Paul emphasizes that the Colossians should not be looking for a mystery of God other than and beyond Christ, he is not saying that they should be satisfied with something less than ultimate, but that by doing so, they are avoiding the only one who really is ultimate. Their understanding of truth in Christ is far too low. In point of fact, to say that we have to be content with Christ, as if Christ is somehow something less than the most important thing in our world and lives is to show that we do not yet understand that, in Christ, the fullness of God has met with us and continues to meet with us. To look for something deeper than Christ is to be looking for something that is deeper than God and we cannot be surprised that we don’t find anything like that because there is nothing like that.
Christ is indeed the very mystery of God. He is a mystery that is at the same time truly revealed to us and really open to our knowledge, and yet utterly greater than we can ever think or imagine. As we get further into the letter we will see some of the concrete ways that people were pushing Christ out of the center of their lives and we will consider some ways, that may even surprise us, that we do the same thing in our world today. However, what is important is that, when we talk about Christ being central, we really mean it. Christ is the mystery of God, the living Son of God who cannot be put into a box and who causes all of our hard and fast rules to be redefined in light of who he is. He is the one absolute in this variable and shifting world. He is the greatest example of the love, mercy, and utter self-giving compassion of God, and he is the one who empowers us day by day. Let us rejoice that we have a God who has loved us so much that he has met us where we are and gives himself to us so completely. Let us pray.
AMEN
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