Missing the mystery

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.

For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments. For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ.

—Colossians 1:24-2:5 (ESV)

I argued earlier today that we have a predisposition to belief, one which is driven in large part by the sense that, however much folks like Richard Dawkins might tell us otherwise, there is more to reality than the material and physical—that there’s more to this life than just what we can see and hear and manipulate. I believe everyone feels the pull of this, though some people do their level best to stuff it down where it won’t bother them; even then, though, you can often still see its effects (even in folks like Dr. Dawkins). This, it seems to me, is one of the points of entry for the church in an age like ours.

Unfortunately, this isn’t all that common an approach in the American church. 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.

I don’t know if this was the problem with the Colossian church, but from some of the things Paul says, it sounds like it might have been. Certainly, their understanding of Christ seems to have been pretty shallow—and as a consequence, though they’d been given the riches of the glory of the knowledge of God’s mystery, though they’d been given the keys to the treasury of heaven itself, they didn’t know it. They didn’t understand what they’d been given, and so they went chasing off after other things. They went a different direction than most of our churches today, off into a weird esoteric form of legalism instead of into the therapeutic moralistic legalism that’s the big attraction these days, but they had the same root problem: they didn’t really know and appreciate Jesus, and so they thought they needed something else. They’d missed the mystery, passed it up for a handful of flashy trinkets.

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 everyone who reads 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.