Colossians 2:4-14

02/13/11

Colossians 2:4-14

Hudson UMC

If the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Colossians was about the centrality of Christ and the last chapter and a half are about concrete ethical exhortation, chapter two and the beginning of chapter three are, in my opinion, the heart of Paul’s whole interaction with the people.  Here we have Paul getting to the core of the issues that caused him to write the letter in the first place.  At first glance, the advice doesn’t seem to be all that applicable to our lives today but actually, I believe, that if we look at what is going on here, the difference from our modern world will help us to see what is really going on.  Then, when we look back at our world, we will begin to see that we really aren’t all that different from those Colossian Christians all those long years ago.

Paul writes, “I am saying this so that no one may deceive you with plausible arguments.  For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, and I rejoice to see your morale and the firmness of your faith in Christ.”  These words form the introduction to a very important set of observations.  If you look in your pew Bible, you will see that these two verses are separated from the rest of our text by a heading.  I think this is unfortunate.  The editors who have tried to make it easier to understand the flow of Paul’s argument have, at least in this case, made it harder to see the connections that are really there.  Remember, in the original text, there were no section headings; there weren’t even any verse numbers or even, if we go back far enough, any punctuation!

Before Paul gives any correction, he points out what the Colossians should be doing.  “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”  In simple terms, Paul is saying, “Trust in Christ.  That is what you have been taught and that is still the best way to live.  When anything comes that tries to marginalize him in any way, stay rooted in Christ.”

Now comes his advice.  “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.”  This is one of those loaded sentences; if we don’t slow down and take it seriously, we will miss what Paul is saying here and we won’t see how it actually applies to us.  When Paul says, “according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirituals of the universe,” he is not saying the same thing twice, but is referring to what appears to be the two major ways the Colossians are, in point of fact, not remaining rooted first and foremost in Christ.  The problem is that, if we take these points seriously, they might not necessarily seem all that bad, and so we might not understand why Paul has a problem with them.

Let us start with “according to human tradition.”  What was going on at the time was that there was a major revival of ancient Jewish practices in Colossae.  As a side note, there has been a tradition, especially in Methodism, to divide the Jewish law into two parts, a moral law and a ceremonial law.  The moral law is defined by the laws that deal with how we live our lives and includes the Ten Commandments as well as any other law that deals with how we relate to God or how we relate to other people.  The ceremonial law is seen as restricted to the laws in the Old Testament that deal with things like ritual cleanliness, the special rites of the Jewish people and the special festivals that happen throughout the year and things along those lines.  In the New Testament, we read, not least in Paul, that Christ has fulfilled and done away with the law, but surely Christ has not undone the ethical nature of God and his people, right?  In order to deal with this, Christians have often made the point that, while Christ has released us from the ceremonial law, he has not released us from the moral law.

It must be said that this way of looking at the Old Testament is very user-friendly and that, if we lived our lives that way, we would be on our way to living more fully as the people of God.  However, there is one major problem with this whole way of thinking, and that is that the ancient Jews would simply not recognize the sharp distinction between moral and ceremonial laws.  To them, what we might call the ceremonial law bore a moral imperative.  You must keep them to be a good Jew.  In fact, if someone followed all of what we would call the moral laws but consistently broke the ceremonial laws, they would be cut off from their people, perhaps even more quickly than if they broke the moral law.

All of that is to say that, when we realize that the law was regarded so highly at that time, it is not all that surprising that people wanted to follow it carefully.  If we couple that with the fact that the Israelites had been following the laws of Moses for about two thousand years, if someone had even a single traditional bone in their body they might be attracted to that way of life.  After all, it had deeper roots than about anything else that was going on and so much of it made sense.  If we add to all this the fact that Jesus himself was Jewish and would have followed many if not all of these laws, it would not be hard to come up with an argument that could be used to say that Christians needed to obey the Jewish law.  What I think we absolutely need to understand if we are to take this issue seriously is that we are not dealing with people who were intentionally trying to shove Jesus out of his central place, but with people who were doing everything they could to please God, and what better way could they do that than by following the law that God himself gave his people?

When we turn to consider what Paul meant by being taken captive, “according to the elemental spirits of the universe,” we see something that is at the same time very different and yet very much the same.  In order to understand what Paul is talking about, we need to understand that “elemental spirits of the universe,” is a compact phrase that expresses several possible things.  In ancient Greece, there was an obsession with what the world was made out of.  It was more or less universally accepted that everything was made up of four elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire.  The question that remained was, “How do these four things make up everything else?”  And perhaps the more pressing question was, “Which of these four things is the very most basic?”  For example, if fire is the simplest of the elements, then Earth, Water and Air could be said to be made up of fire.  This whole way of thinking intended to cut behind what we can see and touch and penetrate into the mysteries of the world, or, perhaps, in light of the Colossian tendencies we noticed last week, the mysteries of God.

A related but somewhat later use of the phrase, “elementary spirits of the universe” was in scientific works.  Euclid’s geometry was praised in the ancient world for its simplicity and its beauty.  It started with five postulates, or statements that were thought to be self-evident, and then the rest of geometry was simply deduced logically from them.  It was simple, it was beautiful, and it was the most rigorous way of thinking that anyone knew.  The goal in science at the time was to find out the small number of “first principles,” or “elementary spirits of the universe,” upon which everything else depended, like in geometry.  Then, it would be possible to use our deductive skills and understand the universe in a way we couldn’t before.

What this means is that there were people in the Colossian church who were engaging in the natural science and philosophy of their day and Paul is worried that it is leading them to push Jesus out of his central place.  Now, it cannot be stressed strongly enough that we cannot jump from Paul’s critique of ancient science and philosophy to a general condemnation to anyone who engages in and appreciates modern science and philosophy; I especially want to make that clear because I myself fall into that category to a certain degree.  Ancient science and philosophy was very much religiously charged.  To engage in natural science at that time was to deal with questions about the foundations of the universe and, to be in the conversation at the time required one to embrace a particular way of thinking that was not at all friendly to Christian convictions.  In spite of the fact that some might disagree, modern science is actually far more open to distinctively Christian ideas and convictions than science has ever been at any other time in history.

The point is that both ancient philosophy and science at the time treated the questions they were asking as having ultimate significance, that is, they were the very most important questions that could be asked and that there was no way to get any deeper than them.  This is the problem that Paul has.  As we have seen throughout the letter so far, Paul affirms that the only one who is truly ultimate is Christ.  Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, the one through whom and for whom all things were created, the one who reconciles us to God and, in our passage for this morning, he is the one in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily.  Any attempt to get to God by some other means than by Christ, even if they seem as good and make as much sense as following the Jewish law or engaging in the best of what secular thought has to offer, is an attempt to get to God by avoiding God, which is nothing less than absurd.

Again, we will unpack these issues more fully in the coming weeks, but this is a radical thing that Paul is saying.  It means that it is entirely possible that we are pushing Christ out of his central place without necessarily even realizing that we are doing it.  It also means that there may very well be things that we do that seem good, and perhaps even are good in their own way that are taking Christ’s place in our lives.  It means that we might just have to look long and hard at these things and make some difficult decisions that might get people around us looking at us and thinking that we are different.  Two weeks ago, I included a quotation by Thomas F. Torrance and I want to say it again.  “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.”  To be absolutely related to Christ carries with it a requirement for us to be only relatively related to everything else, even if it seems good, or at least harmless.

It is because of this utterly radical nature of Paul’s statements that I want to go back to those first words in our passage.  “I am saying this so that no one may deceive you with plausible arguments.”  You see, Paul is not concerned with the Colossians being led astray by people who say things that are clearly seen to be ridiculous.  He is not worried that the people will be deceived by ideas that everyone thinks are foolish.  The problem is that the Colossians might be deceived by plausible arguments.  By definition, plausible arguments are things that we could imagine ourselves believing in.  They are clearly things that rational people wouldn’t be shocked at.  The concern is not with things that are obviously destructive but with things that seem to be good, because it is the things that seem good but are actually deceptive that are the most dangerous.

So what does all of this mean for us today?  It means that we have to take seriously the fact that we might not have all the answers, that something might need to change.  It doesn’t take much to look around and find people who mean well but live in such a way that is either destructive to themselves or to others.  And yet, though we need to take this seriously and really place ourselves open to critique, we do so as an act of faith.  Paul’s letter, again, is not primarily a word of condemnation but a word of grace.  He knows that the Colossians are not evil people who are looking to abandon Christ at the first chance, but people who desperately want to be faithful in every aspect of their lives.

What do we have to risk by taking a hard and searching look at what we do and think to see if Christ is really central?  It may be that we find that Christ is indeed in the center of our lives and rejoice that we are participating in Christ’s ministry in this community.  It may be, however, that we find that there is something or other that is hindering us from being as faithful as we might be, something that, whether we meant it to or not, is sneaking into that central place.  In fact, it is entirely likely that we will find something like that, because none of us, to my knowledge, are yet perfected in love.  But what does it mean to find such a thing?  It means that we are empowered to let God transform us further than he has yet done.  It means that, as God has brought these competing things to our attention, we can more effectively allow God to take their place and fill us with joy.  If it is something that is bad, we are further sanctified by God and our lives will be the better for it.  If it is something good that is taking more than its share of our devotion, it will be put back in its proper place and our priorities will be more balanced and our love for our neighbors will be all the stronger as it flows from our love of God instead of trying to do everything on our own human strength.

So, I would challenge each of you, my brothers and sisters, to join with me in a season of self-examination.  I do not mean that we should join in a guilt trip, nor that we should be out to find faults, but that we would simply allow the light of God’s grace to shine on our lives and release us from any darkness that might be there.  Paul’s concerns are not primarily directed at children he needs to reprimand, but fellow Christians that just need a reminder of what really matters.  As Paul says in our text, when we were buried with Christ in baptism, we were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead…erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands.  He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.  Let us allow the God who has loved us so much show that love to us even more intensely in the week to come.  Let us pray.

AMEN