As we saw, finding divisions within 2:6–4:6 is somewhat arbitrary. The warnings in the present section against false teaching continue until 2:23; but 2:20 – 3:4 forms a balanced bridge between these warnings and the ethical instruction of chapter 3. This section begins, characteristically, with a summary statement (v. 8), whose implications are then worked out. Its main thrust could be summarized as follows. The Colossians already possess all they need, through belonging to the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. Judaism, apparently offering so much to pagans, is itself just another form of the religious life of the ‘present age’, which has been superseded now that the Messiah has been raised from the dead and so has inaugurated ‘the age to come’.
a. Christ and his rivals (2:8–10). 8. Paul now sums up his negative advice to the Colossians: See to it that no-one takes you captive. The verb here translated ‘take captive’ (sylagōgein) is a very rare one. I suggest that Paul uses it because it makes a contemptuous pun with the word synagogue: see to it that no-one snatches you as a prey (see RSV) from the flock of Christ, to lock you up instead within Judaism. The means by which young Christians might be snatched away is characterized as through hollow and deceptive philosophy. NIV well expresses the fact that Paul is not opposed to (what we would call) ‘philosophy’ in general:5 literally the word simply means ‘love of wisdom’. But this ‘love of wisdom’, like the facade of a grand house which remains standing when the insides have been demolished, promises much and gives nothing. Hellenistic Judaism called itself a ‘philosophy’ on occasion, especially when in contact with the pagan world that thought in terms of competing philosophical schools.6 Paul, referring to it thus, contemptuously agrees that it should be seen as just another human system.
In place of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that the Colossians already possess in Christ (2:3), this ‘philosophy’ offers only human tradition and the basic principles of this world. ‘Human tradition’, a phrase picked up in 2:22, recalls the polemic of both Isaiah (29:13) and Jesus (Mark 7:5ff.) against the transformation of true, living religion into a set of ideas and rules handed on at a purely human level. This is not to deny that there is a proper use of ‘tradition’ within Christianity, when Christ himself works by his Spirit to bring his truth to a new generation through the witness of the church. What Paul has in mind is undoubtedly the traditions of the Rabbinic schools in which he had grown up.
The second phrase, translated here as ‘the basic principles of this world’, is somewhat harder, though very important to the whole argument. The problem lies in the ambiguity of the word translated as ‘basic principles’ (stoicheia). NIV has opted for the meaning ‘rudiments’, the foundation principles of a subject: but the word could equally well mean the ‘elements’ supposed by early science to make up the physical world (earth, air, water and fire), or – as most scholars take it – the elemental spirits of the universe, identified as the ‘deities’ who preside over individual nations and peoples. All these meanings derive from the word’s root meaning of ‘series’ or ‘row’ and hence ‘member in a series’, ‘component’ or (in that sense) ‘element’. The context of Colossians 2 shows that here and in verse 20 the correct meaning is that of local presiding deities, the national ‘gods’ supposed to rule over the different areas and races of the world. The arguments for this are well summarized by Caird,7 and will be strengthened by our exegesis of this whole chapter.
But did Paul think that these presiding deities really ‘existed’? His clearest answer is in 1 Corinthians 8:4–6.
We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’), yet for us there is but one God… and but one Lord.
The gods may have some odd sort of existence, but they are not God. Certainly they ‘existed’ in the sense that pagans believed in them and worshipped them: Artemis (Diana), the great goddess of Ephesus, had better be taken seriously by anyone preaching the gospel in that city (cf. Acts 19:28–40). Three points are basic to Paul’s argument about these ‘powers’. (a) Christ is the ruler of all nations, and of any powers or authorities that may stand behind them in the shadowy world of superstition and mythology. (b) The Colossians, in being set free from their national solidarities by belonging to the new world-wide people of God, have also been released from their local ‘deities’. (c) What Judaism might offer to ex-pagan Christians is in fact just another local and, one might say, tribal religion, composed like any other of allegiances, rules and regulations which function at a purely worldly level.8
The alternative to this superficially attractive ‘philosophy’ is the system of life and truth that depends on Christ: and with this the battle is joined. This passage brings to a climax the Christological theme that has been developing since 1:15–20, exploring one facet after another of what it means for Christians to be ‘in’ him (note the succession of ‘in Christ’ and similar phrases throughout 2:9ff.).
9–10. These verses give the main reason (for) why the Colossians must not be ensnared by this ‘philosophy’: in Christ all the fulness of the Deity lives in bodily form. This is probably to be taken simply as an expansion of col. 1:19; the tense is past there, present here, but in both the referent is the same, the glorified man Christ Jesus. The word translated ‘in bodily form’ can also mean ‘actually’ or ‘in solid reality’.9 We should not, however, drive a wedge between the two. Part of Paul’s point is that the incarnation, the taking of ‘bodily’ form by God, was and is the ‘solid reality’ in which were fulfilled all the earlier foreshadowings, all the ancient promises that God would dwell with his people. The word theotēs, translated ‘the Deity’, is to be distinguished from theiotēs, ‘divinity’ – an attribute which might conceivably be possessed by a being of lesser standing than God himself. The verse is, of course, much more than a mere detached statement of a doctrine. It enables Paul to do two things. First, he shows that Christians have no need to pay homage to lesser supernatural beings: or, to put it more strongly, that all other lords become idols when contrasted with Christ. The man Jesus Christ, now exalted, is not one of a hierarchy of intermediary beings, angelic or (in some sense) ‘divine’. He is, uniquely, ‘God’s presence and his very self’. Second, Paul is anxious to show that all the advantages of monotheism (which attracted many Gentiles by its contrast to the confused and unedifying pagan pantheon) accrue to Christianity. Christ is not a second, different Deity: he is the embodiment and full expression of the one God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Those who belong to him, therefore, have been given fulness in Christ. (The same root underlies both this phrase and ‘all the fulness’ in v. 9.) The parallels in Ephesians (1:23; 3:19) suggest the meaning that God intends to flood the lives of men and women, and ultimately the whole creation, with his own love, power and richness, and that he has already begun to put this plan into effect through Christ and by his Spirit. That is the Colossians’ inheritance in Christ, and they can want nothing more from any other source. Nor need they submit to any other master, for (he) is the head over every power and authority. NIV , by translating ‘head of…’ as ‘head over…’, rightly indicates that ‘head’ here is not to be understood in terms of the ‘head-andbody’ metaphor of 1:18 and 2:19. The word ‘head’ was as flexible and evocative in Hebrew or Greek as it is in English, and we should not squeeze all Paul’s uses of it into exactly the same mould. It is probable that ‘every power and authority’ here, and in verse 15, refers primarily to the same entities as the stoicheia of verse 8 (and perhaps the list of ‘powers’ in 1:16). They, at least, are the powers and authorities which are relevant to Paul’s argument at this point.10 All power structures, ancient or modern, whether political, economic or racial, have the potential to become rivals to Christ, beckoning his followers to submit themselves to them in order to find a fuller security. The invitation is as blasphemous as it is unnecessary. Christ brooks no rivals. His people need no-one but him.
b. Already circumcised in Christ (2:11‒12). 11–12. In him you were also circumcised: or, perhaps better, ‘and in him you were circumcised’. Paul emphasizes that the Colossians have already been ‘circumcised’ (in a sense to be explained), and therefore do not need to undergo the operation again in a physical sense, as would be required if they were to become proselytes to Judaism. The emphatic position of this statement in Paul’s argument is one of the strongest reasons for seeing Judaism as his main target in the present chapter.11 The metaphorical use of ‘circumcision’ (not with a circumcision done by the hands of men) has a long history in the Old Testament and subsequent Jewish writings.12 Paul picks up this idea (that the heart, not merely the body, requires circumcision) and uses it to distinguish between Christianity and unredeemed Judaism, thereby designating the former as the true inheritor of the promises to the patriarchs. ‘Christian circumcision’, the point of entry into the community of Christ’s people (as physical circumcision was the point of entry into the community of Israel), provides all the initiation one needs to belong to the people of God.
But in what does this ‘Christian circumcision’ consist? Literally translated, this passage reads ‘and in him you were circumcised with a circumcison not made with hands, in the stripping off of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism…’. NIV has changed the order and opted for one of the possible interpretations of ‘the circumcision of Christ’, reading you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature (the margin notes that this could be translated ‘flesh’), not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism… This last phrase, which envisages Christ as the actual performer of the spiritual circumcision, is somewhat strained: better, perhaps, to leave the reference general, ‘the circumcision relating to Christ’, or ‘circumcision as (re)defined by Christ’, hence simply ‘the Christian circumcision’.
The earlier phrase explaining this spiritual surgery (‘the putting off of the sinful nature’) is more tricky still. NIV omits the word ‘body’ (see the literal translation above): but, even if we reinstate it, the problem of meaning remains. In what sense does one ‘strip off the body of flesh’ in becoming a Christian? The NIV (and NEB) apparently resolve the problem in one direction by interpreting ‘body of flesh’ to mean ‘sinful nature’: the old Adam, as in Romans 6:2–6, is put to death in baptism. But ‘stripping off the body of flesh’, even allowing for the multiple meanings of ‘flesh’ in Paul, seems a very odd way of making this point. Some scholars have therefore suggested that the reference is to Christ’s stripping off of his own flesh, in his death (this would imply that the final phrase, ‘the circumcision of Christ’, was a reference not to ‘Christian circumcision’ but to the death of Christ, metaphorically referred to as ‘circumcision’). It is true that Paul understands the death of Jesus itself, and not merely the believer’s appropriation of it for himself, as the moment when sins were dealt with (see, e.g., 2:13–15 below). But this is not the point here:13 the context requires that Paul say something about what has happened to the Colossians in their becoming Christians. We must therefore enquire further.
One possible meaning of the words, the literal stripping off of the physical body, leaving (presumably) a naked soul or spirit, is obviously irrelevant to those who have yet to face physical death, and is scarcely Christian in its theology. A better solution might be to treat the phrase as meaning more or less the same as 3:9; but this reads into our present passage an unwarranted ethical emphasis. There is, however, another possible metaphorical meaning which gives excellent sense here. As a result of their baptism into Christ, the Colossians now belong first and foremost to the family of God, and not, therefore, to the human families (and their local ‘rulers’) to which they formerly belonged. ‘Body’ can, in fact, easily carry the connotation of a group of people, needing further redefinition to make it clear which group is envisaged (as in ‘body of Christ’). In that context ‘flesh’ can easily provide the further requisite definition, since it can carry not only the meanings of ‘sinful human nature’ but also, simultaneously, the meanings of family solidarity.14 The phrase can thus easily mean ‘in the stripping off of the old human solidarities’. The convert, in stripping off his clothes for baptism (the baptismal reference in the next verse has coloured the language) leaves behind, as every adult candidate for baptism in (say) a Muslim or Hindu society knows, the solidarities of the old life, the network of family and society to which, until then, he or she has given primary allegiance. This meaning fits very well with the rest of the section.
The transfer from the old solidarity to the new is accomplished in baptism. Such a statement alarms many Christians today: seeing the dangers of regarding baptism as a quasi-magical rite through which people are automatically transformed, many have drawn back from the realism of Paul’s language, not only in this passage but in (for instance) Romans 6:2–11 and Galatians 3:27. It has sometimes been claimed either that ‘baptism’ here is simply a metaphor whose reference is the ‘spiritual’ event of becoming a Christian, or that the baptism in question has as its main significance the public profession of faith.
But Paul’s thought is not to be forced into the ‘either-or’ of anachronistic Protestant – or, for that matter, Catholic – polemics. Paul is certainly not asserting anything remotely like the position Protestants have always rightly opposed, namely, that the rite of water-baptism ‘makes someone a Christian’ in the sense that the candidate is willy-nilly converted and made, automatically and inalienably, the possessor of eternal life. But his thought here contains another element. As a Jew, Paul had believed in the solidarity of the racial people of God. In becoming a Christian, he transferred to the church the idea that the people of God was indeed a people – not now, indeed, drawn from one race only, but made up from every family under heaven.15 This people is not merely an invisible family known to God alone, but is an actual company of people in space and time, the church in which Christ is confessed as Lord: outward and visible entry into this outward and visible family is accomplished through the rite of baptism.
This explains Paul’s frequent appeal that the church should become in fact what it is in theory, should put into detailed operation the life to which it has been committed in baptism. 1 Corinthians 10 shows that it is possible, in Paul’s mind, for people to be baptized and yet to be in danger of losing all. This does not make baptism a mere empty ritual. The candidate, being placed into the family where Christ is loved and served, is in the best possible position to grow into mature Christian faith and life. If we find Paul’s definite statements about the effects of baptism hard to understand, it is probably because we have lost his vision of the church as the loving and welcoming family of God, the people who, by support, example and teaching, enable one another to accept the gospel down to the depths of their being, and so to make real for themselves (among other things) the rich statements of Colossians 2:12, to which we now return.
Having been buried with him in baptism, so that his death is counted as their death, the Colossians have been – also in baptism16– raised with him through your faith. Just as the doorway of a building will often indicate what sort of a building it is, so baptism, the gateway to the Christian life, demonstrates (compare Rom. 6:2–11) that being a Christian means dying with Christ to the old solidarities and habits and coming alive to the new family of God and its new lifestyle. Faith itself is the first sign of this spiritual life: not that spiritual life is God’s reward for those who believe the gospel, but that true faith, expressed classically in the confession that Jesus is Lord, is the result of the secret life-giving work of God’s own Spirit (see 1 Cor. 12:3).
As in Romans 4:16–25, this faith is characterized not simply as ‘faith in Jesus Christ’, but as faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. To believe that God raised Jesus from the dead17 is to believe in the God who raises the dead. Such faith not merely assents to a fact about Jesus, it recognizes a truth about God. Paul, reminding the Colossians that they have professed this faith, draws attention to that characteristic of God which undergirds their new status in Christ. They belong to the new world, where the ‘rulers’ of the old world have no authority. By the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, the Colossians have been transferred (see 1:13) into the family of the new age. This does not mean (as is sometimes suggested) that, according to this passage, Christians live entirely in the new age – an idea which comes under attack in (e.g.) 1 Corinthians 4:8 or 2 Timothy 2:18. The ‘heavenly’ life which Christians now enjoy does not escape the rigours and temptations of earthly existence, but becomes on the contrary more than ever committed to working out the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection in practical human life (see 3:1–4; 3:5–4:6).18
c. Already free from the law’s demands (2:13‒15). It is utterly characteristic of Pauline theology that at the heart of a description of how people (particularly Gentiles) have come to belong to God’s family we should find the cross. It is also characteristic that Paul should see the power of the law as abolished in Christ’s death, and that this thought should follow a similar statement about circumcision (see Rom. 4:9–12; 13–16). (It has been argued above, and will be borne out in the detailed exegesis, that the subject here is the Jewish law even though the word ‘law’ does not occur.19) That Colossians 2:13– 15 provides a composite statement of this sort is not in question; but almost everything else about these verses is. In the case of many of the verbs here it is not even clear who the subject is, and the imagery employed seems to pile one obscurity on top of another. The context, however, indicates the overall line of thought. Paul is drawing out the significance of the fact that the new Christians have been united in baptism with the death and resurrection of Christ, and so have exchanged their previous status (Gentiles, outside the people of God) for that of forgiven sinners, welcomed into a family circle beyond the reach of legal accusation or previous national loyalties.
13. Every Jew would have agreed with Paul in telling the Colossians that, in their pagan days, ‘you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh’.20 The best commentary on this is provided by the parallel passage in Ephesians 2:12: ‘remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.’ Paul nowhere draws back from the position that he would have taken as a Pharisee, that the pagan nations were utterly lost. Rather, he offers the appropriate remedy for this condition. Just as the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:24, 32 ‘was dead and is alive again’, so God made you21 alive with Christ. The verb in this sentence, formed by adding the word ‘with’ to ‘made alive’, is typical of expressions Paul uses when thinking about Christians dying and rising (or whatever) ‘with Christ’.22 The logic of such constructions is that, when God looks at those who are ‘in’ Christ, he reckons that what is true of Christ (particularly his death and resurrection) is true of them also. They died with Christ, they have been raised with him. Events like resurrection, which were expected by Jews to occur at the end of time, have actually begun within history, so that those who belong to Christ find themselves living simultaneously in the old and in the new age, albeit owing fundamental allegiance to the new. It is this overlap of the two ‘ages’ of Jewish expectation that brings about the characteristic paradoxes and tensions of Paul’s view of the Christian life. At one moment he must emphasize, as here, that believers already partake in the life and power of Christ’s resurrection. At another (e.g. 3:5–11; Rom. 8:12–15) he must stress the consequent obligation to ‘put to death’ all that still remains of the old sinful life.
Because of the close biblical link between sin and death, the logical precondition for the resurrection life is that sins must be dealt with. The claim that God23 has ‘made you alive’ requires, therefore, further explanation: and Paul answers this need, preliminarily, by saying that God forgave us all our sins. (The word ‘all’ goes with ‘sins’, not with ‘us’.) Paul has altered his pronouns here: he has now shifted from ‘you’ to ‘we’. Jews were not ‘dead in physical uncircumcision’, but they, just as much as pagans, needed forgiveness of sins. The Colossians have joined Paul in the people of God; Paul joins them in the category of forgiven sinners. The further question, of how this forgiveness was accomplished, is now to be addressed.
14. How, then, did the cross solve the problem of sin? Paul does not attempt here a full theological statement of the achievement of Calvary. He aims, more specifically, to show how those things that might have excluded the Colossians from God’s people were dealt with on the cross. The present passage stands at the centre-point, both in literary structure and theology, of the whole chapter and section.
In verses 14–15 Paul notes the two barriers which stand between human beings and membership in God’s family: the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us, on the one hand, and the powers and authorities on the other. God has apparently cancelled the former and disarmed the latter. But what are these two? And in what way were they ‘against us’? And how has this antagonism been removed? Paul clearly intends to provide answers to all of these questions, but he has done so in a way that makes it difficult for us to hear what he has said. In verse 14 we must ask: (a) what is the ‘written code’? (b) How does ‘with its regulations’ relate to the rest of the verse? (c) What does ‘that stood opposed to us’ add which was not already said in ‘that was against us’? And, most important, (d) how has God ‘cancelled’ and ‘taken away’ this barrier? (The further problems of v. 15 will be discussed presently.) NIV , like all translations, has had to opt for one particular point of view, and has in consequence made the passage seem simpler than it is.
We may begin by looking at (a) and (b) together. There are basically three options for understanding cheirographon (a word that occurs only rarely in literature of this time). (i) The first is taken by NIV , which, translating it as ‘the written code’, and linking it to ‘with its regulations’ (tois dogmasin) (cf. 2:20), sees it as referring to the Mosaic law. This can claim a parallel in Ephesians 2:15, the only other Pauline use of the root dogma. (ii) The more traditional interpretation was to understand cheirographon as a bond of debt, an IOU, signed by the debtor,24 referring in this case metaphorically to the debt of sin. This can be coupled with a view of ‘its regulations’ which takes it with one of the two phrases indicating that this bond was ‘against us’ (’against us’ because of its regulations: there is no word for ‘with’ in the Greek, and the dative case here employed could be interpreted like this). There are grammatical difficulties with this, though, as indeed there appear to be in doing almost anything with the phrase except, like Chrysostom and one fourteenth-century manuscript, omitting it altogether.25 (iii) A recent interpretation draws on the use of cheirographon in a first-century Jewish apocalyptic work to refer to a book, kept by an angel, in which all one’s evil deeds were recorded, and couples this with the suggestion that Paul sees Christ himself as taking on the identity of this bond, nailed to the cross, in representing his sinful people.26
The last suggestion seems to me forced and unlikely. If Paul really meant that Christ himself became the cheirographon, he would surely have made it clear sooner than at the end of the verse. And the idea of an IOU, while undoubtedly true to the usage of the word, has to import into the context the notion that this bond had been signed by all people in their consciences – which, while it may correspond to a truth about universal consciousness of guilt, reads a great deal of extraneous material into an already crowded verse. But options (ii) and (iii) may have a grain of truth in them, because they can in fact be combined with (i). It would be in keeping with the ironic tone we find at various points in this chapter that Paul should refer to the Mosaic Law as a mere IOU note, or perhaps as a book which does nothing but keep a tally of one’s sins (see, e.g., Rom. 4:15; 5:20; and Gal. 3:19– 22, where the law, given by angels, has the purpose and effect of shutting people up in their sins). Tois dogmasin is then an almost equally ironic explanatory phrase, referring to the detailed commandments of the Law as that in which the ‘handwritten note’ consisted. The first alternative, properly understood, thus contains at least the overtones of the other two, neither of which is satisfactory if forced to bear the whole weight of meaning. If this suggestion is correct, the other problems in the verse may be seen in a new light.
(c) The difference between ‘against us’ and ‘opposed to us’ is slight but not altogether insignificant. The first indicates active opposition or enmity: the second, a barrier which stands in one’s way. The wordorder in Greek is ‘having blotted out the against-us handwriting, with its regulations, which was opposed to us’. This may indicate that Paul added the last phrase to emphasize the effect of the detailed regulations, because of which the ‘handwriting’ – i.e. the Law – kept both Jews and Gentiles locked up in sin. The Mosaic Torah did not, we should note, stand over against Jews and Gentiles in the same way. In Paul’s view, it shut up the Jews under sin and shut out the Gentiles from the hope and promise of membership in God’s people.
(d) God not only ‘cancelled’27 this ‘written code’; he took it away, (by) nailing it to the cross. The images are so overlaid here that it is hard to see how they are to be related to each other. But if we follow the line of thought taken so far, and pick up the suggestion of several writers28 that there is a reference back to the titulus, ‘The King of the Jews’, which Pilate nailed to the cross as the ostensible reason for Jesus’ execution (see John 19:19), the following interpretation suggests itself. Jesus was sent to the Roman tribunal after being deemed worthy of death by a Jewish court, which had declared (whatever we make of the details) that he was guilty according to the law. Pilate, echoing that verdict but giving it a new twist, put on the cross the sign that read ‘The King of the Jews’. But Paul, looking at the cross, saw there instead the titulus that expressed the charge against all Jesus’ people, the written code that stood over against them, disqualifying them from the life of the new age. And it was God, not Pilate, who put it there. Underneath the different emphases required by the different arguments in which they are set, this verse states the same truth as Galatians 3:13 or 2 Corinthians 5:21. As the representative of his people, Jesus dies their death on the cross, so that, dying it with him, they need never die again. This is how God has dealt with sin, so that his people may have new life.
The context safeguards this statement of what Luther called the ‘wondrous exchange’ (Christ takes our sins, we his righteousness, as in 2 Cor. 5:21) against the misunderstandings to which it has sometimes been subjected. God himself is the source of the redeeming action, not at all an unwilling angry tyrant, pacified by his Son’s pleading or, worse, by the sight of blood. And Christ dies under the ‘written code’ that stood against us (the second ‘us’ may be emphatic, in implied contrast with Christ who took it in our place) not in virtue of some arbitrary exchange of roles but because he, as Messiah, truly represents his people and can therefore appropriately stand in their place.
This verse, understood in this fashion, does two things in its wider context. First, it explains how God has made forgiveness of sins, and therefore new life, available for all. Second, it re-emphasizes the uselessness of looking to Judaism for a richer or more complete membership in the people of God. The Torah was not a help, but a hindrance; God has erased its accusing demands and removed them from the scene altogether. No longer need Jews be under its curse; no longer can it keep Gentiles out of God’s family. No longer can it bar the way to the life of the age to come. This emphasis, reinforced by the final verse (15) of the present section, is taken up again in the last sections of the chapter (2:16–19, 20–23).
15. The overall point of verse 15 is likewise clear, but the details are once more extremely tricky to unravel. Paul is asserting that, because of what Jesus did on the cross, the powers and authorities are a beaten, defeated lot, so that (by implication) neither the Colossians nor anyone else who belongs to Jesus need be overawed by them again. The phrase triumphing over them alludes metaphorically to the practice of Roman generals following a conquest. In the days before the modern news media, the most spectacular method of announcing a far-off victory to people at home was to march in triumph through the city, displaying the booty taken from conquered peoples, and leading a host of bedraggled prisoners through the streets as a public spectacle.
So far, so good; but here the problems of this verse start. (a) What precisely has been done to the ‘powers’? (b) By whom has it been done (God? or Christ?) and (c) where has it been done (in Christ? or on the cross?). These three questions need to be taken together. Logically and grammatically, the subject of the sentence continues to be ‘God’, and the final phrase, which could mean either ‘in him’ or ‘in it’ (i.e. the cross), would read more naturally as a reference to God’s action ‘in Christ’. (Compare ‘with him’ two verses earlier.) Thus RSV: ‘he disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him’. But the verb translated ‘disarmed’ by both RSV and NIV is in a form which elsewhere – in 3:9, for instance – refers to stripping something off from oneself.29This has led several writers to suggest a view composed of three elements, as follows: (i) Paul has subconsciously slipped into regarding Christ, not God, as the subject; (ii) the odd resultant idea of Christ’s ‘stripping off the powers and authorities’ is to be explained by seeing them as the powers of evil which were using his physical body as their point of entry and attack, so that in divesting himself of his ‘flesh’ he got rid of that through which he was vulnerable;30 (iii) the final phrase should not be understood as ‘in Christ’ but ‘in the cross’.
Of these three elements, (i) and (iii) are quite possible. But about (ii) it must be said that, first, there is nothing in the passage which warrants understanding the ‘powers’ as (what we think of as) ‘the powers of evil’, identical with Satan and his angels; second, the mixture of metaphors in the verse would be very harsh, with Christ ‘celebrating a triumph over a cast off suit of clothes’ (Caird); and, third, the idea that the ‘powers’ had their point of entry in Christ’s physical body, of which he therefore divested himself, is more gnostic than Pauline. It seems better therefore (despite the apparent parallel in 3:9) to take the verb in an active sense, which in Hellenistic Greek it could quite easily have,31 and say that God, or possibly Christ, ‘stripped’ not himself, but the rulers and authorities.
It is still not obvious, however, why Paul should assert here that God has, in Christ, ‘stripped’ the rulers and authorities and held them up to contempt. But this may become clearer if we consider the verse within the passage as a whole.
I have suggested above that the stoicheia in 2:8, 20 and the ‘powers and authorities’ of 2:10, 15 refer primarily in this context to the hypothetical tutelary ‘gods’ of the different nations. Among these nations Paul includes Israel, to whom God, through his angels, had given a national charter, the Law. The point he wishes to make is that the Colossians had formerly been under the domination of these powers, (a) because they were members of pagan society and its religions, and (b) because the angels who had given the Law thus functioned as guardians, keeping Gentiles excluded from the family of God (see vv. 16–19). They have now been freely welcomed into that family (vv. 11–12), and this has been achieved through Christ’s overpowering of the gaolers that had kept them locked up (see Rom. 11:32; Gal. 3:22).
At this point there is, I suggest, a further note of heavy and striking irony. The ‘rulers and authorities’ of Rome and of Israel – as Caird points out, the best government and the highest religion the world of that time had ever known – conspired to place Jesus on the cross. These powers, angry at his challenge to their sovereignty, stripped him naked, held him up to public contempt, and celebrated a triumph over him. In one of his most dramatic statements of the paradox of the cross, and one moreover which shows in what physical detail Paul could envisage the horrible death that Jesus had died, he declares that, on the contrary, on the cross God was stripping them naked, was holding them up to public contempt, and leading them in his own triumphal procession – in Christ, the crucified Messiah. When the ‘powers’ had done their worst, crucifying the Lord of glory incognito on the charge of blasphemy and rebellion, they had overreached themselves.32 He, neither blasphemer nor rebel, was in fact their rightful sovereign. They thereby exposed themselves for what they were – usurpers of the authority which was properly his. The cross therefore becomes the source of hope for all who had been held captive under their rule, enslaved in fear and mutual suspicion. Christ breaks the last hold that the ‘powers’ had over his people, by dying on their behalf. He now welcomes them into a new family in which the ways of the old world – its behaviour, its distinctions of race and class and sex, its blind obedience to the ‘forces’ of politics, economics, prejudice and superstition – have become quite simply out of date, a ragged and defeated rabble. Verse 15 thus draws out the effect of verse 14.33
This passage raises sharply the question: how can Paul, who said earlier that ‘all things’ were reconciled to God through the cross (1:19–20; see the commentary there), declare here that on the cross the powers have been defeated? The missing clue, unstated but understood, is the doctrine of the fall. When God looked at his creation, made in and for Christ (1:15–17), he knew it to be very good. As it stood it did not need ‘reconciling’. The intervention of sin produced a triple estrangement – between God and humanity, humanity and the world (including estrangements between individuals and races), and (consequently) God and the world (see Rom. 8:19ff.). God’s response to this situation was one of sovereign love. Wanting the very best for his world, he determined to rid it entirely of the evil which has corrupted it at its very heart. The cross is therefore, at the same time, both the affirmation of God’s hatred of sin and its foul consequences (especially the defacing of his image in his human creatures) and the affirmation of his steadfast determination to save humanity and the world. The ambiguity between the ‘defeat’ of 2:15 and the ‘reconciliation’ of 1:19 is therefore analogous to the similar double truth of God’s attitude towards sinful human beings. As sinners, they need to die to sin; as human beings made in God’s image, they need to have their true humanity reaffirmed and recreated in the resurrection. This is what Paul will work out in 2:20 – 3:4.
Though the ‘rulers and authorities’, then, had come to embody the rebellion of the world, they are not evil in themselves. God has made his world in such a way that corporate human life at any level will structure itself and order its affairs in particular ways. Different parts of the natural order, however, (e.g. the sun or moon) can be, and often have been, idolized, so that human beings offer to them that worship which belongs to God alone (see Rom. 1:25), and thus wrongly give them power in the world. The same can be true of the ‘power structures’ of the different nations (e.g. the goddess Roma in the ancient world, or, more recently, Britannia) or the ‘laws’ governing social or economic life (e.g. the profit motive). Such things, like the sun and moon, are in themselves part of the good creation. Even a secular or pagan state can be regarded as bringing God’s intended order into the world of human affairs (Rom. 13:1ff.). If worshipped, however, they attain to the rank, and power, of idols.
In what way, then, are they ‘reconciled’ (1:18)? This is certainly not something that has been put into automatic effect at the time of the crucifixion. It remains a programme to be fulfilled: ‘that in everything he might become pre-eminent’ (1:18; see 1 Cor. 15:20–28). It is to be effected through the work, and proclamation, of the church (Eph. 3:10). The reconciling mission of the church in the world therefore includes the task of proclaiming to the present ‘power structures’ that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, and summoning them to climb down from his throne and take up their proper responsibilities in looking after his world. Having been defeated as rebels, they now can be reconciled as subjects. They do not own the world. They do not hold the keys of death and hell. They (the Law included), being essentially of ‘this age’, do not hold final authority over those who belong already to the ‘age to come’.
a. These things were mere preparations for Christ’s new age (2:16–19). As often with Paul, the most significant word is the connective – in this case the Therefore at the start of verse 16. Paul is drawing out the implications of the victory of Christ over the rulers and authorities. They had tried to disqualify Gentiles from membership in God’s people, holding up ‘the handwriting, with its regulations’ as a barrier against them. Now Paul warns the Colossians against letting any ordinary mortal do what the ‘powers’ have failed to do.
16–17. The first of the two negative commands of this section is do not let anyone judge you – perhaps better, with RSV, ‘pass judgment on you’. This is not so much a matter of someone criticizing them (J. B. Phillips), taking them to task (NEB) or deciding for them (JB). It is a matter of excluding them, or informing them that they are excluded, from the people of God, on the basis of the Law’s regulations which, according to verse 14, no longer stand in their way. This, broadly speaking, was what had happened (or was threatening to happen) to the Christians in Galatia (see Gal. 4:17). The phrase by what you eat or drink refers to the kosher laws of the Old Testament, extended, as they already were in Paul’s time, to include wine as well as food.34 Or with regard to a religious festival, a new moon celebration or a Sabbath day is a fairly typical list of Jewish holy days (e.g. Ezek. 45:17; Hos. 2:11), referring in descending order to the great annual festivals, the monthly celebrations and the weekly Sabbaths. These rules of diet and ritual marked out the Jew from his pagan neighbour. Failure to observe them implied that one did not belong to God’s people.
It is interesting to observe what Paul does not say in opposition. He never says, here or in Galatians, that Christianity has nothing to do with Judaism. That would have been an equally effective argument in urging the Colossians (or the Galatians) to have no truck with Jewish regulations; but it would have cut off the branch upon which his whole argument rests, namely, the belief that Christianity is the fulfilment of Judaism. Christians are members of the ‘age to come’ for which Israel had been waiting. But ‘when the perfect is come, the partial is abolished’ (1 Cor. 13:10): or, as he puts it here, these are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.
This language of ‘shadow and substance’ could be used in Hellenistic Greek in a Platonic sense, contrasting the ‘shadowy’ world of material objects with the ‘real’ world of ‘forms’ or of spiritual realities. It is true that Paul appears to be drawing up a contrast here between outward material regulations and inward spiritual truths.35 But, just as he never says that Christianity has nothing to do with Judaism, so he never says that it has nothing to do with material things, even with outward forms of worship and ritual. There are, in fact, four reasons why verse 17 should not be understood as a polemic against ‘material’ things per se.
First, Christianity, too, is a world-affirming religion, with its own outward symbols (see 2:12, etc.), intended to be lived out in concrete reality (3:5ff.). To ‘demythologize’ verse 16 into a condemnation of all outward regulations is to fall into a kind of modern gnosticism or antinomianism.
Second, verse 18 objects equally strongly to a non-material feature of the teaching to which Paul is objecting, which would have slipped through the net were he simply attacking outward regulations.
Third, and most important, the phrase ‘of the things that were to come’, which qualifies ‘shadow’, shows that the proper contrast is that between the old age and the new. Christ has inaugurated the ‘age to come’. The regulations of Judaism were designed for the period when the people of God consisted of one racial, cultural and geographical unit, and are simply put out of date now that this people is becoming a world-wide family. They were the ‘shadows’ that the approaching new age casts before it. Now that the reality is come, there is no point in clinging to the shadows. And the reality belongs to Christ.36
Fourth, there is a good reason why Paul would have used just this language to make his point. His style of argument throughout this passage is heavily ironic, portraying Judaism as ‘another religion’ in order to show that Christians do not need it for completeness. Here he is in effect saying: even in terms of pagan religion itself, Judaism has to do with the shadow-world, not with reality. The word for ‘reality’ here is sōma, which elsewhere regularly means ‘body’: so that the phrase could be translated ‘the body of Christ’. Since this seems quite out of keeping with the context, sōma is usually taken solely as the opposite of skia, shadow, and this meaning is undoubtedly the primary one. But the proximity, within the same argument, of verse 19, where the ‘head’ and the ‘body’ are introduced quite casually, may suggest that Paul is aware of, and wishes to exploit, a double entendre here. He manages to refer at the same time to the substantiality of the new people of God, as opposed to the shadowy nature of the old, and to the fact that this new people is the ‘body of Christ’.
18. If the target of verse 16 was a self-appointed judge, here it is a self-appointed umpire, who might declare that the Colossians were not playing the game according to the rules: Do not let anyone… disqualify you for the prize. This metaphor restates Paul’s basic appeal: you are already members of the body of Christ, and nobody must be allowed to rule you out of court. This time the potential objection is based, not on non-observance of Jewish diet or festivals, but on their failure to share in a particular style of ‘spiritual’ life or mystical experience. The adverse ruling might come from one who delights37 in false humility and the worship of angels. The word translated ‘false humility’ carries a bad connotation only by its place in the argument (here and in v. 23): in 3:12 the same word is part of the description of Christian character. It may be that it should be linked more closely with the following phrase: compare JB, ‘people who like grovelling to angels and worshipping them’. The word is used in some Jewish writings almost as a synonym for the fasting which in some disciplines was believed to induce heavenly visions.
This, however, points us on to the question: were the people Paul is attacking actually worshipping angels, and if so what sort of religion or philosophy did they think they were practising? To this there are three main lines of reply. The first searches through the various known syncretistic movements of the period for signs of worship explicitly offered to angels, and comes up with a variety of possible answers, none of them very satisfactory as a background for the chapter as a whole. The second takes ‘the worship of angels’ in the sense, not of human beings worshipping angels, but of the worship the angels themselves offer to God, and refers to various texts from post-biblical Judaism, not least Qumran, in which such a human participation in the angelic liturgy is attempted and advocated. The third takes the phrase in the same sense as the first, but sees it as another example of Paul’s heavy irony: the people he is opposing spend so much time in speculations about angels, or in celebrating the fact that the law was given by them, that they are in effect worshipping them instead of God – a charge which the Jews of Paul’s day would no doubt have rejected indignantly, but which it might have been difficult for them to refute.38
This third view fits the tone and context of Colossians 2 very well. The point about participation in angelic liturgies is well taken, but could simply be part of the reason for Paul’s contemptuous reference here to a worship which, while apparently heavenly minded and super-spiritual, was in fact bordering on idolatry.39
Paul has three different things to say about a person who insists on this kind of ‘spirituality’. The third one, that such a person is out of touch with the Head, we shall come to presently. In the second, that his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions, Paul drags the false worship back down to earth where it belongs. For the ‘superspirituality’ of which such teachers boasted Paul substitutes ‘unspirituality’ (literally ‘the mind of the flesh’). The phrase ‘with idle notions’ translates a single word in the Greek, which could mean ‘without cause’, i.e. nothing is achieved by this self-inflation. Though it could belong grammatically with the other adjacent phrase, ‘Such a person… what he has seen’ (see below), it seems better to take it where NIV has it. This warning against confusing the supernatural with the genuinely ‘spiritual’ remains relevant throughout the history of religion; it is perhaps particularly pertinent to Christians living in a rationalistic age, who may be tempted to regard a wide variety of paranormal or supernatural occurrences as somehow ‘spiritual’.40
But the first accusation in this sequence of three almost defies translation, let alone comprehension. NIV , rendering Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen, preserves the basic meaning of ‘entering’ which is inherent in the verb, but does so only by the use of the English idiom ‘goes into detail’, a metaphor with a different meaning altogether. RSV gives up the attempt and renders ‘taking his stand on visions’: comprehensible, but the Greek simply does not say that. NEB, for once leading the field in sticking to the literal sense of the text, reads ‘people who… try to enter into some vision of their own’; but the problem is to decide what that means. Many manuscripts, reflected in AV , read the word ‘not’, which betrays its secondary origin by giving a much easier sense: ‘intruding into those things which he hath not seen’. If, as some have recently argued,41 the word means ‘enter’ in the sense of entry into heavenly mysteries, then we are clearly still in the world of super-spirituality. Perhaps the best solution is, again, to detect irony: with an implied contrast to ‘entry into the worship of heaven itself,’ Paul describes these people as ‘entering into – their own visions!’ All they have discovered in their vaunted mystical experiences is a set of imaginary fantasies.
19. Finally, such a teacher has lost connection with the Head. NIV has changed the verb from negative to positive, emphasizing the view that those who propagate the teaching Paul is opposing were Christians who had become misguided, or who had never really understood their faith in the first place. It is possible, however, that the verb should be read, ambiguously, as ‘and not holding on to the head’, leaving the question open whether they were simply Jews who, according to Paul, had never ‘grasped’ Christ in the first place (the verb can mean just that) and now find themselves like a torso without a head. This is in fact more likely (see Introduction, pp. 30—31). The picture of Christ as the head is derived, obviously, from that development of his earlier ‘body of Christ’ metaphor (1 Cor. 12, etc.) which Paul has already used in 1:18. It is not to be identified with the related idea in 2:10, though it may perhaps be related to the last phrase of verse 17, on which see above. The underlying point of this short description of the church as Christ’s body is that, while the false teaching might try to exclude the Colossians from membership in God’s people, in reality it is they, not the Colossians, who are in danger of being excluded. The true test of whether or not one belongs to God’s people is neither the observance of dietary laws and Jewish festivals, nor the cultivation of super-spiritual experiences, but whether one belongs to Christ, alive with his life.
The church, then, takes its life from Christ himself, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow, or, perhaps, as God wants it to grow (see NEB). Private visions isolate individuals; dietary laws isolated the Jewish nation from the rest of the world; but in God’s plan all belong together in mutual interdependence. It is no shame when a Christian finds that he or she cannot grow spiritually without support and help from fellow believers; it is, rather, a surprise that anyone should have thought such a thing possible, let alone desirable. Literally, the verse reads ‘grows with growth of God’: NIV rightly takes this to mean ‘from God’. It may also indicate that the new life of Christians is God’s own life, echoing the theme we observed in 1:6, 11, etc.
b. With Christ you died to this world and its regulations (2:20–23). Paul uses his final appeal against the false teaching as a gateway through which to pass, by contrast, to the positive teaching of chapter 3. The opening words of the two subsections (2:20, ‘since you died with Christ’; 3:1, ‘since… you have been raised with Christ’) show the parallel between them, which is worked out in detail in the two appeals. It is not really helpful to divide Paul’s thought here into ‘doctrine’ (chs. 1–2) and ‘ethics’ (chs. 3–4): a good deal of what he has already said has had to do with behaviour, and a good deal that is to come is substantially doctrinal. The string of imperatives in chapter 3,42 hardly proves that a transition has occurred, since the basic mood of 2:6–23 is also imperative.43 In both sections the commands are undergirded with doctrinal teaching. Perhaps the doctrine/ethics distinction is not so much a feature of Paul’s thought as the comparatively modern dichotomy, of which Paul would been innocent, between facts and values. While, then, 2:20–23 is a separate section, part of 2:8–23 as a whole, we should not overlook its intimate connection with 3:1ff.
20. This final appeal, like the earlier ones in the chapter, is grounded in that reality which is true of the Colossians because they belong to Christ (2:11ff.). Christ, by his death, came out from under the apparent dominion which the ‘powers’ had exercised over him. Those who are his have therefore already emerged from that old tyranny. This is expressed in the words since (literally ‘if’: but this is the ‘if,’ not of doubt, but of logic) you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world. Death releases people from their previous status: the idea here is similar to Paul’s expressions elsewhere about dying ‘to the law’.44 Here the ‘death’ which the Colossians have already undergone is ‘out from under’ (perhaps the most literal way of reading apo, more simply interpreted as ‘to’ in NIV , RSV) the rule of the ‘principles’ or ‘elements’, mentioned already in verse 8.
The ‘elements’ and their characteristic regulations are ‘of the world’: why, then, as though you still belonged to it (i.e. the world), do you submit to its rules? In the light of the whole passage, it would be better to translate the verb as passive, not middle, seeing the sentence not as a rebuke for a lapse but as a warning of danger (‘why should you allow yourselves to be subjected to its rules?’, cf. AV ). The meaning of ‘rules’ is defined by its context. It is not a warning against just any regulations at all, as has sometimes been implied, but against those that ‘belong to the world’ – which carries with it the overtones of rebellion against God, much like ‘the present evil age’ (cf. Gal. 1:4) as opposed to ‘the age to come’. At the same time, Paul is preparing for the point (to be spelt out in vv. 21–22) that these regulations betray their irrelevance for true holiness by dealing with physical things only, instead of with physical things in their full context.
21. It hardly needs to be said that this verse is a contemptuous reference to the sort of regulations Paul is opposing, not a statement of his own views. NIV has, in fact, brought this out by putting quotation marks round the three prohibitions, and a question mark at the end of the verse. The verb here translated ‘handle’45 is stronger than that rendered ‘touch’, thus producing a downward sliding scale (Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!) which corresponds to the upward rise in absurd scrupulosity. Examples of this sort of regulation are not difficult to find in the Judaism roughly contemporary with Paul. There is no reason either to look to pagan sources or to imagine that only when one has found a religion which said exactly what Paul here says has the correct background been located. The tone throughout the passage has been heavily ironic, and this continues to the end of the chapter.
22. The two arguments here advanced against regulations of this sort are so close to those found on the lips of Jesus in Matthew 15:1–20 and Mark 7:1–2346 that many scholars have suggested a conscious echo on Paul’s part. This may be judged probable whether or not the Colossians would have picked up such a reference. The first argument, these are all destined to perish with use, highlights the futility of regulations dealing with materials – i.e. foodstuffs – whose proper use is also their destruction (cf. 1 Cor. 6:13). ‘Perish with use’ does not just mean ‘may wear out in time’, but indicates that ‘the things could not be used without rendering them unfit for further use’.47 The second argument, because they are based on human commands or teachings, refers, like Matthew 15:9, to Isaiah 29:13, where the prophet condemns his contemporaries for their heartless outward show of religion. NIV seems to imply, with its addition of ‘because’ to the Greek original, that this clause is supposed to be the reason why foodstuffs will perish with use, but this is clearly absurd. The two clauses stand in parallel, both commenting independently on the regulations mocked in verse 21.
23. The Greek of the last verse of chapter 2 is sufficiently odd for several sober-minded commentators to suggest that, despite the absence of manuscript variations, scribal corruption has occurred at an early stage in transmission. Against this it must be said that any manuscript which offered an easy way out of the problems of verse 23 would instantly become suspect for just that reason; scribes are more likely to smooth out oddities than to introduce them. The first half of the verse is not too difficult, though a little awkward in expression. NIV translates, probably rightly, such regulations indeed have an appearance of (possibly ‘a reputation for’) wisdom, with their selfimposed worship (the most likely meaning of a word which occurs only here: it could also indicate a self-imposed discipline heavily enforced), their false humility (as in v. 18, the idea ‘false’ has to be supplied from the context) and their harsh treatment of the body. It is not difficult to picture the sort of religion Paul is opposing here. Its elaborate liturgies and seemingly rigorous self-abasing asceticism give it a name for serious piety: but it is a sham.
Why it is a sham Paul apparently says in the second half of the verse. But what exactly his reason may be has long baffled commentators.48 One suggested alternative (e.g. RSV margin) gives a strong charge against these regulations: they ‘are of no value, serving only to indulge the flesh’. What looks like rigorous discipline is in fact a subtle form of self-indulgence. This involves reading most of the verse as a parenthesis: ‘which are (though possessing a reputation for wisdom with their self-imposed worship, abject grovellings and harsh physical discipline, all to no value) merely a way of gratifying the flesh’. This may ease the grammatical problem in the first part of the verse, where the main verb ‘are’ (estin) is followed almost at once by an accusative participle ‘having’ (echonta), but at the cost of straining the rest of the sentence almost unbearably. Another alternative is to take the Greek word time (here rendered ‘value’) in its more usual sense of ‘honour’, and to suggest that perhaps these practices do not give proper honour to the human body; but this imports too many extraneous ideas into the clause. It is safest overall to follow NIV (and RSV): they (i.e. these regulations) lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence. This takes the clause as a single whole, understanding pros plēsmonēn tēs sarkos, literally ‘towards the gratifying of the flesh’, as modifying time, ‘value’.49 The value these practices do not have is precisely the one which might make them worthwhile, and which their supporters claim for them: that they restrain fleshly indulgence (which includes not only sensuality but also jealousy, anger and so forth: see Gal. 5:19–21). Genuine holiness, which is an anticipation of the life of the age to come into which the risen Christ has already entered (1:18; 3:1–4), is not to be had by methods whose very nature, focusing as it does on perishable material things, binds them to the present age.
How, then, is genuine holiness to be had? Paul answers the implicit question of chapter 2 by exploring the practical meaning of the resurrection. In doing so he shows that the religion attacked in 2:8–23 is a parody of the truth. It struggles to attain heavenly worship, which is in fact given freely to all Christ’s people. It focuses on the world and the body as the spheres where holiness operates, and ends up being both worldly and fleshly. The old taboos put the wild animals of lust and hatred (see 3:5, 8) into cages: there they remain, alive and dangerous, a constant threat to their captor. Paul’s solution is more drastic: the animals are to be killed (3:5). The old method of holiness attacked symptoms: the true method goes for the root.
This subsection of the letter, then, places the Christian firmly in the New Age, and requires that he or she live appropriately. In 3:1–4 Paul establishes the basis: Christians are already risen with Christ. In 3:5–11 he describes the life of the old age, and urges the Colossians to make a clean break with it. In 3:12–17 he encourages them to embrace the life of the new age; in 3:18 – 4:1 he applies this in detail to daily life in the family and place of work. Finally in 4:2–6 he exhorts them to constant prayer and Christian witness in the world.
The outstanding feature of this part of the letter is the sharp contrast between the old life and the new, as described in 3:5–11 and 3:12–17. It is salutary to ponder the characteristics of the one for a while, to sense its whole mood and style of life, and then to switch suddenly to the other. They are indeed worlds apart. In the one we find attitudes and behaviour that cause inevitable fragmentation in human society and even within individuals: in the other, a way of life which integrates both individual persons and groups of people. The former, in other words, steadily obliterates genuinely human existence: the latter enhances it.
Paul’s appeal to abandon the first lifestyle and embrace the second has exactly appropriate theological foundations. He reminds the Colossians of who they now are because of God’s grace. They are ‘God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved’, who have experienced his forgiveness at first hand (10:12–13): they belong to the new humanity, which is being ‘renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator’. The chief characteristics of the old life are precisely those which grow up where these truths are not known or appreciated. Lust and anger feed on insecurity, attempting to overcome it by dominating other human beings, but always sinking more into fear and pride which in turn cause further anxiety. The gospel goes to the root of this problem. The freeness of God’s love attacks pride: its faithfulness, fear. The genuinely human existence which Paul commends cannot be reached except through belief in the forgiving love of God.
Nor can it be reached in isolation. ‘Christian conduct is the result, not simply of the effort to be good, but of incorporation into the Body of Christ.’50 Individualism, rightly prized by many Christians as a guard against the dangerous idea that membership in the church makes individual belief and conduct a matter of secondary importance, can easily be twisted into the equally dangerous notion that membership in the church itself is of comparative insignificance. God intends Christian behaviour to be reinforced and upheld by the friendship, company, teaching, counselling and loving criticism of other Christians. Not to appreciate this is to lapse into that arrogant independence of one’s fellow human beings – worse, one’s fellow Christians – which is a sign not of the new life but of the old.
It has often been remarked that some of the details of this passage overlap not only with the parallels in Ephesians but with sections of other New Testament writings. With Colossians 3:5, 8, for instance, we may compare Mark 7:21–22; Romans 1:29–32; 1 Corinthians 5:10–11; 6:9–10; Galatians 5:19–21; Ephesians 5:3–6; 1 Thessalonians 4:3–8; 2 Timothy 3:2–5; James 1:21; 1 Peter 2:1; 4:3; with Colossians 3:12ff., Romans 5:2–5; Galatians 5:22–23; Titus 3:1–2; James 3:17; 2 Peter 1:5–7; and, with Colossians 3:18–4:1, Ephesians 5:21–6:9; Titus 2:2–10 and 1 Peter 2:18 – 3:7. It is much easier to suppose that all these passages reflect standard early Christian teaching, such as all new converts would receive, than to imagine that one of them is the source for all the others. These lists of ‘vices’ and ‘virtues’ have some features in common with nonChristian ethical catalogues of the period,51 but are sharply distinguished from them by their specifically Christian motivations. The Jew attempted to keep the Torah to demonstrate his membership in the family of Abraham. The Stoic attempted to rise above passion to the state of total tranquillity. Paul urges his readers to copy God himself in glad, outgoing love, and so to discover in Christ what it means to be truly human.
1–2. Paul has just drawn out the implications of dying with Christ (2:20–23); the Colossians have left behind the old age. Now he draws out the implications of having also risen with Christ. They have entered the new age, and, belonging there by right, do not have to struggle to attain the status of membership in God’s people: they already have it. They must now simply allow its life to be worked out in them: Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on (literally, simply ‘seek’52) things above… Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.
The three focal points of this appeal are (a) the fact that Christ’s people are already risen with him; (b) the appeal to an activity of the mind and will; (c) the object of that activity. The first point is to be amplified in verses 3 and 4, and we shall consider it presently. The second point makes a (no doubt deliberate) contrast with the spurious methods of holiness attacked in 2:8–23. Submission to the ‘powers’ and their outward regulations is essentially dehumanizing; mind and heart need not be in gear with what the body is required to do. God’s purpose in Christ, as we saw in chapter 1, is to produce truly human beings, who find in the service of God a new integration of thought and action. The primacy, in Christian behaviour, of the attitude of the mind is of course no excuse for barren intellectualism; many Christians, however, make that danger an excuse for not giving the mind the place God intended it to have. Someone who truly understands who he or she is in Christ is further along the road to genuine holiness than someone who, in confusion, anxiously imagines that the new life is the result, rather than the starting-point, of the daily battle with temptation. We may compare 1:9–11, on which see the commentary.
The third point, the object of the ‘seeking’, the place where thoughts are to rest, is ‘the things that are above’, contrasted in verse 2 with ‘the things that are on the earth’. Here again there is an implicit contrast with the religion of 2:16–23. But what are these ‘heavenly things’? They are well set out in Philippians 4:8, and also in 3:12ff. of our present letter: the qualities of self-giving love are the chief characteristics of the life of heaven, because heaven is where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God (NIV is certainly wrong to omit the comma and so to make ‘is seated’ into a single expression). This phrase, particularly in its allusion to Psalm 110, focuses attention on the sovereign rule which Christ now exercises. The command to aspire to the things of heaven is a command to meditate and dwell upon Christ’s sort of life, and on the fact that he is now enthroned as the Lord of the world. The Bible does not say very much about heaven. But its central feature is clear: it is the place where the crucified Christ already reigns, where his people already have full rights of citizenship (Phil. 3:19ff.). To concentrate the mind on the character of Jesus Christ, on that unique blend of love and strength revealed in the Gospels, is to begin on earth to reflect the very life of heaven.
3–4. The commands to set mind and heart on ‘the things above’ are more powerfully reinforced in the next two verses. For you died (as in 2:11–12, 20), and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. This statement leaves several questions unanswered, so Paul continues: When Christ, who is your53 life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Here we have a full, if brief, description of the Christian’s true status. With Christ, he has died, he is risen, and he will appear in glory. There is a perfect balance here between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ that are so characteristic of Paul’s teaching on the Christian life.54 The new age has dawned, and Christians already belong to it. The old age, however, is not yet wound up, and until they die (or until the Lord ‘appears’ again in his second coming) their new life will be a secret truth, ‘hidden’ from view (from others, much of the time: often enough, from themselves too).
The life of Christians thus becomes part of the ‘mystery’, the secret plan of God, to be revealed to the world at the end of time: that life is not just ‘hidden with Christ in God’ (v. 3), it actually is Christ himself (v. 4), their hope of glory (1:27). As in Romans 8:18ff., or 1 John 3:1ff., the Christian hopes not merely for the coming of the Lord, but for the full revelation of what he or she already is. Then will it be seen with what faithful diligence and perseverance many outwardly ‘unsuccessful’ and forgotten Christian workers have served their Lord. Paul, the prisoner, an eccentric Jew to the Romans and a worse-than-Gentile traitor to the Jews, will be seen as Paul the apostle, the servant of the King. The Colossians, insignificant ex-pagans from a third-rate country town, will be seen in a glory which, if it were now to appear, one might be tempted to worship. This is how they are to regard their life, and on this foundation they are to build genuine holiness and Christian maturity.
The first section of the ethical appeal is primarily negative, its focal points being the commands ‘put to death…’ and ‘rid yourselves…’ (vv. 5, 8). These verbs introduce two lists of vices, one relating to sexual sin, the other to sins of anger. The two lists are classic statements of the ways in which Christians can be untrue to themselves and, more importantly, to God. By bluntly naming sins which are all too often excused or glossed over with euphemisms, Paul sets a clear standard for the church both ancient and modern. Many Christians tend to concentrate on one list or the other: one knows of Christian communities that would be appalled at the slightest sexual irregularity but which are nests of malicious intrigue, backbiting, gossip and bad temper, and, conversely, of others where people are so concerned to live in untroubled harmony with each other that they tolerate flagrant immorality. The gospel, however, leaves no room for behaviour of either sort.
5. If Christians have already died and risen again with Christ, whatever belongs to your earthly nature must be put to death. The word therefore shows, as so often in Paul, that the command is dependent on the previous statements. The new life, to be revealed fully on the last day (v. 4), is to let itself be seen in advance, in the present time, in Christian behaviour.55 ‘Your earthly nature’ is a potentially misleading phrase. Paul is not advocating a sort of Buddhist abstraction from ordinary human life, but rather the abandoning of a way of life that is ‘earthly’ as opposed to ‘heavenly’ in the sense indicated by verses 1–4, i.e. that belongs to the old age and not to the new. Literally the phrase could be translated ‘the members (or ‘limbs’) which are upon the earth’; Paul probably intends this as a vivid metaphor, as in Matthew 5:29–30; 18:8–9. Practices such as these are like a gangrenous limb to the eyes of a surgeon: they must be cut off before they infect the whole person.
The list moves from the specific to the general. The word here translated sexual immorality refers to any intercourse outside marriage: in the ancient world, as in the modern, intercourse with a prostitute would be a specific, and in pagan culture a frequent, instance of this. Impurity highlights the contamination of character effected by immoral behaviour. The word rendered lust could refer to any overmastering passion, but regularly, as here, indicates uncontrolled sexual urges. Evil desires (the word ‘evil’ is added because ‘desire’ by itself, which is what the Greek word means, could be used in a neutral sense) is the state which logically precedes lust. It is perhaps important to note, as is clearly implied by Hebrews 4:15, that experiencing sexual temptation is not itself sinful. Sin begins when the idea of illicit gratification, presented to the mind in temptation, is not at once put to death, but is instead fondled and cherished.56 Behind this stage, in turn, there is greed: another general term, here it refers to unchecked hunger for physical pleasure, which is the breedingground for more specific evil desires. Paul boldly unmasks this covetousness: it is idolatry. Literal idol-worship, of course, formed the setting for a good deal of the sort of behaviour here criticized, but that is only an illustration of the basic point. All such greed places at the centre of one’s attention and devotion that which is not God. In turning from the source of life, those who follow other paths are actually pursuing death (cf. Rom. 1:21ff., 32; 6:21), as the next verse indicates.
If these vices are not, eventually, to kill the one who practises them, they must themselves be ‘put to death’. The old word ‘mortify’, used here in AV , has now acquired exactly the wrong sense, implying just such a regime of ascetic discipline as Paul has declared to be worse than useless (2:20–23). ‘Mortification’ like that avoids dealing directly with the sin itself. Paul’s recommended treatment is simpler and more drastic. To put something to death you must cut off its lines of supply: it is futile and self-deceiving to bemoan one’s inability to resist the last stage of a temptation when earlier stages have gone by unnoticed, or even eagerly welcomed. This does not mean setting up a new hedge around the law, such as branding all theatrical performances (or whatever) as inherently ‘sinful’. Rather, every Christian has the responsibility, before God, to investigate the lifelines of whatever sins are defeating him personally, and to cut them off without pity. Better that than have them eventually destroy him.
6. Destruction, indeed, will be the result for those who disregard the warning: because of these, the wrath of God is coming.57 It is not the case that God happens to dislike this sort of behaviour and so has decided, as it were arbitrarily, to punish it. On the contrary. ‘The wrath of God’, it hardly needs saying, is not a malicious or capricious anger,58 but the necessary reaction of true holiness, justice and goodness to wickedness, exploitation and evil of every kind. This wrath begins to take effect in the squalid and degrading effects of sin itself (Rom. 1:18–32). But that process is not the whole of ‘wrath’: it leads to the final judgment (see Rom. 1:32; 2:1–16). The present tense in Colossians 3:6 refers, perhaps deliberately, to both these senses of God’s wrath, though ‘is coming’ (NIV , RSV) emphasizes the future aspect. Part of the horror of hell, it appears, is that those who consciously and continually choose sin instead of God become less and less human, until all that ennobles them as creatures made in God’s image has, by their own choice, been altogether obliterated, beyond hope or pity.
It is perhaps along these lines that the difficult doctrine of hell may be comprehensibly stated today, in opposition to the current notion that hell does not exist, or that if it does it will at the last be untenanted, or that even if some will remain there it is in bad taste to mention the fact. Unless we are to rob human beings of all meaningful responsibility for their actions, and to underplay the utter holiness of God, hell must always be at least a possibility. The presence in the world of much dehumanizing evil – dehumanizing to its practitioners even more than to its sufferers – indicates clearly enough how we may understand it. Those who make evil a way of life begin to lose their humanity, begin (in other words) to die, even while they are alive: witness the dead eyes of the miser, the torturer, the prostitute. Paul’s constant emphasis on full, genuine Christian humanity casts a clear shadow over non-Christian existence. Those who choose to live without God will one day find that they have forfeited their likeness to him.
7. Paul knew only too well that the great majority of ex-pagan converts would find in verse 5 a description of their own former way of life (compare 1 Cor. 6:10–11). You used to walk in these ways, he says (‘walk’ referring, as usual, to conduct in general; see above on 1:10), in the life you once lived. ‘To live’ is more fundamental, for Paul, than ‘to walk’ (compare Gal. 5:25): the ‘walk’, the actual conduct, reveals the ‘life’, the settled state of existence. And in the Greek the last words of the verse (en toutois) are perhaps contemptous: ‘when your life consisted of such wretched things as these’.59
8. But now (a classic Pauline way of indicating the transition from the old life to the new: cf. 1:22) you must rid yourselves of all such things as these. ‘These’ may refer to the list of verse 1:5 as well as that of verse 1:8. They must be ‘put behind you’ (J. B. Phillips). When a tide of passion or a surge of anger is felt, it must be dealt with as the alien intruder it really is, and turned out of the house as having no right to be there at all, let alone to be giving orders. This is often harder than it sounds, but it must be constantly attempted, in reliance on the grace which continually renews the life of the Christian (5:10; cf. 2 Cor. 4:16).
It is far easier to drift into a sin which one does not know by name than consciously to choose one whose very title should be repugnant to a Christian. The list in verse 1:8 is another ugly one: anger, the continuous state of smouldering or seething hatred; rage, when this state breaks out in actual angry deeds or words; malice, a word which in the Greek can simply mean ‘evil’, but which here probably has the overtone of ‘evil intended to cause hurt’; slander, speech which puts malice into practical effect (the Greek is blasphēmia, speech which dishonours God himself – in this instance, by reviling a human being made in his image); and filthy language, words which, either by their foul association or their abusive intent, contaminate both speaker and hearers. All such things are to be put away from your lips: one cannot always prevent angry or hateful thoughts from springing into one’s head, but they should be dealt with firmly before they turn into words. It is not ‘healthy’, as is sometimes supposed, to allow such thoughts to find expression. It is certainly healthy to recognize and face up to one’s own anger or frustration, and to search for proper and creative ways of dealing with it. But words do not merely convey information or let off steam. They change situations and relationships, often irrevocably. They can wound as well as heal. Like wild plants blown by the wind, hateful words can scatter their seeds far and wide, giving birth to more anger wherever they land.
9–10. Among the most dangerous seeds are untruths: Do not lie to each other. Truth is often inconvenient, untidy or embarrassing, and we are constantly tempted to bend it into a less awkward shape. But this too is out of place for the Christian, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self. This does not merely mean that Christ demands a new standard of life from his redeemed people. The new self is being renewed… in the image of its Creator. The behaviour outlined in verses 5 and 1:8 is characteristic of distorted humanity. Being itself out of shape, it tends to twist everything else – people, by manipulation or anger; facts, by lying – to make them fit in with its own distortions. The humanity which has been straightened out according to the perfect model, that of Christ (1:15–20; 2:6), has no excuse for such behaviour. The standard now is the life of heaven (3:1–4). They do not behave like that there.
But is this ethical appeal realistic? Paul answers with a strong affirmative, undergirding ethics with theology. Though it may not always feel like it, those who have joined the family of Christ have become different people. They have ‘taken off’ the old solidarity, the old humanity, like a shabby set of clothes. ‘Self’ in NIV is misleadingly individualistic, since the idea, here as in Romans 6:6, is much more than merely individual; it could also imply the false idea that ‘self’ and ‘Christ’ will always be opposed, whereas in truth it is one’s true self, one’s full humanity, that emerges once the shackles of the old humanity are thrown off. This metaphor of ‘taking off’ clothes does not mean simply the making of good resolutions or promises to behave differently. It is the action – itself the reflex, in human experience, of God’s action in grace by the Spirit – of leaving one family, or household, and moving lock, stock and barrel into another, where a different rule of life obtains.
Paul here may well be alluding to the familiar picture of the candidate for baptism, who, symbolizing this transfer of solidarities, exchanges his old clothes for new ones. (‘Taking off the old humanity’ and ‘putting on the new humanity’ are aorist participles in the Greek, indicating actions that are unique and unrepeatable.) The old humanity is the solidarity of Adam’s people: compare Romans 5:12–21 and (growing out of that paragraph) 6:1–7:6. The new humanity is the solidarity of those who are incorporated into, and hence patterned on, the Messiah who is himself the true Man (the same passages in Romans could be cited again). This new humanity is therefore (if we translate the passage literally) ‘renewed according to the image of the one who created it’. At last, in Christ, human beings can be what God intended them to be. This passage clearly looks back to 1:15–20; the intention of creation is fulfilled in redemption, and, conversely, redemption is understood as new creation. As in Paul’s reported prayer of 1:9ff., this renewal is put into effect not only in outward actions but also, and as a prior necessity, in knowledge: the phrase literally means ‘into knowledge’, implying that the ‘renewal’ spoken of is to result in the true knowledge of God – and, perhaps, of good and evil also. Practical Christianity is founded on the full recognition of truth about God and about oneself. And, since this is the foundation, truth is also demonstrated in the full structure; since the ethic Paul is commending produces individual and corporate stability and integration, it is in a measure self-authenticating.
11. In this new community and solidarity which the Colossians have now joined (‘here’: the word indicates a place, presumably the family of Christ’s people, with the emphasis being ‘one doesn’t behave like that here’) there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free. These intermingled distinctions of race, ancestral religion, class and caste provide the best soil for that mutual suspicion and distrust which turn into the vices listed in verse 1:8. These divisions were of great importance in the ancient world. The spread of Greek civilization after the conquests of Alexander the Great meant that the ‘Greek’, whether from Greece itself, Egypt, Asia Minor or anywhere else, could regard himself as a member of a privileged group, somewhat like those who speak a major European language in much of the modern world. He would look down on the circumscribed nationalism of the Jew who insisted on preserving and clinging to his old culture, just as the Jew, fiercely conscious of God’s election of Israel and of the shallowness and moral darkness of Greek polytheism, would despise him. These differences were accentuated by the physical mark of the male Jew: circumcision was prized in Israel and mocked by her enemies. ‘Barbarians’ is a contemptuous word used by Greeks for anyone who did not speak their language: the Scythians (from the then little-known northern reaches of Asia) were the extreme examples of barbarians, little better than savages. The distinction between slave and free, of course, ran through ancient society just as obviously as a colour bar still does in some areas today (whether or not officially sanctioned), and with just as damaging an effect on human relations and self-esteem. The ancient world, just like the modern, was an elaborate network of prejudice, suspicion and arrogance, so ingrained as to be thought natural and normal.
These distinctions, Paul declares with a breath-taking challenge, have become irrelevant in Christ. The ‘powers of the world’ did indeed hold the human race in their grip, as men and women allowed their habits of thought and action to be dominated by them. Paul’s counter-claim, set before the church as a still unfinished agenda, is that these barriers and habits are, in terms of God’s proper will for his human creatures, neither natural nor normal. They are, ultimately, a denial of the creation of humankind in the image of God. That is not to say that differences cease to exist (any more than the male-female distinction ceases to exist, in the similar list of Gal. 3:28). It is to say that differences of background, nationality, colour, language, social standing and so forth must be regarded as irrelevant to the question of the love, honour and respect that are to be shown to individuals and groups.
Instead, Christ is all, and in all. In another echo of 1:15–20 Paul grounds his challenge in this double statement of the universal significance of Christ. On the one hand, he is ‘all things’ (or ‘the totality’60): in other words, he, the pre-existent image of God, is the one whose being underlies all human nature of whatever category (Jew or Greek, civilized or uncivilized, high or low born). Only a Christology as fully insistent as Paul’s on both the divinity and the humanity of Jesus Christ can undergird this claim, that in him there can be no barriers between human beings. On the other hand, he is ‘in all’–probably, ‘in all people’ (taking en pasin as masculine: a second neuter might seem redundant, and the context refers more specifically to people). Wherever one looks, one sees Christ. When an elderly person is ignored, Christ is ignored; where a lively teenager is snubbed, he is snubbed; where a poor or coloured person (or, for that matter, a rich or white one) is treated with contempt, the reproach falls on him. There must therefore be mutual welcome and respect within the people of God. Nobody must allow prejudices from their pre-Christian days to distort the new humanity which God has created in and through the New Man.
The letter to Philemon again provides a good example of this theology put into effect.
12. The mood changes from negative to positive: it is like coming out of fog into sunlight. The same motivation that prompts the Christian to abandon the old ways of life encourages her or him to embrace the new ways: hence Paul begins with a typical Therefore… As God’s new humanity (3:10) the church is God’s true Israel, to whom have been transferred the epithets which formerly belonged to Israel according to the flesh. Christians are God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved. God has assured them in Christ that their membership in his people, their being ‘set apart’ for his service (that is the underlying meaning of ‘holy’), depends not on their goodness but on his grace, not on their lovableness but on his love. These titles are not only used of Israel in the Old Testament, but also of Jesus Christ in the New: he is the ‘chosen’ one (1 Pet. 2:4, 6), the holy one (John 6:69; Acts 4:27, 30, etc.), the one supremely beloved by the Father (Matt. 3:17; Eph. 1:6, etc.). It is in him that Christians find their identity as God’s people. Verses 12–17 contain echoes of the earlier Christological sections of the letter, applying here to those who belong to Christ what is there said of him personally.
Having taken off the shabby ‘clothes’ appropriate for the old age, the Colossians are to be fitted out with beautiful new robes, appropriate for their new position. They are not accustomed to such finery, but God’s loving and gracious choice of them makes it fitting that they should now wear it. Paul earlier (1:11) prayed that this sort of character would appear in the Colossians; he now urges them (clothe yourselves…) to make his prayer come true. They are to ‘put on’ a deep sensitivity to the needs and sorrows of others (compassion in NIV and RSV compresses into one word two words which together refer to an understanding sympathy with others that affects one’s innermost being). This heartfelt compassion is to be coupled with kindness – ‘the art of being a dear’, as Lord Hailsham once paraphrased the Latin caritas; it is strange, in view of the emphasis given by Paul to this basic virtue, how often it is regarded in practice as inessential. And if ‘kindness’ is a Christlike attitude towards others, humility is the Christlike attitude towards oneself, supremely exemplified in that readiness to forgo his own rights which led the Son of God to the incarnation and cross (Phil. 2:5–11). The last two qualities (bringing the total to five, balancing the lists of five vices in vv. 5, 8) are the positive and negative outworkings of kindness and humility: gentleness is the effect of meek humility on one’s approach to other people, whereas patience is the effect of that humble kindness on one’s reaction to other people. The first forswears rudeness or arrogance; the second, resentment and anger.
13. These virtues are at once given practical application: bear with each other – i.e. restrain your natural reaction towards odd or difficult people, let them be themselves – and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another, whether old feuds from pre-Christian days which might jeopardize the new-found fellowship, or problems and squabbles which might arise (Paul was a realist) within the new community itself. The underlying principle is clear, forgive as the Lord forgave you. Paul here makes two points, echoing (perhaps intentionally) the parable of the Unforgiving Servant in Matthew 18:23–35. First, it is utterly inappropriate for one who knows the joy and release of being forgiven to refuse to share that blessing with another. Second, it is highly presumptuous to refuse to forgive one whom Christ himself has already forgiven.
14. The final garment to be put on is love itself, which will hold the rest in place: and over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. That, at least, is one possible meaning of the Greek, though in fact the sentence is more ambiguous than NIV allows. The final clause, literally translated, is simply ‘the bond of perfection’, with the word ‘bond’ possibly carrying the metaphorical meaning of an outer garment holding the others together, or simply a brooch or clasp which does the same job. The sentence could equally well mean that love is the characteristic (there is no word in the Greek corresponding to ‘virtue’ in NIV ) which binds the whole church (as opposed to the other virtues) together. The frequent parallels in secular literature to the idea of a supreme virtue acting as the unifying principle for the others mean that NIV ’s interpretation is probably to be preferred, indicting a specifically Christian viewpoint over against other systems of ethics. ‘Love’ never has this supreme position in other systems, not even (for instance) in the admirable list of virtues found in the Qumran Community Rule.61 The other virtues, pursued without love, become distorted and unbalanced.
15. When love has its full effect in the community it will result in peace: Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. The second clause (which RSV renders, more literally, ‘to which indeed you were called in the one body’) indicates that ‘peace’ here is not the inward, individual peace of mind which accompanies humble, confident trust in God’s love, but a peace which characterizes the community, the ‘body’, as a whole. ‘One body’ here is a simple metaphor, the church being understood as a single living organism whose ‘members’ (the word is supplied by NIV to fill out the sense) must act in harmony; but it is hard to imagine that Paul is not alluding to the idea of the church as Christ’s body, as (e.g.) in 1:18; 2:19.
The peace which is to characterize the church is not to be a mere outward absence of hostility. It is to be ‘the peace of Christ’, which must become the deciding factor (the Greek word for ‘rule’ probably has the overtone of someone acting as umpire or arbitrator) ‘in your hearts’: whatever disagreements or mutual suspicions occur in the church, they are to be dealt with at the deepest level, by all parties allowing the fact of their unity in Christ to settle the issue in their hearts. The pax Christiana is to prevail in the church, as the pax Romana did in the world of Paul’s day, allowing its inhabitants to pursue their respective callings without the constant threat of war. This vision of the church’s life prompts Paul to add once more and be thankful (see above, on 1:3, 12, etc.). Love, peace and gratitude reinforce each other, and set the context within which the exhortations of the next verses may be obeyed.
16. The tasks Paul described as his own in 1:28 are not his alone: they are for the whole church, as you teach and admonish one another, in the mutual forgiveness and trust of verses 12–15. This activity is further described in two ways. First, it is to be achieved by letting the word of Christ dwell in you richly. The first phrase could refer to the teaching about Jesus Christ, stories such as we now have in the Gospels; and certainly there is something attractively wholesome in Williams’ comment, ‘be at home in the Gospel story, and let it be at home in you, so that it may be always ready for use’.62 But it more likely refers to the gospel message announcing what God has done in and through Christ, which was set out in 1:15–20 and applied to the Colossian situation in 2:6ff.; or, just possibly, to the word which Christ speaks in the present by his Spirit. None of these possibilities, of course, should be played off against another: the gospel message and the word given in the present are both recognized as authentic by their conformity with the man Jesus himself. This word is to dwell in them ‘richly’: the church is to be stocked with good teaching as a palace is filled with treasures. The teaching is to be with all wisdom: the ‘word’ concerns Christ, Wisdom himself (2:3, etc.), and will be characterized by wisdom in the teachers.
This ministry of teaching and admonishing is to be part of a life of thankfulness that overflows into song: as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. Linking the two parts of the verse in this way suggests that the singing is not the sole or primary means of teaching, though Christian hymns and songs have often been a powerful means of implanting and clarifying Christian truth. Rather, the ministry of instruction should always be seen as one part of a total life characterized by grateful worship. ‘To God’ could go with ‘singing’ instead of ‘gratitude’. But NIV and RSV probably express Paul’s meaning. ‘In your hearts’ gives the location, not of the singing (though it should of course be heartfelt), but of the gratitude.
The three different categories of song in this verse are not easy to distinguish. Older writers suggested that ‘psalms’ were probably accompanied, and that ‘songs’, being a more general word than ‘hymns’, is qualified with the adjective ‘spiritual’ to distinguish it from secular singing. ‘Psalms’ may actually refer to the Christian use of the Old Testament psalter, but should not be restricted to that; the early church was prolific in its adaptation of Old Testament themes to Christian use (see e.g. Rev. 5:9–10; 15:3–4, etc.), and in its composition of new material (see, perhaps, Phil. 2:6–11; Col. 1:15–20; 1 Tim. 3:16). Together these three terms indicate a variety and richness of Christian singing which should neither be stereotyped into one mould nor restricted simply to weekly public worship.
17. Paul now closes the circle which began at 2:6. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus. Acting ‘in someone’s name’ means both representing him and being empowered to do so. Paul’s exhortation is therefore a salutary check on behaviour (‘can I really do this, if I am representing the Lord Jesus?’) and an encouragement to persevere with difficult tasks undertaken for him, knowing that necessary strength will be provided. And again Paul adds the characteristic emphasis: giving thanks to God the Father through him. The centre of Christian living is grateful worship, which is to affect ‘whatever we do’: since ‘all things’ have been created through Christ and also, in principle, redeemed through him, Christians can do all that they do, whether it be manual work, political activity, raising a family, writing a book, playing tennis, or whatever, in his name and with gratitude. Jesus, the true divine and human image of God, the one whose cross secured our reconciliation, is the reason for our gratitude, and the one ‘through whom’ we can now offer that gratitude to the Father himself.
Putting the life of the new age into practice begins at home. If a sense of anti-climax is felt on moving from the sublime picture of the worshipping church in 3:15–17 to the almost mundane instructions of 3:18 – 4:1, that is perhaps a sign that we have not fully integrated belief and practice. It is clear from the numerous parallels to this section in other early Christian literature63 that the early church took seriously the necessity of living Christianly in the place where, for better or for worse, one is truly oneself. And these terse sentences focus on just that: how to be truly oneself, in the Lord, as a member of the new humanity – and how to set the other members of one’s family free to be truly themselves. ‘If the home is to be a means of grace it must be a place of rules… the alternative to rule is not freedom but the unconstitutional (and often unconscious) tyranny of the most selfish member.’64 As in improvised music, spontaneity and freedom do not mean playing out of tune.
But should Paul’s tunes, so to speak, be our tunes? We meet here, not for the first time, the question of the applicability of what he says to twentieth-century life. This question sometimes surfaces in another guise, namely, how specifically Christian are these instructions?
It is true that pagans and Jews at this period compiled household rules which are in some respects parallel to what we find here.65 But this does not mean that Paul is simply telling his converts to conform to prevailing contemporary standards. Christian ethics and secular standards are, of course, not altogether different: since all people are created in God’s image, with an innate sense of God’s standards (see Rom. 1:32; 2:1–16), the rule of life which will restore that image to its proper glory (3:10) need not scrap all non-Christian values and begin over again, but will be able to build on, and bring to full maturity, what is best in the world outside the church. In addition, it is clear from (e.g.) Romans 12:9 and 13:1–7 that Paul expected Christians to recognize the ordinary standards of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, to avoid giving needless offence to non-Christian society. But the differences between Paul and his pagan contemporaries are as clear as the parallels. Paul has thoroughly Christianized the code, not just by adding ‘in the Lord’ at certain points, but by balancing carefully the duties and responsibilities of the various family members so that the stronger parties have duties as well as rights, and those who are in a position of submission are treated as responsible human beings, with rights as well as duties. He thus sharpens up, in one area of practical life, the standards set out in 3:5–14.
It is, in fact, extremely unlikely that Paul, having warned the young Christians against conforming their lives to the present world, would now require just that of them after all. Nor does he. The Stoics (who provide some of the closest pagan parallels to these household lists) based their teaching on the law of nature: this is the way the world is, so this is how you must live in harmony with it. Paul bases his on the law of the new nature: Christ releases you to be truly human, and you must now learn to express your true self according to the divine pattern, not in self-assertion but in self-giving.
The problem, of course, is that Paul is often suspected of saying something else: of entrenching, in particular, the dominance of husbands over wives. It is perhaps verse 18 which has caused many writers to argue that what Paul writes here is relative, not absolute, and that the proper application of the passage is that we in our turn must think out quite different ways of expressing Christian love in the modern world. But it would be a bold person who would argue, in the face of modern society, that the contemporary non-Christian world offers a better model for marriage and family life than that provided by the ancient world, still less than that suggested by Paul. The solution is to be found, rather, in seeing just what it is that Paul does, and does not, say.
18–19. He offers a careful balance. Neither party is to be arrogant or domineering: Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. The ‘submission’ here is not that of the slave, or the doormat. The equality of women and men before the Lord, of which Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28, has not been retracted: but neither does it mean identity of role or function. The wife must forgo the temptation to rule her husband’s life, using perhaps one of the many varieties of domestic blackmail; the husband must ensure that his love for his wife, like Christ’s for his people, always puts her interests first (see the fuller statement in Eph. 5:21–33). In particular, he must scrupulously avoid the temptation to resent her being the person she is, to become bitter or angry when she turns out to be, like him, a real human being, and not merely the projection of his own hopes or fantasies. It is when husbands and wives understand these guidelines and live by them that they are truly free: free to mature and develop, within the creative context of mutual love and respect.
20–21. In addressing children as members of the church in their own right, and in giving them both responsibilities and rights, Paul is again allowing the gospel to break new ground. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged. In a couple of crisp sentences Paul has said, in essence, what thousands of books on the upbringing of children have struggled to express. Sometimes verse 20 has been over-emphasized, and verse 21 forgotten, in the zeal of parents not to spare the rod lest they spoil the child. Sometimes verse 21 has been over-stressed, and the rights of the individual child allowed to range free, trampling the rights of family, friends, neighbours and anyone else in the way, for fear lest young life be crushed or twisted. Both sides are clearly necessary. Children need discipline; so do parents. The word ‘fathers’ can refer to parents of both sexes, though it may well have an eye to the importance of the father’s role, within God’s created order, in the upbringing of children.
‘Embitter’ is literally ‘arouse’, usually in the bad sense of ‘provoke’. Paul refers to the constant nagging or belittling of a child (a sure sign of insecurity (see 3:8), this time on the part of the parent), the refusal to allow children to be people in their own right instead of carbon copies of their parents or their parents’ fantasies. Children treated like this became ‘discouraged’ or ‘dispirited’: hearing continually, both verbally and non-verbally, that they are of little value, they come to believe it, and either sink down in obedient self-hatred or over-react with boastful but anxious self-assertion. The parents’ duty is, in effect, to live out the gospel to the child: that is, to assure their children that they are loved and accepted and valued for who they are, not for who they ought to be, should have been, or might (if only they would try a little harder) become. Obedience must never be made the condition of parental ‘love’; a ‘love’ so conditioned would not deserve the name. When the parent is obedient to the vocation of genuine love, the child’s obedience may become, like that of the Christian to God, a glad and loving response. Such obedience is ‘pleasing to the Lord’ (as the Greek expresses it), not merely because he desires order but because he wants all his people to follow the often paradoxical, self-denying, Christlike road to true and mature selfhood.
22. Paul has made it clear that the duties of members of families are ‘in the Lord’: and, in the extended section addressed to slaves (vv. 22–25: it is sometimes suggested that this section has something to do with Onesimus’ being sent with the letter, but it is hard to see why), he makes this point in no fewer than five different ways.
First, they are told to obey your earthly masters in everything: they are to be thoroughgoing in their obedience; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favour, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord (many MSS read ‘God’, perhaps to avoid confusion between the Lord (Jesus) and the ‘lord’, i.e. master, of the slave: the same word, kyrios, could indicate either). Here the point, equally applicable at all levels of human labour, is that the Christian at work must be a whole person, totally given to the task in hand, not merely doing the minimum required to avoid rebuke, with a show of effort when one is being observed. That attitude shows no reverence for the Lord who has called all his people to full, single-hearted human living. Even if they are treated like animals or worse, slaves are still to regard themselves as fully human beings.
23–24. Second, whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men. The task may appear unimportant or trivial, but the person doing it is never that, and he or she has the opportunity to turn the job into an act of worship. This attitude cannot be motivated by earthly reward, and so cannot be distracted if such prospects seem remote: since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. One should properly read ‘the inheritance’; the reference is clearly to the life of the age to come. This is ironic, since in earthly terms slaves could not inherit property. Here, then, is the third point: the ‘master’ in heaven will reward you. The fourth one is perhaps not to be taken (with NIV ) as a statement (It is the Lord Christ that you are serving) but, as is equally possible in the Greek, as a command: ‘Serve the Lord Christ!’ The force of this unusual phrase (Paul nowhere else allows the titles ‘Lord’ and ‘Christ’ to stand together without the name ‘Jesus’ as well) could be brought out by a paraphrase: ‘so work for the true Master – Christ!’
25. The final reason for the slave’s obedience functions, in the parallel in Ephesians 6:5–9, as a warning to masters. The point, however, is equally relevant in its context here. If one is serving Christ, one need not fear, as with earthly masters, that those who cover up shoddy work by putting on a good show in the boss’s presence will get away with it, or that the master’s own favourites will be rewarded however hard others may work. No: anyone who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there is no favouritism. This last idea, repeated by Paul in other contexts (e.g. Rom. 2:11), is a commonplace of Jewish and Christian views of God’s justice. The slave has thus both encouragement and warning: he need not imagine that being a Christian will excuse poor or half-hearted work.
4:1. The balance between the pairs of exhortations is again striking, in keeping with a letter emphasizing the dignity of all human beings. Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven. Paul does not protest against the institution of slavery. That would be about as useful, for him, as a modern preacher fulminating against the internal combustion engine. His approach is subtler. He has found a fixed point on which to stand, from which to move the world: slaves too are human beings with rights. To talk of ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ (properly the word means ‘equality’) in relation to slaves would sound extraordinary to most slave-owners of the ancient world. Masters, however, are themselves slaves of the one Master.
In whatever role, then, a Christian finds himself or herself, at home or at work, life can and must be lived ‘for the Lord’, and in harmony with one’s fellow human beings. The rules which facilitate this state create true freedom.66 The section therefore provides the necessary grounding for the wide-ranging instructions of 3:1–17.
This short section has two important functions within the letter as a whole. First, the life of the new humanity ‘in the Lord’ is not something merely to be enjoyed for its own sake. The Colossian church has new responsibilities as well as privileges. Secondly, and in consequence, Paul is drawing the letter towards its appropriate close; having begun with thanksgiving for God’s world-wide work through the gospel (1:3–8), his thoughts turn again to that work and his part in it. But he does not thereby turn away from the Colossians. He claims them as partners, setting before them in general terms the tasks appropriate to them as a new community, in Christ and in Colosse (1:2). This section thus echoes 1:24–2:5, suggesting that Paul intended the latter as a bridge between his introduction of himself and the letter’s main central section.
2. As one would expect from 1:3ff., these instructions focus on fundamentals: Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. It is possible that ‘watchful’ refers obliquely to the church’s ‘watching’ for the Lord’s return; more likely that, as in Matthew 26:41, it means ‘stay awake’, ‘keep alert’. The connection here with thanksgiving (see on 1:3–8, 12b, etc.) may suggest the threefold rhythm: intercession, ‘watching’ for answers to prayer, and thanksgiving when answers appear. As children of the day (see 1 Thess. 5:4–11), Christians are to keep awake, looking out on the sleeping world which, as the object of God’s love, is also to be the object of his people’s ‘devoted’, i.e. regular, steady and thorough prayer.
3. These prayers will include specific intercessions, such as the reciprocation of Paul’s prayer (1:9ff.) for them: and pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message. The ‘door’ could be that which admits Gentiles to the people of God, or possibly the prison door that will open to let Paul and his message out into the world; it is more likely, however, that Paul refers to the ‘door’ that allows the word of God (the phrase literally means ‘a door for the word’) into the hearts, minds and lives of individuals and communities (cf. Acts 14:27; 1 Cor. 16:9; 2 Cor. 2:12). The ‘word’ is here personified, like the gospel (more fully, ‘the word of the truth of the gospel’) in 1:5–6. Here, as there, God is at work through the apostolic preaching, and this work of God must be supported and reinforced by the appropriate weapons, the intercessions of his people. The content of this ‘word’, in keeping with earlier references in the letter (1:26–27; 2:2), is further defined when Paul says so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ. This phrase is to be understood in the light of earlier passages in the letter; it is the secret plan of God for the salvation of the whole world as this has now been made known in and through Jesus Christ. It is the mystery which consists in Christ – not merely in him as an individual, but in the wide implications of who he is and what he has achieved. A message, however, which challenges the power structures of the present age is always dangerous to proclaim: hence for which I am in chains. Paul’s sufferings and present imprisonment were therefore, as he indicated in 1:24, part and parcel of his apostolic vocation, which itself was bound up with the mystery of Christ, and of the ushering in of the new age.
4. The NIV has not quite brought out the full force of the next sentence: pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should. The verb translated ‘proclaim it clearly’ literally means ‘reveal’ or ‘make manifest’, and belongs closely with ‘mystery’. Paul must not simply explain everything with clarity. He must announce, and so ‘reveal’, the mystery of Christ. He is under obligation to do so in such a way as to bring true knowledge and understanding to his hearers (see on 1:24–2:5).
5. The Colossians are to ensure that their lives and speech reflect that same mystery, the hidden wisdom of God. Be wise in the way you act is literally ‘walk in wisdom’, that is, follow Christ as God’s pattern for full and authentic human living. Their lives are to reflect this wisdom towards outsiders.67 Paul knew only too well (1 Cor. 10:32) the importance of giving the world no reason to criticize or gossip about the behaviour of Christians. Blameless life lays the foundation for gracious witness, as Christians make the most of every opportunity. The verb literally means ‘buying up’ or ‘buying out’: it does not necessarily have the sense (as Eph. 5:16 appears to do) that the time is somehow evil and must be redeemed, but simply that every opportunity is to be snapped up (see O’Brien) like a bargain. The word ‘opportunity’ may have simply the sense of ‘time’: the clause is probably an instruction to regard time as opportunity for witness, and to use it eagerly as such.
6. This eagerness for witness must not be the excuse for brash arrogance or boring complacency (imagining one’s own formulae to contain all the answers). On the contrary: let your conversation be always full of grace (the word ‘grace’ has, in Greek as in English, the possible double meaning of God’s grace and human graciousness), seasoned with salt. The metaphor of ‘salty’ speech was a common one in the ancient world. Paul knows that a tedious monologue is worse than useless in evangelism. Christians are to work at making their witness interesting, lively and colourful; and, at the same time, to ensure that they have thoroughly mastered the rudiments of their faith so that you may know how to answer everyone. ‘Answer’ implies that outsiders will ask Christians about their new life, as indeed they will if verse 5 is being obeyed. Many such questions are predictable; but each questioner is an individual and must be respected and loved as such. If the ‘answer’ is heard or felt as an oracular pronouncement or a rebuke for ignorance, the argument may be won but the person lost. Paul’s thought has come full circle. Beginning with a report of his thankful prayer for the Colossians (1:3ff.), and of his work for the gospel (1:24 – 2:5), he has ended with the request that they should pray as he prays, and work as he works. Their prayer and life, like his, are to be expressions of the loving wisdom of God, reaching out in Christ to save the world.
Paul concludes with greetings not merely from himself and to the church in general, but from his companions and to various specific people in the church he is addressing. Such closing greetings often tempt scholars to try their hand at reconstructing the jigsaw of historical circumstances, people and movements, that surround the writing of the letters. Many such solutions are fanciful (most of the jigsaw being lost), but some possibilities are at least worth entertaining. It is partly because of this section that one may argue that Paul is writing from prison in Ephesus (see above, pp. 37ff.). More importantly, the greetings remind us that we are dealing not with an abstract theological treatise but with a real letter to real people.
The section divides into four short subsections. Paul begins by introducing the bearers of the letter, Tychicus and Onesimus, the former a senior associate of Paul’s, the latter perhaps embarrassed to return as a Christian to the town he had fled as a pagan (4:7–9; see Phlm. 10). He then conveys greetings from the colleagues who are with him (4:10–14). Third, he sends greetings to Christians in the Colosse area (4:15–17), and finally (4:18) he takes the pen from the secretary and signs his name in a characteristic closing greeting.
7–8. Tychicus is acting as Paul’s courier on this occasion, but he will do more than merely deposit the letter at Colosse: he will tell you all the news about me. What is happening to Paul (see 1:24 – 2:5) is a matter of personal interest and theological concern to the young church. They need to know how it goes with the one who is bearing the torch of the saving purposes of God, partly in order to pray for him (see 4:3, 8) and partly because their life in Christ is bound up mysteriously with him and his work. Tychicus (mentioned in Acts 20:4 as a native of Asia, accompanying Paul on his journey to Jerusalem, and again in 2 Tim. 4.12; Titus 3:12) is a good choice for a messenger, because he is a dear brother, a faithful minister and fellow-servant in the Lord. These three nouns highlight different features of Tychicus’ work, not related specifically to any particular ‘office’ he may have held. ‘Brother’ means ‘fellow-Christian’ (as in 1:2); ‘minister’ (not a semitechnical term as today) refers simply to the fact that Christ works in the church through servants like Tychicus; ‘fellow-servant’ indicates that, like Paul, Tychicus belongs not to himself but to the Lord. This commendation of Tychicus, his ‘note of recommendation’ (see 2 Cor. 3:1), conforms to standard practice in the ancient world, and was perhaps particularly necessary when Tychicus was being accompanied by one of whom the Colossian church might be suspicious (4:9). He is ‘faithful’ (see 1:7), i.e. reliable and trustworthy. Paul strongly desires that, through Tychicus, a personal link may be forged between himself and the young church: I am sending him to you for the express purpose that you may know about our circumstances1 and that he may encourage your hearts. These two purposes are not to be separated. As the church hears of Paul’s work and concern on their behalf, they will gain fresh strength and confidence. We might compare Philippians 1:12ff. The phrase ‘I am sending’ is, literally, ‘I have sent’: Paul projects himself forward in time, and writes as if he is speaking, through the letter, to the Colossian church as they hear his words being read.
9. Onesimus, too, has an apostolic commendation. We can reconstruct some of his story from the letter addressed to his master Philemon, which (as we may deduce from this verse) was almost certainly sent at the same time. Tychicus is coming with Onesimus, perhaps partly in order to give him moral support and to be there in case further explanations are necessary to convince the Colossians that he too can be styled our faithful and dear brother. The church already knows that he is one of you, and needs to be assured that he is now this in a deeper sense, not merely a Colossian but also a Christian. Onesimus and Tychicus together will tell you everything that is happening here, conveying information not only, perhaps, about Paul, but also about the whole situation of the church in Ephesus (or wherever) and any other local news that might be of interest and importance for the church, perhaps including the possibility of persecution.
10–11. Paul now conveys greetings from six colleagues. Of these only Aristarchus, a Macedonian from Thessalonica, who in Acts 19:29 is with Paul in Ephesus, and in Acts 20:4 and 27:2 is one of Paul’s travelling companions, is described as my fellow-prisoner. It may be that the term is metaphorical, Aristarchus being, like Paul, Christ’s ‘prisoner’, but the literal meaning (‘fellow-prisoner-of-war’) suggests that he, too, is literally imprisoned as Christ’s soldier. He sends you his greetings, as does Mark, the cousin of Barnabas. Whether or not Mark was the author of the Gospel that bears his name, for which there is no direct evidence in the New Testament itself, we know him as an early member of the Jerusalem church and a relative of some of its more important leaders (Acts 12:12). After his somewhat chequered early career as a missionary (Acts 12:25; 13:13; 15:37–39; cf. 2 Tim. 4:11; Phlm. 24; 1 Pet. 5:13), Mark is clearly being rehabilitated both as a worker for the gospel and as a companion of Paul. It may be that the following parenthetical command indicates that he had been under a cloud: you have received instructions about him; if he comes to you, welcome him. Barnabas was of course better known in the early church than Mark (see 1 Cor. 9:6; Gal. 2:1, 9, 13 and Acts 4:36; 9:27; 11:22, 30; 13–14 passim), and this verse suggests that the rift between him and Paul (Acts 15:36–41, which may or may not be related to that described in Gal. 2:13) was at least in the process of being healed. The mention of Mark’s possible visit, especially when coupled with Philemon 22, is an indication that the letter is being written from a location not too far distant from Colosse.
The third greeting comes from Jesus, who is called Justus, the only one in the present list of names not to re-appear in Philemon.2 Together these three, Aristarchus, Mark and Jesus (whose extra name, like those of other early Christians who shared the common Jewish name given to the Lord, serves to distinguish him from his Master), are the only Jews among my fellow-workers for the kingdom of God. NIV here follows most commentators, and the passage, read this way, provides the primary evidence for, among other things, the belief that Luke, who is not mentioned until verse 14, was a Gentile. But in the Greek the sentence is not quite so clear. Literally the words mean ‘who, being of the circumcision, these ones only (are) fellow-workers for the kingdom of God’. It has been argued that this places the three just named in ‘the circumcision party’ of Acts 10:45; 11:2; Galatians 2:12. This would (a) allow Luke to be a (Hellenistic?) Jew and (b) indicate a measure of ‘ecumenical’ co-operation between Paul and those he elsewhere appears to oppose.3 But in the light of Galatians, and of 2:8–23 of our present letter, it seems difficult to take the phrase ‘those… of the circumcision’ to indicate a party within the church without at the same time expressing Paul’s disapproval of it. Perhaps a compromise is possible: Paul may be referring not to a party but to people of a particular background: having belonged to a branch of Christianity more concerned than Paul with observing the Jewish law, they were by now happy to proclaim God’s sovereign rule alongside Paul with his different emphases, and as such they have proved a comfort to me, showing that not all those who were on the opposing ‘side’ in Galatians 2:11ff. were inflexibly opposed to him. But the point should not be over-stressed; NIV may well be right. It is, incidentally, only in this passage that we learn that Aristarchus (see above) is Jewish.
12–13. It was Epaphras who originally preached the gospel in Colosse, and brought the news to Paul that there was now a church there (1:7–8). He, like Onesimus, is one of you, i.e. he is himself from Colosse, and had presumably become a servant of Christ Jesus in Ephesus under Paul’s ministry. He too now sends greetings. He does more: he is always, like Paul himself (1:29 – 2:3), wrestling in prayer for you, that you may stand firm, mature and fully assured in all the will of God. NIV has altered the order of the words, making ‘mature and fully assured’ come at the end of the sentence; in the Greek, however, it precedes, and is closely connected with, the phrase ‘in all the will of God’. God’s ‘will’ is not restricted to the question ‘what does God want the Colossian Christians to do?’, but is a larger entity, as we see from 1:24 – 2:5 and especially Ephesians 1:5–12. It refers to God’s whole strategy for the salvation of the world. Epaphras is praying (like Paul) that the young church will understand what it is that God is doing and order their lives accordingly, growing into well-grounded Christian (and human) maturity. As is clear from 1:3–12 and 2:1–3, Paul regards prayer as more than just a pious ancillary activity to preaching and teaching: it is part of the work itself. I vouch for him that he is working hard for you and for those at Laodicea, a few miles down the road, and Hierapolis, a little to the north of Laodicea. Though not physically present there, Epaphras has a vision for God’s work in the Lycus valley, and is working hard to bring it to reality.
14. The last two greetings are from our dear friend Luke, the doctor, and Demas. It is only in this passage that we learn of Luke’s profession, and only by inference, and later tradition, that we know him as the author of the great two-volume work which comprises the Gospel named after him and the Acts of the Apostles.4 It is, none the less, noteworthy that Paul has as companions two of those to whom tradition, and a reasonable cross-section of scholarship, have ascribed the writing of Gospels. Luke is also listed among the greetings in Philemon 24. In 2 Timothy 4:11 he is Paul’s only companion, Demas having departed (2 Tim. 4:10) ‘because he loved this world’ – a sad but cryptic allusion to a desertion about which we have no other information.