(Genesis 17:9-14; Colossians 2:9-15)

If you were here last week, you’ve probably noticed the gap. Last Sunday, we read up to verse 5 of chapter 2, and now we’re picking up this morning with verse 9. Given that I’m a humanities wonk by my own confession, you might feel justified in wondering if this represents a small problem with my math skills—perhaps I haven’t noticed before that there are those other numbers in between 5 and 9?

Don’t worry, though—it’s nothing like that. I’ll grant you I’m not the first person you’d want planning economic policy or doing the math to make sure your roof will bear the snow load, but I’m up to basic counting. The truth is, we read what we read this morning because of the way verses 6-23 of this chapter are structured. We have this long passage in this chapter in which Paul for the first time explicitly attacks the Colossian heresy, the false teaching that’s been seducing them away from Christ, and tells them how they ought to be living. It’s practical in the beginning and practical at the end—you might say that’s the “what”—and then here in the middle, we have the section we read this morning which gives the “why”: the theological foundation and justification for what Paul says before and after it. So what I decided to do is to take things a little out of the order Paul uses, take this section first, and then look at the passage as a whole next week and see how he applies it.

The opening statement of this section should sound familiar to you by now: “In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” If this sounds a lot like “He is the image of the invisible God,” chapter 1 verse 15, and “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,” 1:19, to you, good, because it should; Paul here is making that same point in a different way, from a bit of a different angle, because this is the point that the Colossians just have to get straight. They want to see God, they want to know God, they want to experience the reality of the presence of God, which is completely right and completely admirable—but they don’t know where they need to go to do that, or how to have that experience, because they haven’t really figured out who Jesus is. They haven’t grasped that in Jesus, the invisible God became visible, and the whole of God—not just part of God, not just certain aspects of God, but God in all of who he is, in all his character, all his love and mercy and justice and grace and holiness, in all his power and glory, became human, and (as we talked about earlier this year) is still human. They haven’t figured out that everything they’re seeking is already theirs in Christ.

And so Paul says again, “In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form,” and then he continues, “and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.” For the Colossians, as we’ll talk about in greater detail next week, those words “power and authority” relate to the spiritual powers they thought they needed to appease in order to pursue the fullness of spiritual life; for us, they may mean something different. The point is clear regardless: whatever other powers there might be, whatever other authorities you might think you need to acknowledge and respect, they are under Jesus’ control, and they aren’t the way for you to find the fullness you’re looking for. The only source of true fullness of life is Jesus—and in him, if you belong to him, you already have it.

Where Paul goes next with this may sound quite strange to our ears, since we lack the Jewish background: he discusses this in terms of the Jewish sacrament of circumcision. (“Sacrament” of course isn’t a Jewish term, but I think we can reasonably use that language.) Circumcision of males was a physical sign of God’s covenant with his people, going all the way back to the covenant he made with Abraham in Genesis 17; but fairly early on in the life of God’s people, God started using it as a metaphor and talking about the necessity for a spiritual circumcision—that his people didn’t just need to snip their flesh, they needed to circumcise their hearts, to cut away the parts of them that resisted God and his will. Just as physical circumcision was an act of outward obedience, accepting the sign of the covenant, so too they needed an act of inward obedience, accepting the authority of the covenant; but as the history of Israel showed, this spiritual circumcision was a task beyond their ability or will to accomplish. It was only in the work of Christ that that could finally become a reality.

I should note at this point that I part company with the NIV in verse 11. A more literal translation here would read, “In him you also were circumcised in the putting off of the body of flesh”; the NIV, as you saw, takes “the body of flesh” to mean “the sinful nature,” but I don’t think that’s what Paul’s on about here. Rather, I think he’s using this as a metaphor for the death of Christ on the cross. In circumcision, a strip of flesh was cut off to mark the entry of the boy or man into the covenant of God; in the crucifixion, Jesus’ whole body was torn away on our behalf to bring about our entry into the new covenant of God. In his death, we received that spiritual circumcision to which Moses and the prophets had pointed, because our hearts were made new.

Specifically, our hearts were made new through our participation in the death and rebirth of Christ. We were circumcised with him in his circumcision—which is to say, who we were before, our old natures and old selves, died with him in his death—and then buried with him in baptism; and then in his resurrection we were raised with him, with a whole new life—his life in us, by the work of his Holy Spirit. The work of God has obviously not been completed, and will not be until Christ comes again, but it has already been accomplished; all that remains is to see it worked out and brought to its full harvest, because the work Christ has begun, he will most surely finish. In the meantime, we can live in the assurance that, as Paul says in Galatians 2:20, it is not we who live, but Christ who lives in us, and that we have his power by his Spirit to walk in his ways.

In verse 13 Paul intensifies this point by changing his terms: not only have we been given new life in Christ, but that life is the first true life we’ve had; before the work of Christ in our hearts, we were alive physically, but dead spiritually, crushed under the weight of our sin and “the uncircumcision of our flesh.” Here again, the NIV takes “flesh” to mean “sinful nature,” and here again I disagree. This is a literal statement with a symbolic meaning: many at least in the Colossian church were in fact uncircumcised, because they were Gentiles. This was significant because circumcision was an act of obedience to the command of God to his people, and thus uncircumcision had been a marker that one had not accepted God’s authority; it was a symbol of alienation from God and his covenant. The point of Paul’s words is clear: you were estranged from God by your disobedience, you were spiritually dead in your sin, and then God came to you in Christ and forgave your sins in order that he might bring you back to life in Christ. He did this freely, as an act of his grace, in spite of the fact that we didn’t deserve it.

But how did he do it? Well, that’s where things get a little tricky, in verses 14-15. The NIV doesn’t help matters here—in truth, their translation committee didn’t cover themselves in glory on this passage—but the translation “written code” is just a bad one, because that suggests a code of laws to our ears, and that’s not what’s in view here. The Greek word at this point literally means “handwritten,” and it was used to signify a note of indebtedness written in one’s own hand—an IOU, but legally enforceable, and containing penalty clauses. We owed God obedience, and the penalty for defaulting on that debt was death; that certainly includes the Old Testament Law, which made both the debt and the penalty explicit, but it’s a far larger thing than that, going all the way back to God’s creation of humanity at the very beginning. God had an IOU on us, and he could have simply enforced it. Instead, he erased it, and then he took it and nailed it to the cross. The IOU against us was nailed to the cross of Christ as the accusation against him; the debt we could never repay, he paid with his life.

Now, remember, back in verse 10, Paul proclaimed Christ the head over every power and authority; one of the points he’s trying to make to the Colossians is that these spiritual powers they’re all caught up about are nothing next to Jesus. Here in verse 15, he comes back around to that point, in a very strange sentence. The word the NIV translates “disarmed” here, following the standard English translation, is actually the same word that’s translated “putting off” back in verse 11; it means that God stripped the powers and authorities. Of what? The translation “disarmed” suggests their weapons, but I think there’s a better read here than that. I believe the imagery here is of a royal court, of a king stripping public officials of their position, authority, rights, and pay, reducing them to powerlessness and insignificance, and symbolizing that by taking away their badges of office and their finery.

I think that’s what we have here. Jesus, by allowing those powers and authorities—working through human leaders—to strip him of his body by killing him, turned the tables on them; in doing that, he took the IOU against us that gave them their power over us and destroyed it, thus enabling him to strip them in turn of that power. And then, having reduced them to utter helplessness, he exposed that utter helplessness to the world, displaying them in a triumphal procession. This was something the Romans did; when one of their generals won a war, he would drag the enemy leaders back to Rome, where he would have a massive victory parade through the streets, with all the people of the city turned out to cheer him—and right behind the general would come the leaders he’d defeated, in chains, naked, exposed to the whole city of Rome in every sense of the word. They had dared to challenge Rome, they had dared to think that they had the power to resist—so they would receive the just punishment of having their complete powerlessness, their inability to resist the might of Rome, put on display before the gods and everybody. Jesus did the same to the powers and authorities in his resurrection, proving their complete powerlessness before him by showing the whole world that not even their greatest weapon—death—could overcome him.

And the sign of his triumph, the banner of his procession, the mark of his victory, was the cross. Normally an instrument of torture, both physical and psychological, designed to make dying not only as long and agonizing but also as humiliating and degrading as possible—the Romans were big on making examples of anyone who gave them trouble; the idea that criminals should be allowed to die with dignity in comfort would never have occurred to them—the cross was a horrible thing; but Jesus took that and flipped it around, making that place of sorrow and defeat a place of glorious victory.

Now, this is pretty dense stuff, and it comes out of a mindset that’s unfamiliar to us; that’s why I thought it was important to take the time to go through it this week and lay it all out before looking at the whole passage, and how this section fits into it, next week. So, we’ll be coming back to this; but for this morning, I want you to notice something. Let’s look at this in the ESV, since it’s a more literal translation and we can see this more clearly. Verse 9: “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and”—verse 10—“you have been filled in him”; verse 11: “In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands”; verse 12: “having been buried with him in baptism,” and here I think the ESV gets it wrong, “in him you were also raised with him through faith”; verse 13: “God made you alive together with him”; and then verse 15: “He [that is, God] disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him.” In whom? With whom? Christ. Everything is in Christ, with Christ, by Christ. It’s not in our own strength, it’s not in our own work, it’s not in our own accomplishments, it’s not in our own determination, it’s not in our checklists or anything we can do; it’s only in Christ, only by his grace, only by his power, only through the cross.

(Proverbs 2:1-11; Colossians 1:24-2:5)

How many of y’all use e-mail regularly? How many of you regularly get e-mail forwards? How many of you send those on to other folks? There are a lot of them out there; unfortunately, a lot of them are purely phony. Maybe you’ve seen the e-mail blasting Target as a French company that’s opposed to veterans; now, my dad likes to refer to Target as “Target, the French store,” but that’s the only thing French about them—they’re headquartered in Minneapolis. To be sure, they’ve chosen to focus their corporate grant-giving on educational and arts projects, but that doesn’t make them anti-veteran. Or perhaps you’ve run across the one about Proctor & Gamble being a front for the Church of Satan? Supposedly the CEO went on Oprah and confessed it, and pointed out the “666” hidden in their corporate logo. Turns out, though, that rumor was invented by a regional distributor for Amway—long enough ago, in fact, that in older versions of the story, the confession occurred on Donahue.

Do you ever wonder why these things get around so well? They spread across the electronic landscape like kudzu, after all—there has to be a reason. Or maybe several, since we human beings tend not to do things simply, or for simple reasons. I don’t claim to know all of them, but I think I can name the big one: we’re wired to believe. That’s just the way we’re made. This isn’t to say that we’re wired to hold any particular belief—I think we were, originally, but our fall into sin broke that—but it is to say that when confronted with a proposition, with someone declaring something to be true, our deepest natural reflex is to believe it. We are innately credulous. That’s why Internet rumors spread the way they do: many, perhaps most, people grant them the presumption of belief, assuming them to be credible simply because they exist. It’s why Adolf Hitler’s “big lie” propaganda strategy worked, because it’s hard for us to credit that anyone actually could tell a lie that big, even when rationally we know that such things happen. And it’s why, as you might have seen in the news lately, research has shown that atheists are far more likely than religious folk to believe in UFOs, ESP, and paranormal phenomena; having thrown out religion, they have to find something else to believe in. Thus the line attributed to the great Christian writer G. K. Chesterton, “When a man ceases to believe in God, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything.”

Now, obviously we don’t believe everything we hear (or at least, most people don’t); we learn fairly early that we can’t, because that would require us to believe many things which are mutually contradictory. Further, as we come to believe in certain things, that rules out believing in others. Over the course of life, we evolve a set of criteria for determining what things we believe and what things we don’t; we develop filters to strain out the things which don’t make sense, or don’t fit with what we believe, or contradict things which we know to be true. And yet, despite all this, we still have the predisposition, the reflex, to believe what people tell us. I spent most of a year working in inner-city ministry, right along the north side of one of the most blighted urban slums in the developed world, and in that time I had people lie to me and try to con me in more ways than I would have imagined possible. It was an education. And yet, when I had someone come up to me one rainy night outside our favorite restaurant and ask for money because he’d run out of gas, I gave him a toonie—a two-dollar coin—and didn’t realize I’d been conned until the next week when I saw the guy referenced by one of the local columnists. I should have known better; but I was predisposed to believe his story.

The most basic reason for this, I’m sure, is that God created us to believe him. Obviously, that was bent when we chose to turn away from God into disobedience, but it’s still there; and I think there’s something about living in our fallen world that reinforces it. It shows up in a lot of ways. Some are fairly unflattering, like the desire to know something that most people don’t—we like feeling special, like we’re smarter than the average Joe—while others are more noble, like the desire to understand the world. Behind them all, if we look, I think we can see a common root: this sense that everybody has, though some pay attention to it and some don’t, that there’s more to this life than what we can see. We can study how this world works in a lot of ways, through sciences like physics or social sciences like economics, or through disciplines in the humanities like history or literature, but there’s always more to understand than we can get to, and always a deeper truth that we can’t quite reach on our own. It’s the sense that there’s a mystery at the heart of life, one that we can’t understand without a deeper wisdom than this world has to give us; we need something better to believe in than money can buy, or power can win, or pleasure can produce.

Unfortunately, if we look at churches around this country, we see a lot of them that are so determined to be relevant and with it and cool that they’ve adopted a strategy of giving the world what it already knows it wants; they mimic its sounds, its approaches, its strategies, in an effort to address the needs it’s already aware of and already understands. Thus we get worship services where a playlist right out of the Top 40 leads into sermons about how if Jesus is your CEO, you can follow these three surefire principles to prepare your children to lead successful lives. The music and the principles may be fine as far as they go—but they don’t go far enough, because they don’t go any farther than the world goes. They don’t even acknowledge the mystery, let alone aim for it; they leave that need unaddressed and unfilled.

Was this the problem in the Colossian church? We have no way of knowing for sure, but it sounds like it might have been. Certainly, from the things Paul feels the need to say to these folks, it sounds like their understanding of Christ is pretty shallow—and as a consequence, though they’ve been given the riches of the glory of the knowledge of God’s mystery, though they’ve been given the keys to the treasury of heaven itself, they don’t know it. They don’t understand what they’ve been given, and so they still feel the need for something more; as a result, they’re vulnerable to these teachers who’ve come along and promised them a new and greater wisdom, a new and greater experience of God, and a new and greater insight into his mystery. They don’t understand what Paul understands, that the supposed wisdom of those teachers is in fact false, a counterfeit, that serves only to draw them away from God.

This is why Paul says that he struggles that the Colossians, and the other Christians of the Lycus Valley, “may be encouraged . . . to reach all the riches of the full understanding of the knowledge of the mystery of God, which is Christ.” Indeed, he expresses this desire for all those who haven’t seen him face to face, for this is his hope for all the church—not just for the people to whom he initially wrote this letter, but for all of us who read it across the length and breadth of the people of God. The world tries to keep us from that, either by leading us off down the rabbit trail to chase illusions, as the Colossians did, or by keeping us so focused on the practical things of life that we forget our sense of mystery, that we forget there’s anything more to life than just getting through it. Paul calls us away from both mistakes; he calls us to remember that there is more to this life, and to dive into the mystery of God, to seek the glory of the knowledge of God in the face of Christ.

His desire is that we will learn that there is a deeper wisdom than this world can offer, and a deeper meaning to life than it knows of, and that both are found in Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, to be revealed only to those who seek him. If we would pursue understanding, if we want to live wisely, if we desire to see ourselves and others clearly and truly, we must look to Jesus, for we will only find what we desire in him. There is no better way, there is no other option, there is nothing more that needs to be said or done; Christ alone is wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:30. That is the mystery of God: that such a thing is possible; that God would actually become human, to live with us and die for us, and then to rise again to set us free; that the gap between us and God has been bridged—from God’s side!—and we don’t have to earn our way into his presence, for we are freely invited there by his grace. This is the mystery we celebrate at this table, the mystery the world calls foolishness that is in truth the root of all wisdom.

(Isaiah 49:1-6; Colossians 1:24-29)

Has it ever occurred to you how much of what they show on TV is about suffering? I don’t mean the programs, necessarily (though many of them are, too)—I mean the commercials. For one thing, many of them are so bad, they make you suffer . . . More than that, though, suffering is really what they’re about. First, you have all the drug commercials. “If you suffer from depression . . .” with these grey-lit shots of gloomy, exhausted people—then, after they tell you about the drug, the same people in the sunshine with smiles on their faces. “If you suffer from high blood pressure,” or “high cholesterol,” or whatever—they all boil down to the same thing: Got a problem? Take a pill. Sure, there are side effects, but they aren’t as bad as this, are they?

Alongside those, though not as frequent, are the “pay an expert” ads. The ones that still come to my mind, though I haven’t seen them in ages, are ads for “the law offices of Buckland & Shumm” that used to run incessantly during Perry Mason on the Bellingham station. Different lawyers out here, but the same basic message: has someone hurt you? Sue their pants off. We’ll be happy to take all their money for you, and we’ll even let you have some of it! Also in this category are ads for counseling services and the like, and these I have a lot more respect for; I’ve been through counseling a couple of times myself (I came out still odd, but happier about it), and I know just how much good a good counselor can do. What does concern me, though, is that there’s still the idea here that suffering is a problem which needs to be fixed, and that you need an expert to fix it for you. There are times when that’s true; there are also a good many counselors who are wise enough not to foster that idea when it isn’t; but there are too many more who aren’t.

As well, we have the bread and butter of commercial advertising: Is there a need in your life? Buy our product. Dishwasher soap not getting your glasses clean? Not attractive enough to the opposite sex? Feeling flabby and out of shape? Driving an old, uninteresting car? Losing your hair? Losing your energy? Why suffer? Buy Our Product, and all will be well.

Besides these, I can think of one other type of TV ad that’s all about suffering: political ads. And no, I don’t primarily mean your suffering, real though that no doubt is. Rather, stop and think about negative political ads for a minute, because they tend to be about playing on the suffering, real or perceived, of the voters they’re trying to persuade. The most common kind of negative ad is the “distort the record” ad, which makes all sorts of exaggerated statements about the opponent’s political positions and actions that really boil down to one premise: you’re suffering, and either my opponent is the reason why, or if they win this election, they’ll make it worse. These sorts of ads give us a third response to suffering: if you can’t take a pill or pay an expert to fix it, then find someone to blame. (Just imagine if we combined these with the lawyer ads . . . “Hi, I’m Joe Schmo, and I’m running for Congress. My opponent beats up old ladies and burns down their houses. Vote for me, and after I win, I’ll sue him for millions of dollars on your behalf.” The possibilities are endless.)

All these ads run off the underlying assumption of our society that we shouldn’t suffer, that we shouldn’t have to, and that if we do, something’s wrong—something needs to be fixed, somebody’s going to pay, something has to change. In the most extreme cases, this gives us the euthanasia movement, which tells us that if we’re suffering and it can’t be fixed, we can’t change it, then we shouldn’t want to live anymore. In lesser cases, we’re urged to take a pill, see a specialist, call a lawyer, file a complaint. Behind it all is the idea that a life without serious suffering is the norm, or ought to be, and that we should expect no less; that creates a gap between expectations and reality, which creates stress, which only makes matters worse.

By contrast, the apostle Paul had a very different view of suffering. I don’t imagine he enjoyed it any more than anyone else does, but he didn’t see it as something to be rejected, to be avoided or fixed or blamed on someone else. Instead, we see him say here (and in other places), “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake.” That doesn’t mean he wanted to suffer, but that in the midst of suffering, as bad as it was, he was able to find joy—not despite his suffering, but in it; he was able to find his suffering a cause for joy. Why? Because he saw a purpose in it, a reason for it, and a benefit to it. He isn’t suffering for no reason, and his suffering isn’t meaningless; he’s suffering for the sake of the Colossians, for the sake of the whole church, and for Christ.

But what purpose, what reason, what benefit, could he have found in his suffering? The answer to that question begins with one key fact: Paul was a faithful servant of Jesus Christ, and there was no doubt in his mind that he was doing what God had called him to do—and he understood all his sufferings, all his afflictions, in the light of that fact. Much that he suffered, of course, was in direct response to that, as his opponents tried multiple times to destroy him (and came very close once or twice); but even those pains which came in the normal course of life, such as the hardships of life on the road, came in the course of a life devoted to serving God. With everything he did focused on following Jesus, he could and did regard all his suffering as suffering for Christ; and so the mission that gave his life meaning also gave meaning to his suffering.

This is why he says, “in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” Paul is not saying here that Jesus’ crucifixion was insufficient for the salvation of his people (and still less that Paul’s own sufferings are necessary to complete that work); rather, he’s drawing on the Jewish concept of “the woes of the Messiah.” In Jewish thought, this was the time of distress and suffering that would precede the coming of the Messiah to put all things right and make all things new; a roughly similar concept in Christian thought is the time of the Tribulation. The idea was that it was necessary to pass through this time in order to enter the kingdom of God. What Paul’s working with here is the thought that there is a definite measure of suffering that must be filled up before Christ will come again, and that in taking on more than his own share of suffering, absorbing more than his share of affliction, he’s reducing the amount that his fellow Christians will have to endure.

This is a strange thought to us (though I would think it must have made sense to the Colossians), but it underscores two key points: first, suffering for Christ is not something to be avoided, but something we need to accept, and even embrace, because when we suffer for Christ, it draws us close to him. Paul makes this explicit in Philippians 3:10, where he writes, “I want to know Christ, the power of his resurrection and the participation in his sufferings, by being conformed to his death.” We cannot experience the power of Christ’s resurrection, which we have through the Spirit of God, if we are unwilling to walk his path of suffering; these two are inextricably linked. As well, if we suffer for Christ, then we suffer with Christ—we do not suffer alone, but in our suffering, we share in his suffering—and so we are drawn closer to him, we come to know him and share in his life in a deeper and more intimate way than we ever could otherwise.

The key is that, in joys and in sorrows, whatever may come, we keep focused on Christ. That’s the example Paul sets us here; and note the way he uses his example to help set the Colossians straight, and bring them back to that focus on Christ. Remember, they’ve fallen in with these teachers who are promising them an experience of God in his glory if they will just obey all their rules and regulations; the teachers are holding up those rules and regulations as the Colossians’ hope of a fleeting experience of glory. Paul points them, and us, to a far greater hope: the true riches of the mystery of God are not locked away from everyone except the select few who can manage to obey him well enough—instead, they’re available to everyone, because the mystery is that God was in Christ, and by his Holy Spirit, Christ is in you.

That, Paul says, is the hope of glory: the promise that we can live life, even in this fallen, broken world, in the constant presence of our loving God, and that when death comes, we will be gathered fully into his presence, able fully to experience his glory—and not only to experience it, but to share in it. That’s the hope, that’s the promise, that enables Paul to rejoice in his sufferings, because he knows that whatever he may suffer now as a result of his service to Christ will only contribute to the glory he will experience later; and it’s the hope and promise that enables us to do the same. It’s the promise we were given by Christ himself, who is our sure and certain hope of glory.

(Isaiah 1:18-20; Colossians 1:21-23)

After the service last Sunday, Bryan Benjamin came up to me and asked, “Why didn’t you talk about Jesus being the firstborn from the dead?” You can always count on Bryan to ask those sorts of questions, which is one of the reasons I appreciate him. My answer, if you boil it down, was essentially that I didn’t want to preach another 45-minute sermon; I was trying to trace a line through the passage, and I could very easily have sent myself off on a long tangent if I’d tried to unpack that phrase, and so I just didn’t. I took it into account in everything I was saying, but I didn’t do so explicitly, or go into how it connected to the rest of the passage.

And yet, that doesn’t mean we can just ignore it and head on by. You might have noticed last Sunday—I didn’t explicitly talk about this, either, but you might have caught it—that in last week’s passage, there’s a movement to Paul’s thought from one part of the hymn to the next. He starts off talking about who Jesus is—“the image of the invisible God, firstborn before all creation”—and then moves from there to talk about his role in creation. That establishes Jesus’ supremacy—Christ is Lord over everything because it was all made through him and for him and he’s the one who holds it all together—which Paul then applies to the church. And with that, the language of the hymn pivots from talking about Jesus’ role in creating the world to talking about his role in re­-creating it, in making it new; and so where in verse 15, Paul calls Jesus the firstborn before all creation, in verse 18 he calls him the firstborn from the dead—in his resurrection in a fully restored human body, free from the effects of sin, we might also say, he is the firstborn of the new creation, the firstborn of the new heavens and the new earth. Just as he’s Lord over all creation because everything was made through him, so he is the head of the church and preeminent in all things because everything will be made new through him.

Which is good, because it needs to be. We need that—our world needs that. That’s why Paul concludes his great hymn by talking about Christ’s reconciling work, about how he made peace through the blood of his cross, and it’s why he continues by turning from what Christ did to why he did it, and why it had to be done. We were, he says, “estranged and hostile in mind”; we were alienated, as we talked about last week, in several ways. First, we were alienated from God; our sin had separated us from him, had broken that relationship beyond our ability to repair—and indeed, beyond our ability even to desire to do so. Look at the old pagan religions, and you’ll see that they’re founded on fear; we take for granted this idea of a loving, caring God whom we can come to know on friendly terms, whom we can trust and on whom we can rely, but that’s not an idea people ever came up with. It took God even to give us the idea, because our sin had estranged us from him to that great an extent.

Second, to be alienated from God is to be alienated from ourselves. It’s God who made us and who alone knows us as we really are; it’s God who holds us in his hand, and in his mind—we continue to exist only because he remembers us to ourselves. It’s Godd who is the source of all good things, including all the good gifts we possess. As a consequence, we cannot know ourselves truly, at least at the deepest level, if we don’t know him; we can figure out a great many things about ourselves, but we’ll always figure some of them wrong, whether just by mistake or out of our desire to believe ourselves better (or different) than we really are. What’s more, there will always be things about ourselves that we won’t be able to make sense of, and currents in our souls that run too deep for us even to see, though we may sense their effects. This is why we invented psychologists and psychiatrists and social workers, and why we conjured up Sigmund Freud so he could invent psychoanalysts, so they could tell us some of the nonsensical truths about ourselves that we would never have wit enough to see on our own; and even so, even at our best, we remain strangers in our own minds. Only God in Christ has the ability to reverse that alienation and restore us to ourselves; only in him can true healing be found.

Third, since we were estranged from God, who is the source of all that is good in us, and since we were estranged from ourselves as a consequence, we were estranged from each other as well. We could build relationships across the divides between us as best we were able, friendships and marriages and families and business partnerships, and often, we did pretty well; but in our own strength, even the strongest relationships we can create are fairly fragile. The vagaries of life can break them, our own sinfulness can cause them to collapse, and even if everything else goes well, death brings them to an inevitable end. And even those who have the most and closest friends know far more people to whom they’re not close, some of whom may be rivals and competitors, and some of whom might even be true enemies. And beyond that, we divide ourselves up in myriad ways, companies and teams, political parties and ethnic groups, states and nations, and we fight with each other. War, of course, is one form of that—but economic competition is another, and sports yet a third, and politics a fourth.

We as fallen human beings need reconciliation; we need peace with God, with ourselves, and with each other, and we can’t do it in our own strength. This world is never going to find a peace treaty to end all wars, and there will never be any such thing as a post-partisan political candidate, any more than there will ever be an economy where no company ever goes under or a sports league where every team ties for the championship. It’s just not in us. As Paul says, our wicked works prove that. It’s not just about life after death; Jesus didn’t just come so that after we die, everything would be good, though that’s certainly part of the gift he’s given us. More than that, though, he came to bring the reconciliation we need in this life. He came to remove the barrier of sin that isolates and alienates us, and to heal the breaches it created. He came to restore our relationship with God so that we could once again call him Father; he came to free us from the distorting burden of slavery to sin that warps and mars our souls; he came to bring reconciliation between us, that we might learn to love our enemies and do good to those who harm us. Indeed, he came to bring reconciliation to the whole created order, which has been broken and sent spinning off course and out of tune by our sin, to heal the damage we have done, to restore its harmony and set it right.

He’s done this, Paul says, “in the body of his flesh, through death.” This of course reaches back to what he said in verse 20, that Christ has “made peace through the blood of his cross”; Paul is driving this point home to the Colossians, hammering it home with repeated heavy blows. The one who is the image of the invisible God, the one who was God become human, the Lord of the universe and head of the church, in whom and through whom and for whom are all things, the one who holds all things together, hung bleeding on a cross in shock and agony until his heart stopped. This is the central fact of our faith, I think, together with the resurrection, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself by taking the overflowing cup of human sin with all its agony and draining that cup to the very dregs.

This is what Paul wants the Colossians to understand, that there is simply no room for their delusions that they can contribute anything to their own salvation; the sacrifice of Jesus is so immense, in the awe-striking glory of who he is and the truly awe-full reality of the price he paid, that there is nothing we can add to it. The price he paid and the work he accomplished on the cross was sufficient for everything; it was truly an infinite sacrifice, the work of infinite love, the gift of infinite grace, and that sacrifice, that work, that gift, is sufficient. It is enough. Whatever may come, whatever may happen, whatever we may do, it is always enough; and it only is enough. It is Christ, by his work on the cross, who makes us holy and blameless in the eyes of God, able to stand in his presence with no reason for guilt or reproach; no matter how good we might be, we can’t live up to that standard, nor will we ever be able to on our own. We can’t earn our way there—and we don’t have to. In Christ, we have been given that status that we can’t achieve for ourselves; he took all our sin on himself on the cross and paid the price for it there, and gave us his righteousness in exchange.

Now, you might have noticed that in verse 22, Paul says that Jesus has done this—“you who formerly were estranged . . . he has now reconciled in the body of his flesh”—but then in verse 23, he says, “Provided you remain firmly founded and stable in your faith.” What’s going on here? Does this mean that you can lose your salvation? There are those who argue that, of course, but no, that’s not what this means. The work of Christ on the cross is finished, it is completed, once and for all. At that moment, salvation was accomplished for all those who belong to him; it cannot be undone, and God isn’t going back on it. Paul isn’t turning around and casting any doubts on that, as if he were somehow lessening the work of Christ. Rather, what he’s doing is making a point that Jesus also made in Matthew 7 when he said, talking of false prophets, “You will know them by their fruits.” If we’ve been saved, if we’ve been reconciled through the work of Christ on the cross, if his Spirit is at work in us, that’s going to have certain clear effects in our lives; thus Jesus could go on to say, “Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.” One of the good fruit that we bear if we’re spiritually healthy—which is to say, if we’ve received the new life of God in Christ by the power of his Holy Spirit—is perseverance: if our salvation is real, we don’t walk away from it. We may drift at times, but in the end Jesus always pulls us back by his Spirit.

This is the assurance we have in Christ, that whatever our own weaknesses or shortcomings, whatever the sins we wrestle with and however blatant or subtle they may be, our salvation doesn’t depend on us; it depends on him in whom we have put our faith and trust, and we can be certain that he is able to hold us safely and firmly in his arms through whatever may come, until at last he brings us home to him.

(Isaiah 40:21-31; Colossians 1:15-20)

This is one of my favorite passages of Scripture—I could easily preach for 45 minutes on this text. I know that because I’ve done it! (Just ask Sara, she was there.) As such, this passage is also the reason why I write out all my sermons. It was back when we were in college, and I was preaching to our InterVarsity chapter, of which I was one of the student leaders; it’s the only time I’ve ever preached without a manuscript. In my defense, I was also sick as a dog that night (which is the main reason I hadn’t written the thing out), so I had even more of a tendency to ramble—but still: 45 minutes—and that was when I talked a lot faster than I do now. Be glad I’ve learned a few things since then. My fellow students at the time were . . . diplomatic. They did agree, though, that I hadn’t repeated anything, and that everything I’d said was good—I just hadn’t known when to stop. There really is enough here to talk about for 45 minutes easy, especially if you don’t know when to stop. Like I said, be glad I’ve learned a few things.

This is a magnificent hymn of praise to Christ, in my opinion one of the high points of the New Testament; many scholars believe that Paul took up a hymn that was circulating around the early church and just plugged it in here, but I don’t believe that. For one thing, that assumes that there’s another great writer floating around the early church about whom we know nothing, which seems unlikely; for another, this passage just seems to erupt out of the end of Paul’s prayer, which is characteristic of Paul. He’s praying for the Colossians, he lays out the reason for their faith, and he mentions Jesus, “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins”—and then he just explodes into praise for who Christ is and what he has done. He can’t help himself, he has to; Jesus means so much to him, his love for Christ is so great, and his understanding of who the Savior is and what he has done is so deep, that praise just bursts out of him. To understand Paul, and to understand anything he writes, we have to begin with that fact, because everything he says and does flows from that.

The first thing Paul says about Jesus is that “he is the image of the invisible God.” This is a powerful phrase. It was well established in the Old Testament, as we talked about a while back, that no one has ever seen God, that no one can see God and live, not because God won’t permit it but because our physical and emotional being is too limited: we simply couldn’t handle the experience. Light is a wonderful thing, but too much light blinds and burns the eyes; heat is necessary for life, but too much heat kills; and joy is essential for our spirits, but too much joy overwhelms and overloads us. For us to see God as he is would be all of these things and more, and we could not endure; we would burn like paper in a bonfire. That’s why we sang at the beginning of the service, “immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.”

This is the problem for all human attempts at religion. Hinduism and its descendants deal with it by making a virtue of necessity, making that extinction of the self the goal of religion. A lot of modern folks, who really prefer a tame God anyway, choose to deny the whole problem. The teachers who were leading the Colossians astray made human effort the solution—if you just work really, really hard and give up all these pleasures and do all these religious things and cut out all your bad behaviors, you can purify yourself enough to see God—an approach which is still fairly common today, especially among diet books. None of these can solve the problem; only God could do that. In Jesus, the one who was immortal took on human mortality—and died; the one who was invisible in the brilliance of his glory bound himself in human flesh and bone and became visible—and indeed, touchable, and knowable in a whole new way.

Now, this is possible because God created us in his image, and though that image in us is broken and marred by sin, it still remains; and so the fact that Jesus is the image of God, the image in whom were were created, tells us something important about ourselves as well: we were made to be like Christ, and any shift away from him, any shift away from the life to which he calls us, no matter how “natural” we might claim it to be, is in fact a betrayal of our true nature. The problem, as Paul well understood, is that sin has so ensnared us and so deceived us that in ourselves, we no longer know who we are, much less who we’re supposed to be; but in Jesus, we can see who we’re supposed to be, and how we were meant to live. In him, we can see not only who God is, but who we truly are, and will be when his work in us is complete.

Having made the ringing statement that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, Paul then says several specific things about him. First, in him all things were created. He was the creative agent through whom God the Father made everything that is—nothing exists that he didn’t make, nothing exists apart from him, nothing has life that he did not give life. What’s more, nothing exists which was not created for him; everything that exists is properly his, created to serve his will and his purposes.

Interestingly, Paul emphasizes that this is true not only of the visible, physical world, but also of the invisible world, what we might call the spiritual world. This is probably in response to the false teachers in Colossae; they seem to have believed that when you ascended to the throne of God, you had to pass through a number of realms, each controlled by an angel with whom you had to negotiate—perhaps, though we can’t be sure, by offering them worship. These angelic figures, then, were of some importance, independent powers who must be treated with considerable respect. To that, Paul says, no: they too, if they exist, were created in Christ, through Christ, for Christ, and are properly under his authority, whether they accept it or not. As such, Paul says, there is only one power who truly matters in this world: Jesus.

Paul goes on to say of Jesus that “in him all things hold together.” Our scientific age has developed this idea of the universe as, essentially, a giant machine—even if God did create the world, all he had to do was put it together, wind it up, start it moving, and walk off to do something else; it would run just fine without him. Thus we have the image of God as divine watchmaker—which is a powerful argument for his existence as creator of the world, but not for his ongoing involvement with it. To this idea, too, Paul says no: the universe doesn’t run all by itself, it runs because Christ holds it together, and if he ever stopped, it would all fly apart; if the universe is a giant watch, it’s a watch with no back but God’s hand to hold all the parts in. The will of Christ sustains our lives, and the life of all that is; apart from him, we have no life, no existence, at all.

Finally, Paul says that through Jesus, the man who was fully God, the only one sufficient for the purpose, God has reconciled the universe to himself. Now, this might seem like a strange assertion, because when we look around, we don’t see that; we see a world that is very much unreconciled—to God and to itself. We see wars and rumors of wars, we see division in the church, we see millions upon millions of people chasing other gods; and when we look at ourselves, if we’re honest, we see that God’s work is very much unfinished in our own lives. And yes, it’s true that not everyone will be saved; where the peace of Christ is not freely accepted, it will be imposed. Jesus didn’t win the devil over, he conquered him. But though the conflict at the heart of creation continues, that’s only a temporary reality, until the victory of Christ is brought to full completion. The key point Paul wants to make is that the victory has already been won, the work of reconciliation and healing has already begun, and its completion is sure; even though we have not yet seen all things reconciled to God, we can speak of it as something that has already happened, because it’s a done deal. The forces of evil are like remnants of the Imperial Japanese army holding out on Pacific islands after the end of World War Two—they may still be fighting, but the war has already been decided.

If you want evidence of that, just look around: we are the sign of the coming kingdom, not in ourselves but in what our lives demonstrate. We are the vanguard of Christ’s victory, and the proof of what God has done, is doing, and will do through Christ. We were estranged from God, in rebellion against him, cut off from his love, and therefore estranged from each other, and from ourselves; our sin set up a barrier around us, crippling our efforts to relate to each other and making any attempt to reach out to God impossible, and that same barrier cut through our souls, keeping us from being who we were meant to be. Through his death on the cross, Christ broke down that barrier and ended our estrangement, bringing us back into relationship with God, back to his love and his life. The charges against us for all our evil were dismissed, and we were set free—set free to live in God.

This is good news, and reason for praise and thanksgiving. The one through whom the Father made the world, the one who holds it together, is the one who holds us together, as individuals and as a congregation. When sin pulls us away from God and we begin to grow distant from him, Jesus pursues us and draws us back. When old patterns and old ways of living reassert themselves, when we begin to act again as if we were still slaves to sin, Jesus sets us free. When the enemy attacks, seeking to use our own sins and the sins of others to break us down, Jesus builds us back up and shields us with his love. And when the devil seeks to use our sins and the sins of others to drive wedges between us, to break relationships and sever the sinews of the body of Christ, Jesus is at work there, too, bringing reconciliation. None of us is perfect; we all make mistakes, we all do wrong—you know I do, I know you do, you know each other do—and in the course of life, we’ve all hurt each other; but Jesus’ reconciling work continues, if we will only accept it, and will continue until he comes again. We are his disciples, we are his people, and whatever may come, and whatever we may do, he is right here with us, holding us together. That’s good news.

(Psalm 96; Colossians 1:1-14)

One of the great temptations of the Christian life, from the very beginning, has been to add to it. C. S. Lewis talks about one aspect of this in The Screwtape Letters, dubbing it “Christianity And”; and while he focuses there on one particular form of this temptation, he sets out its essence very clearly: to add anything at all to the gospel is to nullify it altogether, to “substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring.” We can be tempted into this error out of the desire to serve a particular cause—“Christianity and the Hot-Button Issue,” “Christianity and Your Chosen Political Party”—or the desire to please others, or spiritual pride, or the desire to have God on our own terms, or the fear that Christ really isn’t enough, or even a misunderstanding of what the gospel of Jesus Christ really is and means. There are a lot of reasons, but the mistake is the same: believing that Christ plus something else equals more than Christ alone. As Paul is at pains to tell the Colossians, that’s exactly wrong. To add anything to Christ is to lose Christ, but to have him alone is to have everything.

In the church in Colossae, the issue was accommodation to Judaism. This was a common problem in the churches of the first century; you had Jewish leaders working overtime to pull people back from the church to the synagogue, and others within the church, known as Judaizers, who wanted to stay in the church but bring the synagogue along with them. Their attitude may seem strange to a lot of us, but it’s really quite understandable when you think about it. For the early church, how they were supposed to relate to their Jewish roots was a real question—what should they keep, and what should they leave behind? And if there were those who wanted to throw out the entire Old Testament as outdated and irrelevant, it’s no surprise that there were also those who firmly believed that Christians had to keep on being fully observant Jews—circumcision, food laws, the whole nine yards. Tell truth, they had some reason for their position—after all, hadn’t Jesus said that he came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it? What they missed was the way in which Jesus had fulfilled the Law, and its consequences for their position.

Now, in the church in Colossae, Paul wasn’t dealing with the usual sort of Jewish influence; rather than the Judaizers he’d fought in the Galatian churches and elsewhere, the Colossian church seems to have fallen under the sway of a mystical strain of Judaism that promised its followers a spiritual ascent into heaven, into the presence of the celestial throne of God. This, too, taught them that obedience to the Law was necessary for salvation in addition to Jesus, but it added another incentive: if you’ll just go farther, do more, obey even stricter rules, then you can have a special experience of God that ordinary folks don’t get to have. If you want to really know God, to experience his fullness and feel his presence, you can have that in your life, if you just jump through all these hoops that we tell you to jump through. Again, Jesus alone is not enough, this time to know God and have a relationship with him—legalism is the only way.

In response to this, Paul tells the Colossians that if they really want to draw close to God, they’re going the wrong direction. In starting to follow this teaching, they’re moving away from Christ—they’re assuming that Christ is not enough, that they have to add these other rituals and religious observances if they want to know God—and in so doing, they are trading in the freedom of God for slavery to worldly ideas. The root of the problem here is that they don’t really understand who Jesus is, or what he did for them, much less what that means for their lives; they don’t take him or his work seriously enough, because they haven’t gotten their minds around the staggering reality and significance of his crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. They have not truly grasped that their extraordinary efforts are unnecessary, and even counterproductive, because everything they’re trying to earn, they’ve already been given. That’s why they’re going off the rails, and that’s why Paul sets out in this letter to make all this clear for them.

Now, from his thanksgiving, we can see that there’s still a lot to be said for the Colossian church. They’re not in the kind of shape the Galatian churches were in, where Paul skipped the thanksgiving in his letter altogether and just started yelling at them right off the bat; here, he gives thanks for their faith in Christ and their love for each other, which were bearing fruit in growth—both in numbers and in spiritual maturity. This is telling; for all that they’re starting to follow some false teachers, their hearts are still very much in the right place. They simply need to be taught to recognize error when they see it. Note, by the way, the reason and foundation for their faith and love: “the hope laid up for you in heaven.” As will become clear over the course of the letter, that hope is nothing and no one other than Jesus Christ himself.

As we typically see in Paul, and as we talked about last week with Philemon, his thanksgiving for the Colossians is joined to prayer for them, and indeed moves him to prayer for them. And notice what he prays—if you were here last week, this might sound pretty familiar. Paul tells Philemon that he’s praying for him so that the communion of his faith—the community, the body, of faith of which he is a part, which shaped him and which he has shaped—would be effective in the full knowledge of all the good that is ours in Christ; in other words, that Philemon would be used by God to help bring about what Paul has been praying for the church in Colossae as a whole. As we saw last week, in the biblical mindset, knowledge isn’t just a head thing, it’s active and experiential: you can’t really claim to know something until you’ve integrated it into your life, until it’s reflected on a daily basis in the choices you make and the attitudes in which you make those choices.

The flip side to this is that it means that what you know, the content of your understanding, matters; if you get the head stuff wrong, you’re going to get the life stuff wrong, too. We can see, given that, why Paul was so concerned in his letter to Philemon, because the Colossians have started to buy into something that is very, very far from the truth—not knowledge, but anti-knowledge—and though for now, their hearts are still in the right place, that will change over time unless their false understanding of God is corrected. They’re seeking the right things, spiritual wisdom and understanding and the knowledge of God’s will, but they’re looking, and moving, in the wrong direction. Paul’s prayer, then, is that they would be turned around, that they would set aside their pursuit of false knowledge through false experience and allow the Spirit of God to fill them instead with the true knowledge of God and his will—so that they would then do God’s will, leading “lives worthy of the Lord,” lives that give honor to him by faithfully representing his character and his will in this world.

Of course, Paul recognizes that this requires strength beyond our own merely human capacity, and so he prays for the Colossians that they might be filled, not only with the knowledge of God, but with the power of God—power to do his will, power to stand firm in the face of opposition and difficult times, and power to remain joyful and grateful to God no matter what may come. The Christian life is not meant to be a life of grim endurance through the struggles and sorrows of this world, but a life of joy and peace—of victory, not necessarily over them, but in their midst. This is something the world cannot give—only God can; it’s only possible by his power. It’s only possible because we have been given something the world doesn’t have: a share in the inheritance prepared for the saints in the realm of light, the hope laid up for us in heaven. Christ has conquered the power of darkness—by his sacrifice on the cross, he has bought our freedom from the power of sin—and through the work of Christ, God has rescued us from that power and brought us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

With this statement, Paul strikes the note that will ring through this entire letter—a note which indeed can be heard throughout all his letters: every aspect of our salvation, and indeed, every aspect of the life which God gives us, is contained in Christ. Nothing is lacking in his work—nothing more is needed; nor is there anything our own efforts can add to what he has done. There is no space for spiritual pride in the Christian life, because there is nothing to our own credit in our salvation, nothing we’ve earned and nothing of our own deserving; there is only room for gratitude and praise to Jesus, because he’s done it all. Yes, he calls us to live life in a new way, different from the way the world lives, but not in order to earn his favor or to repay the debt we owe him; both are beyond our power. Rather, he calls us to live in accordance with his will because that’s the logical working-out of the new life he has given us, and out of gratitude for that gift. We live differently, or should, because we know differently, think differently, believe differently, love differently—our motivations have been changed, and that changes the way in which we live our lives. But we do so not out of duty, but out of love and gratitude; and not in our own power, but in the power of the Spirit of Christ who is within us.

(Deuteronomy 23:15-16; Galatians 3:26-29, Philemon)

As we talked about last week, Onesimus had a problem, and that gave Paul an opportunity. Or rather, Onesimus had two problems. The first was that he was a slave. Legally, though everyone agreed he was human, he didn’t exactly qualify as a person—he was instead a living, breathing, walking, talking, two-legged piece of property who belonged to a person named Philemon. Onesimus’ second problem was that he had dealt with the first problem by escaping from his master in the city of Colossae and running away to Rome. This obviously got him away from the day-to-day consequences of being enslaved, but it also left him in a dangerous position, because the Roman policy on fugitive slaves was simple and inflexible: if caught, they were returned to their master, who could do whatever he wanted to them. And I do mean whatever.

The good thing for Onesimus was that by the sovereign grace of God, he fell in with the apostle Paul and ended up part of Paul’s household as the apostle was under house arrest in Rome. This was good for him spiritually, as Paul led him to Christ during that time; it was also good for him physically, as Paul was the man who had led his master to Christ, and thus could be an advocate for him with Philemon. As we saw, this gave Paul the opportunity, when the time came to send a letter to the Colossian church, to send Onesimus back with it, with his own letter to Philemon to give him protection; it gave Paul the opportunity to rearrange Philemon’s thinking, and through him the thinking of his whole congregation, about Onesimus specifically, and about slaves in general. It gave him the chance to confront Philemon with the fact that this slave of his, this man whose body and blood he owned, was now also his brother in Christ, and as free in Jesus as Philemon himself; and in so doing, it allowed him to force Philemon to consider very carefully the consequences of that fact.

To what purpose? Well, to understand that, having looked last week at verses 15-16, let’s go back and start with the beginning of the letter. Paul opens it in typical fashion, with a greeting, a thanksgiving, and a prayer, but it’s worth noting a couple things here. First, it’s a personal letter, but not only a personal letter. It’s addressed to Philemon—clearly someone whom Paul holds in high regard—to a woman named Apphia and another man, named Archippos—beyond the fact that both are Christians, we don’t know who they were—and to “the church that meets in your home.” That’s very interesting, because it means that while this letter is to Philemon, with requests and persuasion for Philemon, the whole congregation is going to be reading it over his shoulder, if you will, as he reads it. Partly, that might be to encourage Philemon to do what Paul wants him to do, since if he doesn’t, he’ll look bad in front of everyone; but more than that, I think this tells us that Paul isn’t only concerned about Onesimus and Philemon here. He has some things he wants to teach the whole church in Colossae through this episode.

Sometimes in Paul’s letters, the thanksgiving and the prayer are pretty clearly separated; here, they’re interwoven. He starts off, “I always thank God as I pray for you,” and then he finishes that sentence one half at a time. First, in verse 5, he says why he thanks God for Philemon: because of his faith and his love. The way this is structured in the Greek makes it clear that his love is not just for the people of the church, but also for the Lord Jesus, and that his faith isn’t just for himself, but that in fact his faith is a source of strength for the church.

And then look at verse 6—what do you see? “So that.” The NIV isn’t very helpful here; they have it in the middle when it should be at the beginning. You see, the verb “to pray” isn’t in this verse; that verb is back in verse 4. The interesting thing about verse 6 is that it doesn’t actually give the content of Paul’s prayer, strictly speaking—it begins with “so that” and gives the purpose of Paul’s prayer. It’s a small difference, but it’s an important one for us in understanding this letter. You see, Paul isn’t just saying, “I’m praying this for you, I’m thankful for you, Amen, now let’s get down to business.” Instead, he’s saying, “This is why I’m praying for you, this is what I want to see happen in your life and through your life, and it’s for that reason that I’m going to say what I’m about to say to you.”

What we need to understand here is that when we see “so that” in the Scriptures, we need to pay attention, because this is going to answer the “why” question. I may have said this here before, but the preacher’s question is “so what?” As a preacher, whenever I tell you something, I have to consider that you have the right to say—not in a nasty or disrespectful way, but as an honest question—“so what?” So what’s the reason you’re telling me this? So what’s the reason I should care? So what difference does this make to me in my life? And when you ask “so what,” the answer should come back, “so that”—and so it does here. This is Paul’s purpose for Philemon, it’s what he wants to see happen in Philemon’s life, and so this is the other pole of this letter. I said last week that verses 15-16 are the keynote of this letter, the keystone of its argument, and so they are; but verse 6, the purpose of his prayers for Philemon, is also the purpose of this letter toward which that argument is focused.

That, I’m guessing, is why Paul layered this sentence six feet deep with theologically loaded, meaning-full words, as he’s clearly trying to express something powerful here. Unfortunately, one of the things he succeeded in doing is in making this verse all but impossible to render into English. I feel sorry for Bible translators here, because they can’t explain it, or turn it into a whole paragraph—they have to put just a line or two that makes at least minimal sense in English and captures, as best they can, what Paul is trying to say. That’s why the NIV takes the “so that” from the beginning of the verse and moves it to the middle—I think it’s a mistake, but they’re just trying to get all the pieces to fit into the box in a way that lets people see more or less the right picture. For preaching from, though, it’s not so great, so if you’ll look up at the screen, you’ll see my translation of verse 6. It’s not great English, but like I said, this is a tough verse.

He starts off with the phrase “the communion of your faith.” In the Greek, this is koinonia tou pisteos. Koinonia is the word we most often translate “fellowship”; it’s from the word koine, meaning “common,” and it means doing, sharing, owning, living in common, being involved in something together and being involved in one another’s lives. It’s hard to translate in the simplest of cases because it’s a much richer word than just “fellowship,” with a much deeper meaning than we usually give that word; but here, when it’s combined with “faith”—and specifically, Philemon’s faith—what does that mean? There are, I think, two parts to that. The first is that Philemon’s faith isn’t just his own, but is a faith held in common with the whole Christian church, and indeed that it came to him through the Christian church; he is one who has received this blessing from the church, and thus is indebted to it. The second is that in living out his faith, and especially in serving as a leader in the church, he has expanded that communion, that circle of relationships—his faith has formed a community, and there is a koinonia which has resulted from his faith, including perhaps people whom he personally has led to Christ. The communion of his faith is the communion, the part of the body of Christ, which has shaped him and which he himself has shaped in his turn.

Paul’s hope is that that communion might become effective—this is the word from which we get our word “energy”; in fact, one commentator translates this, “might be a source of energy.” The idea is that the communion of Philemon’s faith, that this community of which he is a part and which he is responsible to lead, would be energized to produce results, to accomplish things. But to accomplish what? The aim here, Paul says, is “full knowledge of all the good that is ours into Christ.” Now, that sounds strange, in the first place because we’re used to thinking of knowledge as a head thing. You go to school, you read books, you listen to the teachers and the professors, and you learn things, and then you take tests and put those things down on paper to show that you know them. In the biblical mindset, though, knowledge isn’t a head thing, or at least not purely so. Sure, it has intellectual content, but it’s more than that. First, it’s active—you don’t actually know something until it’s reflected in how you live your life each day. Second, it’s relational—to know someone is not simply to be aware of facts about them, but to experience them and be in relationship with them.

Thus, when Paul talks about “full knowledge of all the good that is ours,” he’s not talking about possessing a set of facts about what’s good and what isn’t, he’s talking about experiencing in our own lives the good which Christ has given us—experiencing God’s work in our lives, and living accordingly, and so embodying that good in a way that the whole world can see. This is what Paul wants Philemon’s faith to produce, in his own life and also in the broader church, through his leadership of the communion of faith of which he is a part. This sort of witness is what he wants to see in Philemon’s life, and what he wants to see Philemon lead others to through his teaching and example. The desire to see this is the reason why Paul writes this letter.

Now, that doesn’t quite finish verse 6, of course, but don’t worry, I’m not leaving Jesus out of this sermon; I’ll come back to this verse in a minute. Before I do, however, I want to point you to perhaps the most interesting feature of this letter. Look at verse 8: “Therefore”—because this is what I want to see happen in your life—“although in Christ I have every right to tell you what to do here, I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to ask you to do this out of love.” Out of love for whom? Well, partly for Paul, clearly; but this is also more general—out of love for Christ, out of Philemon’s love for the church, out of the love that is chief among “all the good” that he’s just been talking about in verse 6. He goes on to ask two things: first, that Philemon welcome Onesimus as he would welcome Paul himself; and second, that he would send Onesimus back to Paul—and perhaps even first set him free from slavery; I think that’s what Paul’s hinting at in verse 21—so that he could once again help Paul in his ministry in Rome. But where Paul could have simply ordered Philemon to do all these things and been certain of being obeyed, he doesn’t; instead, he just asks him. Why?

Paul doesn’t spell this out, of course, but I think we can see the answer to that in the letter. It’s all about love, and about the communion of Philemon’s faith becoming effective in the full knowledge of all that is theirs into Christ. For Paul, this isn’t just about Onesimus being protected, or getting Onesimus back; there’s something larger at stake here as well: the growth of the Colossian church, which now includes Onesimus. Paul doesn’t just want Philemon to do the right thing, he wants him to do the right thing for the right reason—because if you know the love of Christ in your life, this is what you do; this is what it means to live out that love, first toward Onesimus, and then toward Paul—and he wants him to do it in full view of the church (that’s the main reason this letter is supposed to be read to them as well) so that in doing it, he will set an example for them as they go out and live their own lives.

This, I think, points us back to the end of verse 6, where Paul talks about “all the good that is ours into Christ.” Now, that’s a literal translation, and it’s bad English, but I think it’s important for us to catch the meaning of that little preposition. You can just take it to mean “in,” as the NIV does, and just talk about the good that is ours in Christ; or you can translate it as “toward,” as other commentators do, and focus on the fact that the good that God does in us is supposed to focus our attention on Christ, and move us toward him. It seems to me that we need to hang on to both those aspects and remember that we’re still in process: we’re already in Christ, and in Christ we have all this good that’s beginning to be realized, but it’s only beginning; we still need to be closer to him, and we’re still being drawn closer to him. We need to remember, as Hannah sang earlier, that it truly is in Christ alone that our hope is found, not in anything else. We need to remember that we find our true life in Christ alone, for Christ alone, and that the hope and the goal toward which we live is Christ alone. Let’s pray.

(Deuteronomy 23:15-16; Galatians 3:26-29, Philemon)

This morning, we’re starting a sermon series on Colossians; we’ll be working our way through the letter to the Colossians over the course of the fall. Now, as I say that, some of you might be wondering what I’m talking about, since we didn’t read Colossians this morning; wasn’t I listening as Dr. Kavanaugh read Philemon? Well, yes, I was listening, and I didn’t make any mistake in what I asked him to read; we’re starting a series on Colossians by looking at the book of Philemon. I’ll grant, it’s not the usual way to do things, but I do have reasons for putting things together this way. Some are just reasons of scheduling, minor practical matters; of greater importance is the fact that this letter is part of Scripture, which means that while it’s usually ignored because of its size, we ought to stop and consider what God wants to say to us through it. If we’re going to do that, then, the logical time is to put it together with Colossians, because these two letters are related. In fact, they’re quite closely related, as you can see if you flip over to Colossians 4:9, where Onesimus is mentioned along with Tychicus as one of the people carrying that letter; you’ll note there that Paul explicitly says, “he’s one of you.”

We don’t know a lot of Onesimus’ story, but we do know that he was a slave. That’s a loaded word, and rightly so, but it’s important to realize that slavery in the Roman world was very different from American slavery; and while it could still be a terrible thing, on the whole it was far better. Yes, slaves were owned by another human being and under that person’s absolute authority, and yes, some masters were cruel and exploited their slaves; but most, it seems, treated them at least decently. There was certainly societal pressure to do so, partly on moral grounds (for they knew full well that slaves were human) but more on practical grounds: it was unwise to provoke slaves by ill-treating them, for one thing, and for another, it was uneconomical, because it reduced both their ability and their motivation to work. Indeed, unlike in America, it was quite common to teach slaves and train them so as to increase their productivity, and some slaves became quite important people in their own right. Slaves were allowed to work on their own, though their owners took much of the money they received, and to own property—some even owned other slaves. In a society which was rigidly structured by class (which was rigidly determined by money), slaves who belonged to an owner of social standing who took good care of them were better off than many who were free but poor. There were even people who voluntarily sold themselves into slavery in order to improve their lives, usually because they were too deeply in debt to get themselves out of it.

Still, even given that Roman slavery was generally a far better thing than American slavery, especially in the context of unjust Roman society, the fact remains that it’s intrinsically a bad thing; people shouldn’t own other people. As such, Paul’s response to slavery is obviously a central concern for us as we read this letter; and to understand the response he offers here, we need to get the details straight, as far as we can. We know that Onesimus belonged to Philemon, a man of some importance in the city of Colossae who was one of the leaders of the church there. As we’ll talk about later on, the church in that time period met in the homes of members, and each house church was under the direction of overseers (we would call them elders). Philemon was rich enough to have a house big enough for the church to use—no surprise, since he was rich enough to own slaves—and as such was probably one of the overseers of that particular congregation.

We also know that at some point, Onesimus escaped from his master and fled the city. He was almost certainly still young enough to be unmarried, so he had no one but himself to worry about; that made escape easier. He may have taken some of his master’s money or valuables with him; that’s not clear, but it might well be part of the financial harm done by Onesimus which Paul has in view in verse 18. You can understand why Onesimus would have stolen as much as he could carry on his way out the door, since he had a long journey ahead of him. A slave who had run away could never feel completely safe as a fugitive; it wasn’t like in America, where there was a safe place to run to. The best chance of safety lay in fleeing to one of the great port cities of the empire; the nearest of those was Ephesus, down the Lycus valley a ways from Colossae, but that would be far too close for comfort. Instead, Onesimus made for the greatest city of all, and the one that offered the greatest hope for a better life: the capital city of Rome.

Now, we don’t know anything about his journey, or what might have happened along the way; but we know that somehow, he fell in with Paul, who was under house arrest in Rome at this time. He may well have known of Paul as one of his master’s friends and someone Philemon held in high honor—indeed, he may actually have known Paul already—or maybe not, we can’t really say; but however it happened, he became part of Paul’s unorthodox little household, and Paul led him to Christ. This was a critically important thing for Onesimus, not just for his spiritual destiny but for his daily life, because under Roman law there were only a couple ways for a fugitive slave to regain some sort of legal status. One was to go to a temple that could offer asylum to fugitives and appeal to the priests; they would then contact the owner and try to broker a safe return for the slave. The other was to go to a friend of the master, an amicus domini, and appeal to them for asylum and assistance. If that person was willing to intercede on the slave’s behalf, and if they were willing to write a letter to that effect in the slave’s defense, then under Roman law the slave was no longer a fugitive.

This gave Paul an opening. He gets bashed sometimes by modern Western types for not denouncing slavery and trying to launch an abolitionist crusade; but if he’d tried, he would only have made things worse. He would have suddenly been taken far more seriously by the Romans as a troublemaker (and most likely executed as a result), Christians throughout the empire would have abruptly been treated with far greater suspicion and hostility, people who already didn’t like Christians would probably have been roused to defend slavery . . . and all in all, the gradual drift of Roman society away from slavery would probably have been reversed somewhat, not speeded up. He’s simply too outnumbered and outgunned for a frontal assault to work. Instead, he does what he can to undermine slavery in and through the church, beginning with this letter.

You see, Paul writes this letter to Philemon as the amicus domini for Onesimus; and in it, he does several things. We’ll look at a few of them next week, but now, I want to focus your attention on the most important one. Look at verses 15-16. Paul writes, “Perhaps Onesimus was separated from you for a little while.” Note that. He doesn’t say, “Perhaps Onesimus separated himself from you”; he says, “perhaps he was separated.” That’s what we call the “divine passive,” and you’ll find it all over the Old Testament. The Jews were so careful about not taking God’s name in vain that they avoided using it whenever possible; and so if they wanted to say God did something, they would often write, “It happened.” That’s the divine passive, and that’s what we have here: Paul is gently suggesting to Philemon that it wasn’t Onesimus who did this—it was God.

To what purpose? Onesimus’ salvation, for one; more than that, a major change in his relationship with Philemon as a result. We cannot know how Philemon treated his slaves, though given his position in the church one would hope he treated them well; but it seems likely that he treated them, and thought of them, as slaves—people, yes, but definitely second-class, second-tier. Now Paul is saying, perhaps God was at work here so that Onesimus might be saved and Philemon might have him back “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” in Christ, a fellow Christian. This is the keynote to everything Paul says in this letter, to his appeal to Philemon to welcome Onesimus back rather than punishing him and all the rest of it: Philemon, this man isn’t just your slave anymore, he’s your brother in Christ; I led him to Christ just as I led you to Christ, and you can’t look at him the same way as you used to. In the world, you own him and he’s your inferior; in the church, Jesus owns both of you and he’s your equal.

This is how the church gradually ended slavery in the ancient world; slaves became members of the church alongside freemen and citizens, and they became elders, and they became pastors, and some even became bishops. About forty years after this letter was written, one Onesimus became bishop of Ephesus; we don’t know if it was the same one or not, but personally, I think it was. And the more people saw slaves as their equals, and sometimes even their betters, the less supportable slavery became, until eventually the Emperor Justinian ended it altogether.

And everywhere this dynamic has been allowed to work, everywhere that Christians have learned to see one another first and foremost as people whom God loves, for whom Jesus died, all the distinctions that we use to say this person is better or more important or more valuable than that one have tended to fade away. That’s why Paul could tell the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”; and we could add, there is neither rich nor poor, black nor white nor Hispanic nor Asian nor American Indian, Republican nor Democrat nor independent, American nor foreigner, not because these divisions don’t exist but because they aren’t what really matters. Christ Jesus is for everyone, and loves everyone equally—that’s what matters. Everything else is just details. Everything else. We are God’s people—that’s the bottom line.