Letters today have the sender’s name at the end. In Paul’s day, it came at the beginning, and was followed by a greeting to the recipients. The form is ‘Paul; to the church in Colosse; greeting’. But the apostle has, as usual, expanded traditional style to set, right away, the scene and tone for what he wishes to say.
1. Paul does not come before the Colossians simply as a private individual, but as an apostle of Christ Jesus. Unlike most of the other apostles, he had not been a follower of Jesus during his earthly ministry; but he had been appointed, through his own vision of the risen Lord, to an office which, like theirs, gave him a special authority not only in churches he had founded himself but even in those which, like that in Colosse, he had not. It is this God-given authority which undergirds the continuing use of his writings as authoritative Scripture in the church. The supporting claim, that this apostleship came about by (literally ‘through’) the will of God, is not merely an indication of the ultimate source of this authority, but a linking of Paul’s task to the over-arching divine plan of salvation which, prepared in the Old Testament and brought to a climax in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, was now being put into effect through the world-wide mission in which Paul had been allotted a key initiating role (see below, on 1:23).
Timothy our brother is included in the greeting, here and in the opening verses of 2 Corinthians, Philippians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians and Philemon. Among the most prominent of Paul’s partners, travelling companions and assistants, Timothy shared a close bond of affection and mutual understanding with Paul, which is of course reflected in the two letters addressed to him personally, as well as in, e.g., 1 Corinthians 16:10–11; Philippians 2:19–23.
2. The letter is addressed to the holy and faithful brothers in Christ at Colosse; not that Paul is differentiating between them and other Christians who were not ‘holy and faithful’ (‘brother’ is a frequent New Testament term for ‘fellow-Christian’, reflecting the fact that the church understood itself from the start as a family), but he looks at the church, with all its imperfections, from God’s point of view (compare 1 Cor. 1:4–9, in the light of the rest of that letter). ‘Holy’ could be an adjective, as in NIV; it could be a noun (‘saints’), as in RSV (‘the saints and faithful brethren’); but even if this were so it would be quite wrong to see two different groups here. The ‘and’ would be, as often, explanatory (‘the saints, i.e. the faithful brethren’). Paul often refers to Christians as ‘saints’, indicating thereby not an advanced level of holiness but the fact of being, through faith and baptism (see below, on 2:12), set apart from the world for God. The terms belong to the church as a whole, seen as the true people of God, the ‘real Israel’.1 The word ‘faithful’ is probably not to be taken in the sense of ‘having Christian faith’ – one could have deduced that from the fact that Paul calls them ‘brothers’ – but in the sense of ‘firmly committed’, ‘steadfast’. The two phrases ‘in Christ’ and ‘in Colosse’ (‘at’ in NIV translates the Greek en, ‘in’) are nicely balanced in the Greek, standing on either side of the central phrase ‘holy and faithful brothers’. This encourages us to take ‘in Christ’ in a locative sense,
i.e. neither merely as a synonym for ‘Christian’ nor in a sense of ‘mystical absorption’, but as referring to the Messiah, the anointed King, in whom the true people of God find their identity. To be described as ‘in Christ’ and ‘in Colosse’ is to be located with precision in the purposes of God, as a member both of his true people and of that particular earthly community where one is called to service and witness.
Paul is writing to the Colossians with one great desire – that they should grow into full Christian maturity. It is in that light that his greeting is to be understood: grace and peace to you from God our Father2 (this is an adaptation of conventional greetings formulae). ‘Grace’ sees Christian life and growth as the free gift of God; ‘peace’, with the overtones of the Hebrew word ˇsa-lôm, encompasses not merely personal ‘peace’ of mind and heart, but all the wider blessings of belonging to God’s covenant family. The scene is set for a letter through which Paul intends, by his writing, to be a means of that grace, and so to bring about that rich and mature peace (see e.g. 3:15).
This long introduction is often split up into almost unrelated parts (with 1:15–20 in particular being disassociated from the rest). But it is in fact a complex whole, at the end of which Paul is ready to move in to the heart of the letter. In it all, Paul is really introducing himself, so that the young church will understand that his writing to them at this time is simply one outflowing of his total God-given ministry. He says, in effect, ‘this is how I am thanking God for you’ (1:3–8), ‘this is how I am praying for you’ (1:9–23) and ‘this is what I am doing for you’ (1:24 – 2:5). In introducing himself like this he lays foundations for the main thrust of the letter, the maturity in Christ into which he hopes the Colossians will grow. Theologically, these foundations look like this: he tells the church that he thanks God for founding it (1:3–8), that he wants them to thank God for his great plan of salvation (1:9–20) and to appreciate where they fit into it (1:21–23) as well as the role of his own ministry within it (1:24 – 2:5). The ‘therefore’ of 2:6 shows that he is at that point ready to build on this carefully-laid foundation, bringing together God’s gospel, the Colossian situation and his own vocation.
The exhortation of 2:6 (‘just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him’) is therefore much more than the rather obvious piece of advice which, taken out of context, it might appear to be. We will know, in fact, that we have understood 1:3 – 2:5 correctly when we discover that it has prepared us to give 2:6 its full value. When Paul there mentions ‘Christ’, the word is no mere empty cipher: it is the Christ of 1:15–20, in whom is true maturity (1:28), who is himself ‘the mystery of God’ (2:2), God’s eternal secret plan for creating and redeeming the world. This large view of Christ must be kept in mind throughout.
Paul is able to address the Colossians as ‘brothers in Christ’, and to hope with confidence for God’s grace and peace to be given to them, because he knows that God has already been at work amongst them. His characteristic way of mentioning this is not simply to remark that he has heard of their conversion, but to tell them that he thanks God for it. His extended introductory thanksgivings and intercessions – or rather, introductory descriptions of thanksgivings and intercessions – are thus an important feature of many of his letters (this is particularly true of Colossians, where thanksgiving forms an important theme: see 1:12ff.; 2:7; 3:15, 16, 17; 4:2). They are not ‘asides’, devotional musings detached from the main emphasis of the letter. They form, quite deliberately, the logical basis for what is to come. They illustrate, in addition, the principle they state. What is worked for must first be prayed for. The source of all peace is grace.
The detailed structure of the thanksgiving in verses 3–8 highlights the same point in a more precise way. After the initial statement that he is in constant prayer for them (v. 3), which is reiterated in v. 9 when Paul tells them the content of these intercessions, he outlines what it is that he thanks God for when he remembers them (vv. 4–5) and how it is that these things have come about (vv. 6–8). The paragraph gives us a valuable insight into Paul’s understanding of how God’s grace operates. The gospel, seen almost as a personified force, is at work in the world through those commissioned to proclaim it; where its truth is recognized and its command obeyed, it bears fruit. In a world where many varied ‘religious experiences’ were on offer, Paul gives the Colossians the theological framework of understanding within which they will be able to make sense of what God has been doing in their lives. Without this framework, experience remains ambiguous and even potentially misleading.
3. Though NIV and RSV both take always with we thank God, it goes more naturally in the Greek with when we pray for you: Paul is continually praying about the church in Colosse, and whenever he does so he thanks God. It is likely that the word ‘always’ indicates regularity, not that such prayers occupied all Paul’s waking hours; he does not pray haphazardly or only when the mood takes him, but keeps regular hours of prayer (probably morning, noon and evening), and the church in Colosse is always mentioned. In this discipline of thanksgiving and intercession he was simply continuing a practice ingrained since his childhood – though of course (he would say) filling that practice with new content.
By praying to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, he is indicating that subtle but far-reaching development in his belief about God which took place when, on the road to Damascus, he was confronted with the fact that the God he had worshipped all his life had vindicated as Christ (i.e. Messiah) the Jesus whom he, Paul, had regarded as an impostor. Though Judaism knew God as Father, the precise nature of his paternal love could not be conceived until it had been revealed in the cross of the Messiah. Nor could that cross be understood, conversely, until it became clear that it was the climax of the saving plan of the God of Israel, and that therefore this God had now exalted the crucified one and given him the title ‘Lord’ (Greek kyrios). The familiar composite title for Jesus (‘our Lord … Christ’) is not, then, merely a heaping up of honorific phrases, but a very precise statement of who Jesus is from God’s, and the church’s, point of view. For Paul this meant nothing less than a new vision of God himself, which naturally began, as here, to be reflected in the nature and content of his prayers.1
4. As in various other passages (1 Cor. 13:13; 1 Thess. 1:3; 5:8), Paul draws together the three virtues of faith, hope and love. These are the things in the Colossian church for which he thanks God, both because they are fine and lovely in themselves and because they are signs of that new life which is springing up in Colosse: signs of peace and hence evidences of grace. But, unlike 1 Corinthians 13:13 (but like the two references in 1 Thessalonians), the order is ‘faith – love – hope’. The phrase is not a mere formula, thrown in for effect, but a genuine statement in which each word counts. Each quality has its part to play in the development of the letter’s thought (for faith, see 1:23; 2:7; for love, 1:8, 13; 2:2; 3:14; for hope, 1:23, 27).
Each is now further described. Faith is not just (as often today) any religious belief. It is defined as faith in Christ Jesus. This phrase (which could have the connotation of the sphere in which faith operates rather than, as an English reader tends to assume, the object of faith) is one of Paul’s regular shorthand ways of describing characteristically Christian faith.2
Faith, for Paul, includes not only personal trust and commitment, but also the belief that certain things are true (see e.g. Rom. 10:9). These are brought together in, for instance, Romans 4:24 (belief in the God who raised Jesus). The present context emphasizes the truth of the gospel as something to be heard and acknowledged with the mind (vv. 5–6), and so stresses if anything the ‘belief’ side, though by no means at the expense of ‘commitment’. ‘Belief’, if genuine, is more than just mental assent to truths.
For Paul, the sure sign of grace at work was the fact of a loving community created out of nothing: of a love not restricted to those with whom one has a natural affinity, but which extends to all the saints. It is this – perhaps after all in keeping with 1 Corinthians 13 – which Paul singles out in verse 8 as the main element in the news brought to him by Epaphras.
5. Hope here apparently refers not so much to the state or activity of hoping as to the thing hoped for. It is the hope that is stored up for you in heaven (cf. 1 Pet. 1:4, and especially 2 Tim. 4:8 ). But how is the ‘hope’ connected to the previous verse? RSV (‘because of the hope’) preserves the ambiguity of the original, while NIV has attempted to clarify it by paraphrasing: ‘the faith and love that spring from the hope …’ If this is correct – as grammatically it may be – it is an interesting and unusual idea. Paul normally sees faith and love, and hope, as together springing from the gospel, the facts about Jesus Christ. But the further references in 1:23, 27 may indeed suggest that Christian hope had formed a central part of Epaphras’ initial preaching in Colosse. This element in Christianity would be quite new, and very attractive, for a pagan of the first century. So NIV may well have caught Paul’s underlying meaning. The solid facts about the future hope of Christians are a powerful motivation for constant faith and costly love in the present. Paul does not say here what precisely it is that Christians hope for: it is not completely clear whether he envisages a heavenly realm already in existence waiting to be enjoyed by believers, or whether he simply refers to God’s intention, and promise, concerning the bliss which he will give to his people. Galatians 4:26, however, encourages us towards the former view.
Paul uses the mention of hope as a bridge from the description of Christian existence in verses 4–5a to the description – still within the overall thanksgiving – of how this new life came about. The ‘hope’ is that which you have already3 heard about in the word of truth, the gospel. ‘The gospel’, for Paul, is an announcement, a proclamation, whose importance lies in the truth of its content. It is not, primarily, either an invitation or a technique for changing people’s lives. It is a command to be obeyed4 and a power let loose in the world (cf. Rom. 1:16–17), which cannot be reduced to terms of the persuasiveness or even the conviction of the messenger. It works of itself to overthrow falsehood. It is, of course, quite likely that Paul has in mind a contrast with the false claims he opposes in chapter 2.
6. As Paul looks at the young church, what he sees is what God is doing: for, in personifying ‘the gospel’, he is really using a paraphrase to refer to the divine action through the gospel (and, of course, through its proclaimers, as in v. 7). The gospel has come to you: God has reached out to them, has visited them with his saving power, as indeed all over the world this gospel is producing fruit and growing. Paul does not, of course, mean that every square mile of the inhabited earth has been evangelized (see below, on 1:23). From his perspective as a converted Pharisee the important point was that the salvation promised in the Old Testament had now been unleashed upon the world irrespective of geographical or racial barriers. His own missionary activity was an embodiment of this truth, as Ephesians 2:11 – 3:13 indicates. It is in that sense that the individual churches are ‘representatives’ of the Gentile world as a whole. They were for Paul a sign and promise of the universal scope of God’s saving purposes and hence of still greater things to come.
The gospel, treated metaphorically as a person at the start of verse 6, now becomes a plant which, like the good seed in the parable, bears fruit and grows.5 This is one of those points where, in the light of the chapter as a whole (see below, on 1:10 and 1:15ff.), we may be permitted to hear overtones or echoes from an important Old Testament passage. In Genesis 1, the initial statement of the creation of the world by the God of Israel, the command is given to the animal kingdom that it should ‘be fruitful and increase in number’ (1:22). This is repeated (1:28) to the man and the woman who have just been created in the image and likeness of God. This theme from the creation account is picked up at several key points in the story of the creation of Israel, the family of Abraham, highlighting the Jewish belief that in the call of Israel God was fulfilling his purposes for the whole world, undoing the sin of Adam by creating for himself a holy people.6 It is completely in line with Paul’s rethinking of Jewish belief in the light of the gospel that he should transfer to that gospel ideas belonging to the creation, and the divinely intended recreation, of the world. Paul gives us an advance glimpse of the theological position soon to be stated in full (1:15–20). God is doing through the gospel what he always intended to do. He is sowing good seed in the world, and preparing to reap a harvest of human lives recreated to reflect his glory.
This, Paul now affirms, is no abstract theory. The gospel has been at work all over the world, just as it has been doing among you, in Colosse itself. Without wishing to press the plural form of ‘you’ (Greek en hymin) too far, it seems clear from verse 4 and elsewhere that Paul does not merely mean that ‘among them’ there is evidence of individual changed lives; he sees that ‘in them’ as a community the gospel has been at work to create that corporate life and love which is God’s will for his family. In an individualistic age we do well to remind ourselves how often Paul’s ‘you’ is plural – and that not merely referring to a collection of individuals, but indicating a corporate unity, the Body of Christ.
The gospel has been at work in Colosse since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace7 in all its truth (the words ‘all its’ in NIV are an explanatory gloss; RSV is closer to the original with ‘the grace of God in truth’). God does not put his saving power into operation by some automatic or magic process which bypasses the consciousness of its recipients. Paul describes the effect of Epaphras’ preaching in Colosse in terms not of an emotional reaction, nor even of people ‘accepting Christ into their hearts’, but of hearing truth and understanding it. The task of the apostolic herald is to announce truth: the word here translated ‘understood’ indicates that the response sought is an intelligent thinking through and recognition of that truth. Paul was in no doubt about the Colossians’ state of heart, but he knew that Christian emotion must be undergirded with a clearheaded grasp of truth. It is important to stress at the same time that the response to the gospel will involve not only the intellect but also the emotions; but it should also be said that intellect and emotions, head and heart, are not simply two separate compartments without an adjoining door. Clear recognition and understanding of the genuine Christian gospel – that God loved the world so much that he gave his Son to die for it – is a most powerful stimulus to fullhearted Christian love for God in return. Such an emotional response can in its turn fuel the desire for a deeper intellectual understanding (see 1:9) of God’s nature and purposes.
7–8. Part of the mystery of that work of grace is that it includes the proclamation itself. You learned it from Epaphras (as in the RSV, so in the Greek, this is still part of the same sentence). God’s grace characteristically operates through the divinely appointed means (see Rom. 10:14–15). This is certainly not to set bounds to the sovereign grace of God. It is to note that, as a normal ‘rule’, God has committed himself to working through the proclamation of the gospel. The divine action takes up within itself both the work of the evangelist and the understanding of the hearers. When God works, humanity is not obliterated or bypassed but, through submission to the cross and all that it implies for preacher and hearer, it is enhanced, ennobled, redeemed. Epaphras does whole-heartedly the work to which he is called, as Paul’s dear fellow-servant, working for Christ alongside him not in competition but in love, and thus being a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf, doing in Colosse what Paul himself would have done. Indeed, he is in some sense carrying out Paul’s own work, by sharing in his unique mission to the Gentiles. This phrase also acts as a gentle indication of his (Paul’s) own right to address them: they are Epaphras’ work, but Epaphras is working on his, Paul’s, behalf. (Some manuscripts read ‘on your behalf’; even if this were correct,8 Paul would still be linking Epaphras’ work to his own by means of the adjective ‘faithful’, i.e. ‘trustworthy’.) And as Epaphras works, God works; as he preaches, God opens the understanding of the hearers; as he lays before them the facts about Jesus, they recognize those facts as true. Like a man who suddenly learns that he has inherited a fortune, the Colossians are possessed of new knowledge which cannot but revolutionize their lives.
That this miracle has happened in Colosse, and that it is indeed nothing other than the work of God, is what Paul has now learnt on Epaphras’ return: he has also told us of your love in the Spirit. No mere human affection, this: it is a love which, created by the Spirit (here mentioned explicitly for the first time, though the entire paragraph is incomprehensible without him), is God’s own love, becoming their own through the miracle of grace, enabling them to give to one another that love which can be recognized by its likeness to God’s own act of love on Calvary (see Rom. 5:5–10; etc.).
When we stand back from this opening paragraph, we see that, though in one sense it is about the Colossian church, in another sense it is about God. Already in his opening thanksgiving Paul has begun to reveal the truth he most wishes the Colossians to grasp: that in Christ God is the creator and recreator of the world and of humanity, and that therefore, once the meaning of the cross is fully understood, the world and humanity are to be joyfully affirmed as his own. In Christ there is a new beginning, a new Genesis.
These verses form a single unit, which is essentially a reported prayer. The reason why this is often overlooked is because most of the material, namely verses 13–23, is built on the final main element in the prayer, i.e. thanksgiving. Paul prays that the young church will grow in knowledge (v. 9), in holiness (v. 10) and in spiritual power (v. 11), adding a few phrases to fill out the petition in each instance; then, finally, he prays that they will continually give thanks to God (v. 12), this time filling out the meaning not with a few phrases but with several sentences. They are to thank the God who …: their knowledge of God and their thanksgiving to him is to be Christshaped.
The link with the opening thanksgiving (for this reason) should not be overlooked. It is because of what God has already done that Paul can pray with confidence for what God will do. Having begun a work of grace, God will continue and complete it (see Phil. 1:6). And this prayer is tireless: we have not stopped praying for you (see above, on 1:3) since the day we heard about you. In an echo of verse 6, Paul stresses that his response to Epaphras’ news was just as immediate as their response to his preaching. The ‘we’ may include Timothy, but it could be simply rhetorical.
Paul’s habit of reporting his regular prayers on behalf of his addressees (see e.g. Rom. 1:9ff.; Phil. 1:9; etc.) should not go unremarked. He will not offer teaching, advice and encouragement except in the context of prayer. His apostolic work is not his own idea. It is part of God’s plan. Conversely, prayer brings the assurance that his ministry is being used within God’s overall plan (1:24–29), and consequently that characteristic confidence which, outside this context, could sound like arrogance.
9. Basic to the whole prayer is the opening phrase: asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will (in the Greek the verb ‘fill’ is passive, ‘that you may be filled’; NIV has made explicit the regular use of the passive to refer obliquely to the divine action). It is this ‘knowledge’ which forms the basis both of holiness (v. 10) and of thanksgiving (vv. 12ff., in the light of 2:2), and which is the central characteristic of the humanity that is now renewed in Christ (3:10). The ‘knowledge of God’s will’ is more than simply an insight into how God wants his people to behave: it is an understanding of God’s whole saving purpose in Christ, and hence (as in v. 10b) a knowledge of God himself. Some have seen in the word ‘knowledge’ (epigno-sis) a hint that Paul is picking up the language (and, by implication, refuting the teaching) of ‘gnostic’ opponents – religious groups which, drawing on many traditions, held out the offer of a salvation attained through spiritual ‘knowledge’ (gno-sis), which would enable one to escape from the material world and realize one’s true (‘spiritual’) destiny. There is, however, no evidence of such teaching in any clearly defined form at this period, and when it does appear it is probably itself dependent on Christianity.
What Paul is speaking of here is not an esoteric knowledge, confined to private religious experience or exclusive sects. It is a knowledge ‘of his (i.e. God’s) will’, which is open to all God’s people. This knowledge is given through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. RSV’s ‘in’ is a more literal rendering than NIV’s ‘through’: knowledge of God’s will manifests itself in these qualities. The two adjectives (‘all’ and ‘spiritual’) govern both the nouns (‘wisdom’ and ‘understanding’). Their regular secular meaning (‘wisdom’ is mental excellence in general, ‘understanding’ is the ability to think through a subject coherently and clearly) is thus transposed on to a plane of more than merely human or worldly intellectual skill.
The three terms ‘knowledge’, ‘wisdom’ and ‘understanding’, so important elsewhere in Paul, are therefore best understood against their Old Testament and Jewish background, in which they regularly denote aspects of that character which God seeks to inculcate in his people.9 ‘Wisdom’ is the characteristic of the truly human person, who takes the humble yet confident place marked out for Adam in the order of creation, under God and over the world. For Christians to ‘grow up’ in every way will include the awakening of intellectual powers, the ability to think coherently and practically about God and his purposes for his people. Paul never plays off spiritual life against intellectual understanding. The wisdom and understanding commended here are given the adjective ‘spiritual’, and at once expounded in practical and ethical terms in verse 10.
10. Verses 9 and 10, taken together, form a miniature picture of Christian life and growth. The argument is not circular (as might at first appear), but spiral. Paul prays that they may increase in knowledge of God’s will, with the result that the Colossians will live as God wants them to and so increase in the knowledge of God! Understanding will fuel holiness; holiness will deepen understanding. (An alternative, which I consider less likely, is that the phrase at the end of v. 10 means ‘by means of the knowledge of God’.) When Paul says that you may lead a life (NIV adds, in front of those words, and we pray this in order, to make the thought clear) he uses the verb ‘to walk’, in keeping with his Jewish background (cf., in the Old Testament, Prov. 2:20; 4:25–27; etc.). This ‘walk’ must be worthy of the Lord. The Lord, Jesus Christ, provides in his death and resurrection a pattern of life which sets the standard for his people. Those who are ‘in the Lord’ must live appropriately. The following clause, ‘(that you) may please him in every way’, is not expressing an impossible ideal. Paul knows that complete perfection is attained only with the eventual gift of the resurrection body (Phil. 3:12). Nevertheless, those who belong to Christ can and do please God (cf. Rom. 12:1–2; 2 Cor. 5:8; 1 Thess. 4:1). God looks on his new (albeit as yet incomplete) creation, and declares it to be very good.
This explanation is supported by another oblique allusion to Genesis 1. Just as the gospel is bearing fruit and growing, so God’s people are themselves bearing fruit in every good work, and growing in the knowledge of God (the Greek verbs are the same as those in v. 6). Here is the typically Pauline paradox of grace. God is at work, therefore his people are at work (see further, on 1:29). This (albeit indirect) reference to Genesis increases the awareness that what Paul is talking about is God’s new creation. He is asking that the Colossians may understand themselves more and more to be God’s new, true humanity, and that they may increasingly live in a manner appropriate to that vocation. The idea of ‘good works’ is of course thoroughly Pauline (see Rom. 13:3; 2 Cor. 9:8; Gal. 6:10; Titus 1:16, and the parallel to our present passage in Eph. 2:10). By adding ‘in every good work’ to ‘bearing fruit’ and ‘in the knowledge of God’ to ‘growing’ he has expanded the formula of verse 6, neatly integrating what we often see as the active and reflective aspects of Christian living. Knowing God is itself an activity; obeying him is a form of devotion.
11–12a. The remainder of the prayer indicates the power which enables the young church to grow in this way and the thankful attitude which will characterize them as they do so (RSV weakens this close connection with vv. 9–10 by beginning a new sentence here). God is accomplishing this productive and growing Christian character in his people so that they are strengthened with all power according to his glorious might. God is regularly seen in the Old Testament as the powerful God – the sovereign creator who rescued Israel from Egypt. That power, unleashed through the gospel (see Rom. 1:16–17; 1 Cor. 1:24; etc.), is now continually at work in God’s people to give them great endurance and patience.10 Paul singles out these qualities as the weapons one needs to live in the world undaunted by its crises and panics. A patient and longsuffering spirit, the quiet corollary of faith, hope and love, is the product of the settled conviction that the Father of Jesus Christ is the sovereign Lord of the world, and that he is able to bring about his purposes in his own time and manner. There is a slight distinction to be drawn between ‘endurance’ and ‘patience’. The former is what faith, hope and love bring to an apparently impossible situation, the latter what they show to an apparently impossible person. Verse 11 contributes to the total prayer the insights (a) that growth in the knowledge of God, and in holiness, is an uphill battle, and (b) that strength for this battle can only come – but will surely come – from the power of God himself.
Since the early manuscripts of the New Testament contain almost no punctuation, it is impossible to tell whether joyfully goes with giving thanks in verse 12 (as NIV) or with ‘endurance and patience’ in verse 11 (as RSV). But, as verse 12 is a continuation of the same sentence, it makes little overall difference. God’s strength equips his people to live in the world with patience and to praise him for his grace. These thanks are to be offered to the Father. Christian maturity stems from a proper, thankful relationship to God, not as a remote or unconcerned being, but as the wise and loving Father of his people.
a. The new exodus (1:12b–14). Paul is not content merely to tell his readers to be thankful. He gives them three good reasons for gratitude. These (vv. 12–14, 15–20, 21–23) are not just stated side by side, but depend closely upon each other. Genuine Christian theology is the exploration of God’s character and actions, not in a spirit of mere speculation and curiosity, but out of gratitude and love, and with the intention of, and desire for, obedience. Paul’s prayer for the church reaches its climax in thanksgiving, and this thanksgiving is to be based on knowledge.
12b. The first reason for thanksgiving is that the Colossians have been given a share in the new exodus, the deliverance of the true people of God – the God, that is, who has qualified you11 to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. This seems at first sight a complicated way of saying that God has caused the Colossians to hear and receive the gospel. That is indeed Paul’s underlying meaning. But expressing it thus enables Paul to evoke a whole world of imagery relating to Israel’s exodus from Egypt and her entry into the promised land. The ‘inheritance’ alludes to the promised land of Canaan; ‘the saints’ is a regular term for the people of God, indicating that they are set apart from the world for his service.12 The parallel in Ephesians 2:11–13 suggests the idea that the heritage of God’s people is no longer the prerogative of one race, but has been opened up so that people of every conceivable background can share it. The promise of the land is widened into the promise of a whole new creation (Rom. 4:13; 8:17–25). The addition of ‘in light’ differentiates between the new and the old inheritance (the glory of heaven, not the land of Canaan) and also sharpens the moral contrast with the kingdom of darkness (v. 13), where the young Christians had formerly dwelt.
The Colossians have not come into this inheritance automatically. God has ‘made them fit’ for it. Paul elsewhere uses this word (in Greek hikano-santi) and its cognates when describing a status or office for which he was not ‘fit’ in himself, but for which God ‘fitted’ him (see, e.g., 1 Cor. 15:9; 2 Cor. 2:16; 3:5–6). He now explains this divine action further, in order the more securely to ground the Colossians’ thanksgiving.
13. Again he alludes to the exodus, this time referring particularly to the dramatic rescue operation in which God delivered his people from the dark power of Egypt (see Exod. 6:6; 12:27; 14:30), transferring them into a new land: for he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves. The harsh rule of the prince of darkness has been exchanged for the wise sovereignty of God’s Son (cf. Rom. 5:21; 6:16ff.). Paul shares with other New Testament writers, and with Jesus himself, the belief in the existence of a dark power to whom the human race, and the world, is subject because of sin – and the belief that, in Jesus Christ, God has defeated this power and is establishing his own kingdom in its place.
On the basis of 1 Corinthians 15:23–28 we may infer – though the point is controversial – that Paul conceived of the establishment of this kingdom as a two-stage process. First there is ‘the kingdom of Christ’, which begins with Christ’s resurrection and exaltation and continues until all enemies are subdued. Then there comes the final kingdom of God, the restoration of all things. This distinction does not, of course, correspond directly to the language about God’s kingdom on the lips of Jesus; it belongs to a later perspective. The idea of the ‘kingdom’ is not found frequently in Paul (see Rom. 14:17; 1 Cor. 6:9), but is clearly presupposed throughout. The language of 1:13 is, in fact, firmly grounded in the world of Jewish expectations and in the fulfilment of those hopes in the Messiah, Jesus.
There are two closely related reasons why Paul has described Jesus as ‘the Son he loves’ (literally ‘the Son of his love’; cf. RSV, ‘his beloved Son’). There is, first, an allusion to Jesus’ baptism,13 when God anointed him with his Spirit, and said ‘you are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased’ (Mark 1:11), thus declaring Jesus to be the anointed King of Israel, the one in whom Israel’s destiny is summed up and fulfilled. Hence, secondly, God has fulfilled ‘in him’ his ancient purposes. Jesus as the beloved Son is Jesus as the true Israel. He has offered to God the filial obedience which Israel had not: ‘when Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son’ (Hos. 11:1, quoted of Jesus in Matt. 2:15). This exodus reference fits well with the rest of our present passage. In Christ the love of God has been expressed and defined by being lived out, by being put to death to redeem sinners.
14. In him, then, we have redemption,14 the forgiveness of sins. The word ‘redemption’, as used in the ancient world in general, is from a root which carried the meaning (capable of metaphorical use) of ‘purchase from the slave-market’. To a Jew, however, the root in question would always awaken deeper echoes, memories of the time when God redeemed his people from the kingdom of Pharaoh.15 As a result the ‘forgiveness of sins’ here is not merely good news for troubled consciences, though of course it certainly is that. It is one of the specific blessings of the new covenant spoken of in Jeremiah 31:31ff. and Ezekiel 36:16–36.16 This idea belongs within the wider Jewish belief that God’s purposes for Israel were part of his plan to rid the world of evil entirely. It is this plan that he has now put into effect.
Paul, then, is asserting in shorthand form that in Christ, the true Israel, the true King, the one whom God loves, God’s people are rescued from the dark power that has enslaved them and are brought into all the blessings of membership in the new covenant. Chief among these blessings is the fact that sin has been dealt with. God’s people are to thank him that they are indeed his people, qualified for inheritance (v. 12), delivered from sin’s grim tyranny (v. 13), redeemed through his Son (v. 14). This statement (and its further application in vv. 21–23) must have considerably clarified for the young Christians in Colosse exactly what it was that had happened to them in their conversion, and why it had been necessary.
b. Creation and new creation in Christ (1:15–20). The next six verses of the letter are generally, and rightly, reckoned among the most important Christological passages in the New Testament. It is perhaps inevitable, therefore, that they should have been the subject of considerable discussion. The present work is not the appropriate place to engage in these debates: what follows presupposes the results of detailed work set out elsewhere.17
1. Poem and context
Most scholars agree that the passage is skilfully worded and rhythmically balanced, deserving to be called a poem. Some have gone beyond this, and suggested that it is, or contains, a hymn already well known before being quoted here. Many hypotheses as to the origin and original shape of this hymn have been suggested, but none has met with great support.18 There are reasons, however, for questioning some aspects of this approach:
(a) Verse 15 begins with ‘who is …’, suggesting that the hymn does not begin there.
(b) Verses 12–14 are also in an elevated style.
(c) There is no need, as is sometimes supposed, to delete words or phrases to produce a credible poetic structure (see below).
(d) The poem as it stands fits very well into its present context, continuing and bringing to a climax the reasons why the Colossians should thank God.
(e) It also fits very well into the thought of the whole letter.
(f) If Paul has edited the hymn by adding bits, it is quite arbitrary to suppose he would not also have left bits out; if so, restoration of the ‘original’ is out of the question.
In short, if these verses ever had a meaning other than that which they now bear, we could never be sure that we knew it. The meaning they now have, i.e. the contribution they make to the larger unit within which they occur, is clear: and that is what we need when studying Colossians.
2. Poetic structure
The structure of the poem can be clearly seen by highlighting the connecting words which introduce each line or group of lines. There are four sections. The outer two begin with ‘who is …’, the inner two with ‘and he …’. The balance of the detailed content (even more impressive in the original; the English here is as literal as possible) shows that this is a helpful approach.
(Section 1)
15aWho is the image
of God, the invisible one
15bfirstborn of all creation
16afor in him everything was created
16bin the heavens and on the earth
16cthe visible and the invisible
whether thrones or dominions
whether rulers or authorities
16deverything has been created
through him and unto him.
(Section 2)
17aand he is before all things
17band all things in him hold together
(Section 3)
18aand he is the head
of the body, the church19
(Section 4)
18bWho is the beginning
18cthe firstborn from the dead
18dso that in everything he might become pre-eminent
19 for in him all God’s fullness
was pleased to dwell
20aand through him to reconcile
everything to him(self)20
20bmaking peace through the blood
of his cross (through him)21
20cwhether things on the earth
or things in the heavens.
It should be clear from this that there are all sorts of parallels between the different parts of the poem. The first lines of sections 1 and 4 belong together: so do the opening lines of sections 2 and 3. The poem pivots about the division between verses 17 and 18. At a broader level, sections 1 and 4 both begin with a statement about Christ, amplify it with the title ‘firstborn’, and then explain it in relation to Christ’s position vis-à-vis the created order. The sequence ‘in him … through him … to him …’ occurs in verse 16 and verses 19–20a. The symmetry of all these is not, of course, exact in all details, but there is no good reason to expect it to be.
3. Poetic significance
Someone who writes in this way wants his or her readers to stop and think. The most obvious point that the poem makes is the parallel between creation and new creation; hence the emphasis that is placed on the fact that each was accomplished by means of the same agent. The Lord through whom you are redeemed (Paul is telling the Colossians) is none other than the one through whom you (and all the world) were created.
This statement conforms closely to the basic confession of Judaism, that Israel’s God is the creator God, and vice versa. (See e.g. Pss 96:5; 146:5–6; Isa. 40:12–31.) It is a typical statement of Jewishstyle monotheism, and would be a telling rejoinder to any dualistic theology which saw creation as inherently bad.22 But this form has been filled with new content. What was before said in reference to Israel’s God, Yahweh, is now said in reference to Jesus Christ. He has not displaced the God of Abraham, the God of the exodus. He has made him known. If the hymn stands, with mainline Judaism, over against paganism, it also stands over against Judaism itself. We might compare 1 Corinthians 8:1–6, where Paul fills the Jewish confession (‘the Lord our God is one Lord’) with Christian content.
This point is undergirded by the particular language used of Jesus in the poem. As far back as 1925 C. F. Burney made the brilliant suggestion that the hymn deliberately applies to Jesus everything that could be said of the figure ‘Wisdom’ by combining Genesis 1:1 (‘In the beginning God created’, in Hebrew b˘ere-’sˇît …) with Proverbs 8:22, where ‘Wisdom’ states that ‘the Lord begat me at the beginning (re-’ˇsît) of his work’.23 The significance of this can be grasped in two syllogisms:
(a) ‘Wisdom’ is God’s agent in the creation and preservation of the world.24
(b) Humanity is designed to be God’s vicegerent on earth (Gen. 1:26–28; Ps. 8:6–8).
(c) Therefore ‘Wisdom’ is the attribute needed by human beings to equip them for this task.
(a) Israel was called to be God’s true humanity.25
(b) The Jewish Law (Torah) was the charter of Israel’s life.
(c) Therefore Torah is to be identified with Wisdom.26
Against this background of thought, Burney’s theory results in the following view of 1:15–20.
(a) The divine Wisdom has at last been fully embodied in a human form, Jesus the Messiah, Israel’s representative.
(b) God’s purposes in the creation of the world, and for the world’s redemption, are fulfilled in him.
(c) The Lord to whom the young Christians have given their allegiance is not one cult-figure among many, but is the one through whom was made the entire universe, all mere cult-figures included.
(d) Redemption is not thought of dualistically, as though the created world were totally evil and salvation meant being rescued from it. Creation is God’s work – Christ’s work: though spoilt by sin, it still belongs to God and God still has plans for it. Redemption is not an invasion from a different or hostile realm. The Lord of this world has come to claim his rightful possession.
If they grasp even the outline of this picture (the detail is complex, but the shape is simple), the Colossians, who had gratefully turned away from their pagan ‘gods’ in becoming Christians, will not be inclined to go back to them. Nor will they be tempted (this, as we shall see, is the main point of ch. 2) to look to Judaism for protection against the pagan ‘principalities and powers’. Having Christ, God’s true Wisdom, the Lord of the world, they possess all they need (cf. 1 Cor. 3:22–23). If Christ is God’s Wisdom, his Torah, then all that Judaism believed to be true of herself, and of her Torah, all that she hoped for because of her monotheism and election, has been achieved in Jesus Christ. He (not the Law) is the Father’s agent in the world. He (not an abstract divine ‘Wisdom’) is supreme over the nations and their ‘gods’. For him, not for Israel, all things were created.27 This is the fundamental emphasis of the poem within the letter as a whole.
4. Jesus and God
Paul, then, does not in this poem abandon the Jewish doctrines of monotheism and election. He redefines them. But what, in that case, is he asserting about Jesus, in particular when he calls him ‘the image of God’ (v. 15)? There has been considerable debate about this from the first Christian centuries up to the present, and the answer offered below is an attempt to hold together the strong points of the various parties in the debate.28
(a) The actual reference of verse 15 is clearly the man Jesus, who is now exalted. Paul uses the present tense (‘is’) to refer to him as having taken the place of world sovereignty marked out for humanity (‘the image of God’) from the beginning (cf. Eph. 1:20–23).
(b) The logic of the hymn (creation – new creation) indicates also a reference to the exalted Jesus as the Father’s agent in creation. The one through whom the world was made has now become, as a human being, the one through whom the world is ruled by the saving love of God. The poem refers to the exalted man, but identifies him with the pre-existent Lord.
(c) There is therefore no suggestion that Jesus pre-existed in human form: merely that it was utterly appropriate for him, as the pre-existent one, to become man. The language Paul uses to refer to him before his human conception and birth is often borrowed from his later human life, just as we say ‘the Queen was born in 1926’, not meaning that she was then already Queen, but that the person we now know as Queen was born that year. Thus 2 Corinthians 8:9, ‘For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor’: not that the pre-existent one was already Jesus, the Messiah, but that the person we now know as Jesus, the Messiah, is to be identified as God’s pre-existent agent.
(d) Paul’s Jewish background supplied him with the categories for this breath-taking idea, but (as usual) he reworked them. Some Jews regarded ‘Wisdom’ or the Mosaic Law as quasi-divine pre-existent entities, not thereby compromising monotheism but expressing, in a figure of speech, certain aspects of God’s character. Paul, likewise remaining an emphatic monotheist, applies these themes to Jesus, and can actually state (v. 19; 2:9) that all the divine fullness dwells in him. ‘Jesus’ and ‘God’ do not, though, mean the same thing: Paul regularly distinguishes God as ‘Father’ and Jesus as ‘Son’ or ‘Lord’. But Jesus is not a second God. His death (v. 20) is the achievement of God himself. Paul regarded Jesus as identical with one who was, and always had been, fully divine, and yet who could be distinguished in thought from the Father. The pre-existent Lord of the world becomes Lord of the church (1:18–20) in order to become Lord, fully, of the world which he has made but which has rebelled against him.
(e) The Colossians (this is the point of this theology in its context) have thus given their allegiance not to one cult-figure among others, but to the divine Lord through whom the world was made. The redemption achieved in Christ is indeed the new Genesis: the church really is the new humanity (3:10–11). The Jews learnt more fully who their God was when he redeemed them from Egypt (see Exod. 3:1–17; 6:1–8); the world may now learn through the gospel the full truth about the God who made it. The ‘exodus’ ideas of 1:12–14 thus belong exactly where they are in relation to the poem. The incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus were self-revealing, selffulfilling actions which the one creator God was pleased to undertake (cf. 2 Cor. 5:19 with Col. 1:19–20). The poem leaves the church, and the world, not just with a picture of the exalted Christ, but with a vision of the gracious, loving and beckoning creator-redeemer God.
15. It remains to fill in the details of the poem, to show how this wealth of theology was actually expressed. He, the Son of God in whom we have redemption, is the image of the invisible God. No-one has ever seen God, wrote John in his Prologue (1:18), but God the only Son29 has made him known. Humanity was made as the climax of the first creation (Gen. 1:26–27): the true humanity of Jesus is the climax of the history of creation, and at the same time the starting-point of the new creation. From all eternity Jesus had, in his very nature, been the ‘image of God’, reflecting perfectly the character and life of the Father. It was thus appropriate for him to be the ‘image of God’ as man: from all eternity he had held the same relation to the Father that humanity, from its creation, had been intended to bear. Humanity was designed to be the perfect vehicle for God’s self-expression within his world, so that he could himself live appropriately among his people as one of themselves, could rule in love over creation as himself a creature. God made us for himself, as Augustine said with a different, though perhaps related, meaning. The doctrine of incarnation which flows from this cannot, by definition, squeeze either ‘divinity’ or ‘humanity’ out of shape. Indeed, it is only in Jesus Christ that we understand what ‘divinity’ and ‘humanity’ really mean: without him, we lapse into sub-Christian, or even pagan, categories of thought, and then wonder why the doctrine of incarnation causes us so much difficulty. Paul’s way of expressing the doctrine is to say, poetically, that the man Jesus fulfils the purposes which God had marked out both for himself and for humanity.30
Upon Jesus Christ, then, has come the role marked out for humanity, and hence for Israel: Christ is the firstborn over all creation. The title ‘firstborn’ is given to Israel in the Old Testament (Exod. 4:22; Jer. 31:9; cf. Psalms of Solomon 18:4; 4 Ezra 6:58), and also, once, to the coming Davidic Messiah (Ps. 89:27). Burney (see above) argued strongly that it referred to the figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22. It therefore conveys the idea of priority in both time and rank, and we should not foreclose on either of these options (NIV, in its paraphrase, allows only the idea of rank): to opt for temporal priority does not imply that the pre-existent Son of God is merely the first created being. The continuing temporal sense of the word is clear from verse 18 (cf. Rom. 8:29), and gives a parallel idea to that expressed in the NEB translation of John 1:1, ‘When all things began, the Word already was’. It is in virtue of this eternal pre-existence that the Son of God holds supreme rank.
16. That this is the correct way to read verse 15 is immediately confirmed: for by him all things were created. He is not simply part of the created world itself. All that God made, he made by means of him. Paul actually says ‘in him’, and, though the word en can mean ‘by’ as well as ‘in’,31 it is better to retain the literal translation than to paraphrase as NIV has done. Not only is there an intended parallel with verse 19, which would otherwise be lost: the passive ‘were created’ indicates, in a typically Jewish fashion, the activity of God the Father, working in the Son. To say ‘by’, here and at the end of verse 16, could imply, not that Christ is the Father’s agent, but that he was alone responsible for creation.
All things, which in the Greek has an article indicating that Paul sees this created world as a single whole (i.e. ‘the totality’), is now further specified: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities. (NIV obscures the parallel between this verse and 2:15 by translating archai in 1:16 as ‘rulers’ and in 2:15 as ‘powers’.) Wherever you look, or whatever realities you think of, you discover entities which, even if they do not acknowledge the fact, owe their very existence to Christ. They are his handiwork. Paul has here chosen to mention especially what we today call the power structures of the universe.
The identity of these ‘powers’ is much debated. Some of the terms Paul uses here belonged to complex metaphysical systems in contemporary non-Christian thought. It is not easy to separate the different terms clearly. ‘Thrones’ is probably superior to ‘powers’, ‘rulers’ to ‘authorities’; and while ‘thrones’ and ‘rulers’, in the Greek, connote the position held, ‘powers’ and ‘authorities’ indicate the presence of those over whom authority is exercised. Paul, however, is not concerned so much with listing them in a particular order, or with distinguishing carefully between them, as with asserting Christ’s supremacy over them. As to their referent, in our modern age it has often been taken for granted that Paul’s language about supernatural power-structures needs to be demythologized, to be turned into language about (say) international power politics or economic ‘structures’. This is quite legitimate, since for Paul spiritual and earthly rulers were not sharply distinguished.32 In his view, earthly rulers held authority (in the sense intended by John 19:11; Rom. 13:1–7) only as a trust from the creator.33 At the same time, we should not ignore the supernatural or ‘demonic’ element in these ‘powers’. Anything to which human beings offer the allegiance proper only to God is capable of assuming, and exerting, a sinister borrowed power.34 For Paul, the ‘powers’ were unseen forces working in the world through pagan religion, astrology, or magic, or through the oppressive systems that enslaved or tyrannized human beings. (See below, on 2:13–15.)
No power structures are, however, independent of Christ: for all things were created by him and for him. Again ‘all things’ has the article, so that we might translate it as ‘the totality’. ‘By him’ is, this time, properly ‘through him’; ‘for him’ is properly ‘to him’. ‘Were created’ is, this time, a perfect tense (‘have been created’) in contrast to the aorist (‘were created’) at the start of the verse. The difference is that, whereas before Paul referred to the initial act of creation, he here refers to the result of that initial act: ‘all things have been brought into being through him and to him’. The weight of the sentence falls, therefore, on to the final phrase ‘to him’. Creation, called into existence for the sake of Christ, exists in the present in order to give him glory. Verse 16 thus moves the thought of the poem from the past (Christ as agent of creation) to the present (Christ as the one to whom the world owes allegiance) and to the future (Christ whose sovereignty will become universal). Though the powers are now in rebellion, he remains their true Lord. This is confirmed by the next stage, the first of the two short central sections of the poem.
17. Paul now sums up his statement of Christ as the intermediary of creation, before setting in parallel to this the fact of his work in the new creation. He (NIV omits the ‘and’ at the start of the line, thus losing the exact parallel with 18a) is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ‘Before’, like ‘firstborn’ earlier, is ambiguous, and probably refers again to primacy of both time and rank. The second clause, asserting that the world is now sustained and upheld by Christ, transfers to him one more aspect of ‘wisdom’ thought (see Wisdom 1:7; Ecclus. 43:26; and in the NT cf. Heb. 1:3). The verb, again, is in the perfect, indicating that ‘everything’ has held together in him and continues to do so. Through him the world is sustained, prevented from falling into chaos. No creature is autonomous. All are God’s servants (Ps. 119:91) and dependents (Ps. 104).
18. It is to this Jesus Christ, none other, that the Colossians now belong in belonging to the church. This is the moment when, according to the careful structure of the poem, the thought moves from creation to new creation. Paul starts where the Colossians are, as members of the one world-wide people of God. If God’s people are the new humanity, the metaphor of a human body is utterly appropriate to express not only mutual interdependence (as in Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:12ff.) but also, as here, an organic and dependent relation to Christ himself. Hence: And he is the head of the body, the church. Paul, as is well known, is good at mixing his metaphors (see, e.g., Eph. 4:14, with the comments of Caird35): he is also apparently good at adapting them to fresh uses.36
Paul has been exploring the different meanings of the Hebrew re-’ˇsît (‘firstborn’, ‘sum-total’, ‘head’), and he now reaches the final stage: he is the beginning and (there is no word for ‘and’ in the Greek, and it might have been better not to add it, but to leave the next clause as an explanation of, not an addition to, ‘the beginning’) the firstborn from among the dead. This assertion dominates the remainder of the poem. The word ‘beginning’ is too thin to do justice to arche-, which means ‘first principle’, ‘source’, ‘creative initiative’, and again indicates priority in both time and rank. (It is actually the singular noun from which is derived archai, rulers, as in v. 16 and 2:15.) This part of the poem refers particularly to Christ’s rule over the final great enemies of mankind, sin and death. With Jesus’ resurrection, the new age has dawned. The new man has emerged from among the old humanity, whose life he had shared, whose pain and sin he had borne. For Paul, as throughout the Bible, sin and death were inextricably linked, so that Christ’s victory over the latter signalled his defeat of the former (see Rom. 5:12–21; 1 Cor. 15:12–28). ‘Firstborn’ here, particularly when taken closely with arche- in the sense of ‘beginning’, implies that Christ’s resurrection, though presently unique, will be acted out by a great company of others. Those Jews who expected a resurrection from the dead (certainly the Pharisees, and quite possibly many others) had seen it as a large-scale, single event at the end of time. Paul, however, believed that God brought forward the inauguration of the ‘age to come’, the age of resurrection, into the midst of the ‘present age’, in order that the power of the new age might be unleashed upon the world while there was still time for the world to be saved.
Jesus’ resurrection was thus accomplished so that in everything he might have the supremacy. That which he was by right he became in fact. God’s plan is not merely to sum up the old creation, but to inaugurate the new creation, in and through him. The paradox of Christ’s being ‘before all things’ (v. 17) and yet becoming pre-eminent in his resurrection is to be explained on the basis of Philippians 2:5–11. The exaltation of Christ after his work on the cross gives him, publicly, the status which he always in fact enjoyed as of right.37 The puzzle is caused by sin: though always Lord by right, he must become Lord in fact, by defeating sin and death. Compare Romans 1:3–4: Jesus was ‘Son of God’ even while being ‘a descendant of David as to his human nature’ (it is as Son of God that he dies on the cross, Rom. 8:3, etc.); in his resurrection this Sonship was powerfully, and publicly, demonstrated. The ‘so that’ in our present passage implies that behind Jesus’ resurrection there stands the divine purpose, which is now explained as a purpose of reconciling love.
19–20. Just as verse 16 explains the appropriateness of what was said about Christ in verse 15, so verses 19–20 explain the appropriateness of verse 18b (‘who is the beginning …’). Paul here expresses evocatively and colourfully what in 2 Corinthians 5:19 he stated bluntly (‘God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ’): For God was pleased to have all his fulness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. About this difficult little passage there are five things to be said.
i. There is no word for ‘God’ in the original of verse 19, but the grammatical subject (‘fulness’) must be a circumlocution for ‘God in all his fulness’ (see 2:9).38 It is appropriate that Christ should hold pre-eminence, because God in all his fullness was pleased to take up permanent residence (this is the best way of taking the Greek verb) in him. The full divinity of the man Jesus is stated without any implication that there are two Gods. It is the one God, in all his fullness, who dwells in him.
ii. The sequence ‘in him … through him … to him …’ echoes the same sequence in verse 16. This deliberate balance has created a problem of ambiguity, it being unclear whether the repeated ‘him’ refers to God or to Christ. The answer is probably that the final ‘him’ is to be taken as a contraction of ‘himself’ (auton in place of heauton), a verbal switch not without parallel.39 God dwelt fully in Christ in order to reconcile all things to himself (i.e. to God) through him (i.e. Christ).
iii. In rearranging the order of phrases (see the full layout of the poem above), NIV has omitted the awkward extra phrase ‘through him’, which occurs in most manuscripts after the words ‘his cross’ and before ‘whether the things on earth or the things in heaven’. But the phrase, easy to omit in copying but odd to add, should probably be retained. It re-emphasizes the fact that reconciliation was achieved through Christ alone.
iv. In what way are ‘all things’ reconciled to God through the cross? This question breaks down into three more: (a) how does Jesus’ death effect reconciliation between God and his human creatures? (b) does ‘all things’ include the non-human creation? and (c) does it imply automatic salvation for all human beings?
(a) There is no problem, from the vantage-point of other Pauline statements (e.g. 2 Cor. 5:21), in answering this first question. On the cross, God took upon himself that which stood as a barrier between himself and his human creatures, i.e. sin. The worst that sin can do is to kill: dying, Jesus exhausted its power. The word ‘blood’ also suggests the ideas of the sacrifice which makes peace between God and man and of God’s new covenant, which stands at the heart of the new creation. (See further on 1:22; 2:11–15, where this summary statement of the achievement of the cross is considerably amplified.)
(b) What, then, is the scope of this new creation? Because humanity plays the key role in the ordering of God’s world, human reconciliation will lead to the restoration of creation, just as human sin led to creation’s fall (compare Rom. 8:19ff.). At present, as Paul in prison knew only too well, the world as a whole remains unaware of the reconciliation achieved on the cross, of the fact that God will eventually remake the world and its power structures so that they reflect his glory instead of human arrogance. That is why he can speak both of the reconciliation of the ‘powers’ and also of God’s victory in Christ over them as hostile forces (2:15). God plans for an eventual complete harmony, new heavens and new earth. All evil is to be destroyed through the cosmic outworking of the crucifixion: all creation is to be transformed in the cosmic results of the resurrection.
(c) The process of reconciliation between God and man, however, does not simply happen by some automatic process. Paul clearly believed that it was possible for human beings to reject God’s offer of salvation, and that at the last judgment some, having done so, would thereby be themselves rejected (see Rom. 1:18 – 2:16; 14:10; 2 Cor. 5:10; 2 Thess. 1:5–10).40 Since he never tells us how he would harmonize this with the reconciliation of ‘all things’, it is risky to guess what he might have said. But the present passage, and the parallel in 2 Corinthians 5, suggest two comments. First, he is emphasizing the universal scope of God’s reconciling purposes; nothing less than a total new creation is envisaged. Secondly, ‘reconciliation’, the re-establishing of a mutual relationship, cannot occur ‘automatically’ in the world of human relations from which the metaphor is drawn. In theological terms, reconciliation occurs ‘when someone is in Christ’ (2 Cor. 5:17), which elsewhere (e.g. Rom. 3:21–31; 6:1–11; Gal. 3:26–29) is correlated clearly with faith and baptism. The expansion of our present passage in Colossians 2:9–12 suggests that this is the right approach. See also the commentary on 3:6, below.
v. The extraordinary events of incarnation and cross were not a faute de mieux, undertaken with reluctance or merely because there was no other possible course. God not only acted in this way: he ‘took pleasure in’ doing so. In taking human flesh in order to bring creation to its climax (1:15–17), he fulfils the eternal purpose whereby he made humanity to be master of the world. As he had been ‘pleased to dwell’ on Mount Zion,41 so he is now ‘pleased to dwell’ among his people in human form (compare John 1:14). Behind the mystery of sin, then, there stands the loving wisdom of God. In making a world which he could appropriately enter, he made man and woman in his own image. The creation of such beings entailed the possibility that they would rebel against him. Such rebellion could not baffle or perplex him, nor confound his purposes: it would evoke that quality above all others of which he had no lack, namely, the generous love expressed on the cross. He came, therefore, to defeat sin in the territory it had made its own, that of Adam, of human flesh and blood. Reconciliation, effected through the death of the Son, reveals most clearly the love of the Father (Rom. 5:6–10). It is this revelation that calls forth the praises of heaven, to which Paul now invites the Colossians to join their voices.
We are now in a position to survey the poem in its totality, and to assess the contribution it makes to the developing thought of the letter. The Colossian Christians (and their modern counterparts) are to thank God, because in Jesus Christ he has revealed himself to be the one God of all the earth, the Creator and Redeemer of all. He is not one more rival (specifically, a Jewish one) to the gods of paganism. He reigns supreme over all. He has given himself to his world in loving self-sacrifice, to create out of sinful humanity a people for his own possession, with the intention of eventually bringing the entire universe into a new order and harmony. All this he has done in and through Jesus, his Son, his own perfect human self-expression.
Out of the many points here which could be developed further, Paul highlights two.
First (2:6–23), Jesus has taken the role assigned by Judaism to ‘Wisdom’ and the law. No Christian should think to consolidate his or her freedom from the spiritual tyrannies of the world by taking on the ‘extra’ protection of the Jewish law. Monotheism, election, Torah, the three pillars of Judaism, have all been redefined in and through Jesus Christ. Possessing him – better, being possessed by him – the Christian is already ‘complete’ (2:10, AV). Second (3:5 – 4:6), the new life in Christ is nothing less than the beginning of the new creation. And, if new creation, new humanity. Christians already share in the new age which began on Easter Day. This is worked out in terms of practical holiness, which does not thwart or cramp full humanity, but facilitates and enhances it.
If we wished to apply what Paul has here given us to further questions relating to the last quarter of the twentieth century, we might do so in a variety of ways, recognizing that such matters are not questions simply of exegesis, but of possible applications of exegesis. Thus, for instance, monotheism, often taken for granted, is once again a live issue. To assert today that the one Creator God has revealed himself fully and finally in Jesus Christ is to risk criticism on the grounds of arrogance or intolerance. The mission of the church, however, does not commit Christians to the proposition that there is no truth to be found in other religions. Colossians 1:16 implies that all philosophies or religions which have some ‘fit’ with the created world will thereby reflect in some ways the truth of God. It does not, however, imply that they are therefore, as they stand, doorways into the new creation. That place, according to 1:18, is Christ’s alone.
A further application concerns the church’s task in the world. There is no sphere of existence over which Jesus is not sovereign, in virtue of his role both in creation (1:16–17) and in reconciliation (1:18–20). There can be no dualistic division between some areas which he rules and others which he does not. ‘There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.’42 The task of evangelism is therefore best understood as the proclamation that Jesus is already Lord, that in him God’s new creation has broken into history, and that all people are therefore summoned to submit to him in love, worship and obedience. The logic of this message requires that those who announce it should be seeking to bring Christ’s Lordship to bear on every area of human and worldly existence. Christians must work to help create conditions in which human beings, and the whole created world, can live as God always intended. There is a whole range of ethical norms which God built into his world: respect for persons and property, maintenance of family life and of the ecological order of creation, justice between individuals and groups. Christians must be in the forefront of those working to promote such causes. Many opportunities to speak about Jesus will occur in the undertaking of such work, as it becomes clear that the gospel provides a coherent and satisfying underpinning for those standards which uphold and enhance a truly human life.
The basic target of Paul’s polemic, the main thing that the gospel was bound to attack, was idolatry. Anything put in the place of the one God of all the earth becomes an idol, be it never so useful, beautiful or sacred. Even the God-given Torah could become an idol: how much more the man-made political and economic systems of Paul’s world or ours. To apply the gospel to the idolatry of our modern world will take more prayer, discernment, humility and wisdom than it is usually given. Not to apply it in this way is implicitly to deny it.
Colossians 1:15–20 gives the church not merely an exalted view of Jesus, and hence of humanity, but of God and his world. God, man and the world are each now to be understood in relation to Jesus Christ. He makes the invisible God visible; he fulfils the Father’s reconciling purpose on the cross; he is the Father’s agent in creation and redemption. He is the truly human being,43 the true Image of God. He is Lord of old and new creation, being in himself the beginning of the latter, the first created being to attain the state of perfection which will one day be shared by ‘all things in heaven and on earth’. It is this Lord that the Colossians have come to worship, his ‘image’ that they will one day fully share (3:10). This is the fact to which Paul now turns, applying the poem to the young church he is addressing.
c. New creation in Colosse (1:21–23). The reconciliation just mentioned is not a strange new truth to the Colossians. They have already experienced it. Paul here outlines their former plight, the means of their rescue, and their consequent present hope. This statement ties verses 13–23 with the thanksgiving of verses 3–8, points forward to the appeal of chapter 2, and enables Paul to work round to the detailed introduction of himself which follows immediately in 1:24 – 2:5.
21. The Colossians, then, were once alienated from God. NIV, by adding ‘from God’, brings out the sense, which is not that of Ephesians 2:12 (where the estrangement is between Gentiles and the Old Covenant people of God), but is nearer to Ephesians 4:18. Made for obedient fellowship with God, humanity since the fall is somehow out of order, God’s design having been spoilt by sin. The result is that (you) were enemies in your minds because of your evil behaviour. The Greek is not quite so clear as appears from NIV’s ‘because’. It is not simply that habitual wrongdoing has turned the mind away from God. Nor is the word translated ‘mind’ (dianoia) strictly the mind itself, but the way it works, the processes of understanding and intellect. Thought and act are both tainted, each pushing the other into further corruption, in a mirror image of 1:9–10 (see above). The best comment on 1:21 is perhaps the sequence of thought in Romans 1:21–32. Wrong thinking leads to vice, vice to further mental corruption, so that the mind, still not totally ignorant of God’s standards, finds itself applauding evil.
22. Paul now applies verse 20 to the problem of verse 21, and concludes that God has now reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight. He does not say that God’s action in Christ, and the Colossians’ acceptance of the gospel, have automatically and instantly made them perfect. Having been given a new life, they must behave in accordance with it. This they can do only because of the reconciliation (between themselves, as pagan sinners, and the Creator God, the God of Israel) which was achieved on the cross.
But how? NIV, by simplifying ‘the body of his flesh’ into ‘Christ’s physical body’, has somewhat obscured a collocation of tricky technical terms. For Paul, the word ‘flesh’ (sarx) frequently describes not merely the physical aspect of human nature, but humanity as it opposes God. ‘Body’, on the other hand, which also describes man as a totality, not merely as a physical entity, is morally neutral. What, then, does ‘the body of his flesh’ mean, and how is it the means of reconciliation?
Two parallel passages, both in Romans, will help us here. In 7:4 Paul writes ‘you died to the law through the body of Christ’, and in 8:3 he says that God, ‘sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as a sin-offering,44 condemned sin in the flesh’ (RSV). The context of both passages within Romans 5 – 8 as a whole, coupled with the reference in Colossians 1:18 to Christ as ‘the head of the body’, suggests the following train of thought:
(a) Jesus, as Messiah, represents, and is fully identified with, his people. He shares their ‘fleshly’ existence, so that, though himself without sin, he takes sin’s consequences on himself, becoming subject to death.
(b) Jesus is also fully identified with God (1:19; this identification is further described in 2:9 as so-matiko-s, bodily).
(c) In Jesus, therefore, God identified himself with the sins of humanity. The cross is simply the outworking of this explosive meeting between the holy God and human sin.
(d) Those who are members of Jesus’ ‘body’ thus find their sin already condemned in him, and themselves reconciled to God. Jesus has risen from the dead, as the first of a large family whose sins, having done their worst in producing his death, are left behind in his life beyond death (1:18; see Rom. 6:7–11; 8:29). It is this line of thought, I suggest, that Paul has expressed compactly in the first half of verse 22.
The reconciliation thus effected has a definite and attractive aim in view. God’s purpose is to present you holy in his sight, without blemish. The words translated ‘present’, ‘in his sight’ and ‘without blemish’ all evoke the language of Jewish sacrificial ritual. (Sacrifice had to be ‘without blemish’: so, physically speaking, did the priest who offered it.) Paul may therefore be hinting at a sacrificial metaphor, though it could hardly be fully stated, since it would imply that God was offering a sacrifice to himself. Better, therefore, to leave it as a hint.
As often, Paul here mixes his metaphors, adding and free from accusation. This indicates not merely a legal setting, where a defendant might, like the woman in John 8:10–11, find himself without accuser. The other New Testament uses of the word45 suggest the context of community life in general, where not even casual gossip will be able to find a word to say against the person in question. NIV takes ‘without blemish’ and ‘free from accusation’ as explaining the meaning of ‘holy’. RSV, which sets all three terms in parallel, is to be preferred, (a) because holiness is more than the sum of these two negatives and (b) because there is an ‘and’ preceding ‘without blemish’. When God looks at Christians (Paul is saying), he desires that they should be holy and without blemish and without reproach.
God’s purpose, then, is to create a holy people in Christ. This he has done in principle, by dealing with sin on the cross and thus already achieving reconciliation. This he is doing in practice, by refashioning their lives according to the pattern of the perfect life, that of Christ (see 3:10). This he will do in the future, when that work is complete and the church enjoys fully that which at present it awaits in hope. The present process, which begins with patient Christian living and ends with the resurrection itself, will result in Christians being presented without shame or fear before God, as glad subjects before their king.
23. This promise, like most, has a condition. The hope holds good, if Christians hold on to it: if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel. Paul knows that true Christian faith is the beginning of a life which, given by God, will be brought to completion by him (Phil. 1:6). He also knows that genuine faith is seen in patient and steadfast day-to-day Christian living, while counterfeit faith, so hard in its early stages to distinguish from the real thing, withers and dies. From God’s point of view, genuine faith is assured of continuing to the end. From the human point of view, Christians discover whether their faith is of the genuine sort only by patient perseverance, encouraged (cf. Rom. 5:1–5) by the Christian hope. There is here almost certainly a deliberate echo of 1:4–5.
The verb ‘continue’ (epimenein) often has the sense, in constructions like this, of remaining in a place or locality. It makes good sense here to take it in this way, and to see ‘the faith’ as a ‘place’ (perhaps, as we say, ‘the Christian faith’) where Christians must ‘remain’ rather than just the activity of believing. ‘The faith’ includes that activity, but goes beyond it to indicate the content of what is believed, and perhaps also the whole Christian way of life.
The words ‘established’ and ‘firm’ refer to the security, respectively, of foundations and superstructure. Painstaking work at every stage of building results in an unmovable structure. This metaphor evokes not merely the secular building trade but the founding of the people of God.46 And the ‘place’ where this structure is located is the gospel itself, the proclamation of Jesus Christ as Lord (see above, on 1:3ff.).
Having narrowed his horizons from the world as a whole to the church in Colosse, Paul broadens them again, to show the young church once more where it fits into the divine plan. This is the gospel that you heard, he writes, and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. Referring again to 1:3–8, he claims that the Colossian church, in hearing the gospel, has joined an audience that includes every creature on the earth (echoing 1:6 and 1:16). This is an extraordinary statement. Whenever we date this letter, Paul knew perfectly well when writing it that the vast majority of people in the known world of his day had not even heard the name of Jesus. What, then, did he mean?
We appear to be faced with three possible answers. (a) Either Paul is referring to a proclamation of the gospel which takes place in and through a revelation in the world of created ‘nature’ itself: or (b) he could be thinking of a single proclamation of the gospel (in the sense of an announcement of Christ’s Lordship) which, made in advance of its verbal declaration to human beings, was somehow made known to the other orders of creation: or (c) he intended this claim to be taken in an anticipatory sense; that, in Christ himself and in the fact of the Gentile mission, the gospel had in principle already been preached world-wide.
The first two interpretations seem unlikely. Even if Paul did believe in a revelation of God the Father in the world of nature (some have denied this, but it seems clear enough in Rom. 1:19ff., not to mention Acts 14:17; 17:24ff.), he never suggests that the gospel itself, the good news about Jesus Christ, has been made known in this way. Nor does the idea of an independent proclamation to the non-human creation find any echoes elsewhere in his writings. Nor would it be clear how he, Paul, could become a minister of such a proclamation, as he says in the next phrase. Romans 10:18, though sometimes read in this way, refers in context to Paul’s own Gentile mission, seen from God’s point of view as a single world-wide proclamation.
All of this strengthens the view that the third answer is correct. The aorist tense should strictly speaking be translated not ‘that has been preached’ but ‘that was preached’. The verb ke-ryssein, one of Paul’s regular words for his own activity (as in the next clause), supports the idea of a proclamation made to human beings rather than the notion of an instantaneous announcement made directly to the non-human orders of creation. God has, in principle, announced the gospel to every creature under heaven. Although, however, the proclamation is made to human beings, we would be quite wrong, in view of 1:16, 18 and 20, and the emphatic reiteration of ‘everything’ there and elsewhere in Colossians, to limit its effects to them.47 From whales to waterfalls, the whole created order has in principle been reconciled to God. Like a sovereign making a proclamation and sending off his heralds to bear it to the distant corners of his empire, God has in Jesus Christ proclaimed once and for all that the world which he made has been reconciled to him. His heralds, scurrying off to the ends of the earth with the news, are simply agents, messengers, of this one antecedent authoritative proclamation.
And Paul is among them. He has become a servant of this gospel, this message. He uses the same word, diakonos, of himself that he had used of Epaphras in 1:7. It does not carry a technical sense of particular church office. It merely describes Paul, and Epaphras, as ‘stewards’ or ‘administrators’, set apart to ‘distribute’ the gospel much as the seven ‘deacons’ in Acts 6 were set apart to distribute food.
With this, Paul concludes his long description of his thanksgiving and prayer. He has managed to include all the main themes he wishes to develop, and to set them in a context which shows that they are not mere abstract ideas or theories, but part of the living faith which he and the Colossians now share.
Paul now completes his introduction of himself, before launching into the reasoned appeal of 2:6 – 4:6. He does so with a remarkably full description of his ministry, in order apparently to ensure that the Colossians, who had until now only heard of him second-hand, would understand his reasons for writing. Having put them on the map of the divine purposes in Christ (1:21–23), Paul now places himself on that same map. His writing at the present time is not an odd or arrogant venture. His whole ministry – his suffering, preaching, teaching, hard work and prayer – has had them in view for some time, and this letter is simply one more facet of his total God-given work, which includes responsibility for them.
Any suggestion that his writing might be an act of presumption (attempting to intrude where another had first claim) is forestalled by the centrality of Christ in this passage, which is thereby linked directly to the great theme that has occupied chapter 1, up to this point. Paul’s sufferings are to be understood, in some strange sense, as not his own, but Christ’s. His preaching and teaching are God’s means of accomplishing that which he is doing in Christ. His (Paul’s) hard work is accomplished only because Christ is at work in him. And, if Christ is his motivating and energizing power, Christ is also his goal. Christ’s body is the beneficiary of his sufferings (1:24). Christ’s indwelling in his people is their hope of glory (1:27). Maturity in Christ is Paul’s ambition for every Christian (1:28). Good order in Christ is what he is glad to see in the young church (2:5). Christ himself is God’s secret plan (1:27; 2:2), revealed in every aspect of Paul’s work.
By introducing himself in this way Paul shows where his true credentials lie. He explains in the first paragraph (1:24–29) the nature of his own ministry in Christ; in the second (2:1–5), how this ministry relates to the church in Colosse. He thus follows the pattern he has already used in 1:15–20, 21–23: new creation in Christ, new creation in Colosse.
24. Elsewhere, too, Paul declares that he rejoices in his sufferings (e.g. Rom. 5:3). The idea that this suffering is somehow endured on behalf of the people to whom he writes is not unknown (2 Cor. 1:6; Eph. 3:13; cf. 2 Tim. 2:10). But this verse goes further. It seems to tie Paul’s sufferings to the sufferings of Christ himself, and in so doing raises a number of problems. How can Paul claim what surely belongs to Christ alone, namely, the vocation to suffer on behalf of others? NIV has softened this emphasis by its rendering, Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you. It is true that the word mou (‘my’), qualifying ‘sufferings’ in the original, is lacking from most manuscripts, but RSV in supplying it (‘Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake’) has only brought out the force of the definite article before ‘sufferings’, taken in the light of the whole verse and of Ephesians 3:13. How, particularly, can Paul claim that in his sufferings he is able to fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church? How can there be anything lacking in the sufferings of Christ? Supporters of rival theories of the atonement have always regarded this verse, or at least their opponents’ handling of it, with deep suspicion. But such fears are unnecessary if we understand Paul’s world of thought.
Two ideas from Paul’s Jewish understanding of God’s purposes help us to see what he means. First, there is corporate Christology, expressed in the second half of the verse by the concept of the church as Christ’s body. That which is true of Christ is true also of his people. Second, there is the concept of the Messianic woes, which Paul alludes to also in Romans 8:18–25.48 This latter idea, developed out of Old Testament hints by some intertestamental and Rabbinic writers, is part of the view (shared by Jesus and Paul) that world history is to be divided into two ages – the present (evil) age (cf. Gal. 1:4) and the age to come. When the great moment arrives for history to move from one age to the next, God’s people will suffer (so it was believed) extraordinary tribulations, which were to be understood as the birthpangs of the new age (Rom. 8:22). They are to be the accompaniment, or perhaps the foreshadowing, of the appearance of the Messiah.
Paul’s appropriation of this idea is, like all his reusing of Jewish material, reshaped by the facts of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Instead of the old and the new ages standing as it were back to back, he understood them as overlapping. Jesus’ resurrection had inaugurated the new age, but the old would continue alongside it until Jesus’ second coming. The whole of the time-span between the Lord’s resurrection and his return was, then, the period of the turn-around of the eras: and therefore the whole period would be characterized by ‘the Messianic woes’. Such suffering, indeed, is actually regarded as evidence that the sufferers really are God’s new people. That is why Paul can talk of rejoicing in his sufferings, as opposed to merely rejoicing in the midst of, or despite, them. Just as the Messiah was to be known by the path of suffering he freely chose – and is recognized in his risen body by the mark of the nails (Luke 24:39; John. 20:20, 25, 27) – so his people are to be recognized by the sufferings they endure:
And in the garden secretly,
And on the cross on high,
Should teach His brethren, and inspire
To suffer and to die.
They are not merely imitating him. They are incorporated into his life, his paradoxical new way of life.
It is in this sense that Paul can speak of filling up the afflictions of the Messiah. He is not adding to the achievement of Calvary. The word ‘afflictions’ (thlipsis in the Greek) is never, in fact, used of the cross. He is merely putting into practice the principle of which Calvary was, in one sense, the supreme outworking. He understands the vocation of the church as being to suffer; he does not arrogate this privilege to himself, as though he were independent of Christ, but rightly sees that it is his precisely because it is Christ’s, and so is he. This is what he means when he writes of suffering ‘with Christ’ (Rom. 8:17) or of sharing the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings (Phil. 3:10).
That this is the correct approach to the verse is confirmed by two other considerations. First, the interchange between Christ and Paul permeates the whole paragraph, not merely this verse; see especially 1:29. Second, the parallel passages in 2 Corinthians 1:3–7 and 4:7–12 possess, in more full and hence less cryptic expression, the same combination of elements.
Paul therefore applies to himself the same pattern, of suffering on behalf of others, that was worked out on the cross. He does not think thereby to save the Colossians from their sin and its consequences. That work is already done. But he may perhaps save them some present suffering. By drawing the enemy’s fire on to himself, he may allow the young church something of a respite from the fierce attacks they might otherwise be facing. There may also be here (though this is not provable) the idea of a fixed amount of suffering to be undergone in the dawning of the Messianic age. Paul delights to take as much of it as he can, in order to spare others. It is less probable, though some have suggested it, that in so doing he is hoping to hasten the Lord’s return. If all these ideas sound strange to modern ears, this may be not so much due to the distance between Paul and ourselves in time and culture as because the church has forgotten how to apply to itself the fact that it is the body of the crucified Messiah.
Three details – two of exegesis, one of application – remain.
The word ‘now’ at the start of the verse is not, as in English, a mere transition word (roughly equivalent to ‘well, then …’). But it is not clear whether it is (a) temporal, referring to a rejoicing which Paul has ‘now’, while in prison, as opposed to that which he had before, or (b) logical, referring to the fact that he can rejoice thus ‘now’ because of the truths he has just been rehearsing in 1:15–20. The latter seems more probable. Paul’s reasons for rejoicing will not be removed when he is released from prison.
Second, the word rendered ‘fill up’ has another preposition attached to it (i.e. the first three letters of the word antanaple-ro), which is very difficult to bring out in translation. If my interpretation of the verse is correct, the preposition ant(i) will have the effect of emphasizing that what Paul is suffering he is suffering in some way not merely on behalf of the young church but actually instead of it.
Finally, we would be wrong to think of suffering only in terms of the direct outward persecution that professing Christians sometimes undergo because of their faith. The church must, it is true, always be ready for such persecution, and must support, in prayer and practical help, those who face it. But all Christians will suffer for their faith in one way or another: if not outwardly, then inwardly, through the long, slow battle with temptation or sickness, the agonizing anxieties of Christian responsibilities for a family or a church (Paul knew these too: see 2 Cor. 1 and 2; 1 Thess. 2:17 – 3:1), the constant doubts and uncertainties which accompany the obedience of faith, and ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’, taken up as they are within the call to follow Christ. All of these, properly understood, are things to rejoice in – not casually, flippantly or superficially, but because they are signs that the present age is passing away, that the people of Jesus, the Messiah, are the children of the new age, and that the birthpangs of this new age are being worked out in them. This knowledge about the two ages, as we shall see, forms the basis of Paul’s later appeal in 2:20 – 3:4.
25. In verse 23 Paul described himself as the servant of the gospel. Here, with an enviable balance, he sees himself as the servant of the church. He has a special responsibility towards the Colossians, just as the steward of a great house might be entrusted by his master with responsibility of attending to the needs of his guests: I have become its (i.e. the church’s) servant by the commission God gave me. His task is simply stated: to present to you the word of God in its fullness, or, more literally, ‘to fulfil the word of God’. We should not restrict this phrase, as NIV seems to do, to the preaching of the ‘whole counsel of God’ (Acts 20:27, RSV). Nor is it a matter simply of ‘making the word of God fully known’, as RSV translates. ‘The word of God’ is, for Paul, a power let loose in the world, embodied in the true gospel message (see 1:6). It must be allowed to have its full effect, to be ‘fulfilled’ in that sense.
26–27. This is confirmed by Paul’s further definition of ‘the word of God’ as the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations but is now disclosed to the saints … (namely) Christ in you, the hope of glory. Here again we have Jewish ideas rethought in the light of the gospel. In their looking forward to the day when God would act in history to restore the fortunes of his people, some Jewish seers expressed their hopes in terms of the ‘secret plans’ that God was reserving for the last great day.49 The word ‘mystery’ is properly to be understood against this background. It is unlikely that the word contains a veiled allusion, or an implicit challenge, to pagan mysterycults,50 and quite certain that it does not mean (as the English word ‘mystery’ often does) something merely puzzling or paradoxical. It is God’s secret plan, anticipated in visions and symbols by holy men of old, and now at last unveiled before all his people (‘the saints’ here is not a restricted group within the church, but, as regularly, the whole people of God). We may compare 1 Corinthians 2:7: ‘we speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began’.
God’s secret plan is not, for Paul, a timetable of events, but a person. We see here the outworking of the Christology of 1:15–20. All that God has from the beginning planned to do he has done, and is doing, in Christ, for the sake of his people: to them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery. These phrases should perhaps be turned around to bring out the emphasis of the Greek: a literal translation might be ‘to them God wished to make known what is the richness of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles’ (NIV seems to make ‘to them’ redundant by appearing to let ‘among the Gentiles’ qualify ‘make known’ instead of ‘this mystery’). At the centre of the mystery stands the revelation, in Christ, that God’s purposes were not to be restricted to the Jews, but were to embrace the entire world. It is this fact, for Paul, that reveals the ‘riches of the glory’ of God’s plan. God is revealed in Jesus Christ as the Lord of the whole world, its sovereign and loving Creator and Redeemer. Looking into his astonishing plans is – according to the metaphor Paul has used – like exploring a palace richly stocked with treasures, each one revealing more fully than the last the majesty of the owner.
Among these treasures is the fact that God’s glory is to be shared with his people (cf. Rom. 5:2).51 This hope of glory is a certainty because of the mystery itself, which is Christ in you. This could be taken as ‘Christ among you’ (the ‘you’ is plural), its emphasis being that of the immediately preceding phrase, ‘among the Gentiles’. The fact that the Jewish Messiah has made his abode among the nations of the world shows that God intends their ultimate glorification. But, though this sense is thoroughly Pauline, it is probably better to take the phrase in the sense of Romans 8:10, where the indwelling of Christ in believers is their guarantee of resurrection. It should be noted that, although ‘Christ in you’ can be truly predicated of all who are ‘in Christ’, and vice versa, these two ideas are not the same. Christ indwells, by his Spirit, all those who, in belonging to his family, are said to be ‘in him’. Romans 8:1–11 provides good examples of both ideas: so do verses 1:27–28 of our present passage.
28–29. Christ’s design (v. 22) is to ‘present’ his people to God, holy and without reproach. Paul’s aim, derived from this, is that he may present everyone perfect in Christ. The parallel reveals again how closely Paul related God’s purpose and his own vocation. It is because God is at work that Paul is at work. The paradox, capturing so neatly the correct balance between divine sovereignty and human responsibility in the work of Christian ministry, comes to a head in verse
29. To this end I labour; but, whereas human logic would see this as a statement of mere human effort (and effort it is: the word used refers to uncompromising hard work), the higher logic of God’s work in human beings recognizes a deeper truth; struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me, i.e. the energy of God’s Spirit at work in Paul (the whole thought is very close to that of 1 Cor. 15:10). The word ‘struggling’, whose root can mean ‘to compete in the games’, carries, as often in Paul, the idea of athletic contest: Paul does not go about his work half-heartedly, hoping vaguely that grace will fill in the gaps which he is too lazy to work at himself. Nor, however, does he imagine that it is ‘all up to him’, so that unless he burns himself out with restless, anxious toil nothing will be achieved. He knows that God’s desire is to bring Christians to maturity, and that God has called him to have a share in that work. He can therefore work hard without the stressful motivation of either pride or fear. He thus becomes an example of that maturity, both human and Christian, that he seeks under God to produce in others.
The work consists in proclaiming him, i.e. Christ. This proclamation has a twofold aspect, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, and a definite goal, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ. Actually ‘everyone’ is repeated three times, occurring after ‘admonishing’ as well. This emphasizes that every single Christian is capable of the maturity of which Paul speaks, since, though it involves ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’, these are not to be weighed in the scale of ordinary human intellectual ability, but are of an altogether different order (cf. 1 Cor. 2:6–16). (This is not to say that this knowledge and wisdom will not stretch the finest intellects to the very limits of their capacities.) ‘Him we proclaim’: these words serve, for Christian preachers and teachers, as a constant reminder of their central calling, not (first and foremost) to comment on current affairs or to alleviate human problems, good and necessary as those activities may be, but to announce that Jesus is Lord.
This announcement will, in its detailed application, include ‘admonishing’ as well as positive ‘teaching’. The first word (nouthetountes), though sometimes understood as meaning simply ‘putting into the mind’, most likely includes the idea of the setting of someone’s mind into proper order, with the implication that it has been in some way out of joint. Positive teaching may not be enough: there is no telling what muddles Christian minds will get into from time to time, and part of the task of one who proclaims Christ is to straighten out confusions, to search for and tie together correctly the loose ends of half-grasped ideas, so that the positive teaching may not be instantly distorted upon reception, but may be properly understood, appreciated and lived out. Then it is that the goal of maturity (not ‘perfection’ in the sense of sinlessness, as Phil. 3:13– 14 makes clear) may be in sight. This goal is possible ‘in Christ’: the Image of God himself now lives in his people by his Spirit (1:8), working secretly until their life and his are indistinguishable in their basic character, in true humanity (1:27; 3:10).
2:1–2a. The reason Paul has told them all this (2:1 should, despite NIV’s omission, begin with the word ‘for’, as in RSV) is that I want you to know how much I am struggling for you and for those at Laodicea,52 and for all who have not met me personally. It is important that the new Christians in Colosse, and for that matter at nearby Laodicea (who had had their own letter: see the commentary on 4:16) should realize that, though they have never met Paul, he has long been working on their behalf. The word ‘struggling’, continuing the athletic metaphor of 1:29, reemphasizes that this has been no light task.
Paul then elaborates further the meaning of maturity. My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding. NIV has here slightly obscured the relation of the clauses: ‘united’ properly governs not only ‘in love’ but also the next phrase, which literally means ‘and unto all the wealth of conviction of understanding’. In other words, while the process of knitting together the church into a united body clearly includes the growth of love, it also includes the growth, on the part of the whole community, of that proper understanding of the gospel which leads to the rich blessings of a settled conviction and assurance. Living in a loving and forgiving community will assist growth in understanding, and vice versa, as truth is confirmed in practice and practice enables truth to be seen in action and so to be fully grasped (cf. 1:9–11). All of this promotes the encouragement, comfort and strengthening of the heart, regarded metaphorically then as now as the seat of affections and the mainspring of actions.
2b–3. But what does ‘complete understanding’ mean? Paul explains: he is working in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ,53 in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. This is both a comfort and a challenge to Christians. They do not need to look for wisdom or knowledge elsewhere than to the one they already possess, but at the same time they have a long way to go if they are to explore and make their own the rich inheritance they have entered into. For God’s ‘mystery’ see above, on 1:26. Here the idea is spelt out in terms of the Christology of 1:15–20. Christ sums up in himself all that the Jews predicated of ‘Wisdom’ (cf. Prov. 2:1– 8, whose LXX translation is echoed several times in our present passage). Christ himself is ‘the mystery of God’: not just a clue or a key to it, as though it were something other than himself, a proposition which, however true, remained abstract. Everything we might want to ask about God and his purposes can and must now be answered – this is the force of the verse – with reference to the crucified and risen Jesus, the Messiah. Paul’s repeated descriptions of such understanding as ‘riches’ or ‘treasure’ invite his readers to explore it with eagerness.
4–5. I tell you this – that is, I make these central and all-embracing claims – so that no-one may deceive you by fine-sounding arguments. Paul does not say that the Colossians have already been deceived, but from long experience he knows that a work of grace is followed by an attack from the enemy, and that one regular form this attack may take is the clever plausibility of teaching near enough to the truth to be apparently respectable and far enough away from it to be devastating in its effect on individuals and congregations. This is the first definite indication Paul gives that his letter is going to contain negative as well as positive teaching. Again the note struck – as frequently in Colossians – is the importance of clear and straight thinking. It is by spurious arguments that such teachers win the day, and valid arguments, based on the centrality of Jesus Christ, are the proper weapons with which to meet them.
Paul, himself a master theologian, assures the Colossians that he is undertaking this task on their behalf in writing this letter: for though I am absent from you in body, I am present with you in spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 5:3; 1 Thess. 2:17). At the moment he is happy with what he sees: and delight to see how orderly you are and how firm your faith in Christ is. ‘Orderly’ and ‘firm’ are most probably military metaphors: the church is drawn up in proper battle array with a solid wall of defence, namely, its faith in Christ. Paul is there in spirit, like a general inspecting the troops before a battle. It is possible that the two words joined together in NIV’s ‘delighting to see’ should in fact be kept separate:54 Paul is rejoicing not merely because of the church’s proper battle preparations but, as in 1:3ff., because of the many things that God has accomplished among them. He is glad in the Lord to be with them, and is keeping careful watch on their readiness for the spiritual, and consequently intellectual, warfare into which they may shortly be plunged.
We come now to the central section of the epistle. It has certain clear paragraph divisions, but one should not think that each paragraph deals with a separate watertight topic. The whole section is bound together by various important themes – most noticeably, of course, the centrality of Christ – and is thereby integrated also with the long introduction we have just studied.
The line of thought moves by a process of growth and development. The opening statement (2:6–7) serves as a summary of all that is to come.1 (The main subdivision falls at the start of ch. 3: it would be too simple to see 2:8–23 as negative teaching and 3:1 – 4:6 as positive, though there would be some truth in that.) 2:8–12 provides the initial warning against false teaching and the basic reason for opposing it: having been baptized into Christ, Christians are already complete in him. 2:13–15 applies this to the Colossians’ situation, as Gentile Christians for whom Christ’s victory on the cross means freedom from the tyranny of alien forces. 2:16–19, in turn, applies this latter point: no-one can deny the Colossians their status within the Body of Christ. 2:20–23 then warns against the false means of attaining holiness that such a rival scheme might promote, and 3:1–4, balancing this, sets out the true alternative. Having died with Christ and been raised with him (2:20 – 3:4 thus draws out the implications of 2:12), Christians are not to be governed by the kind of rules that properly belong in the old age. Instead, they are to live the life appropriate to the new age. This will mean (3:5–11) putting to death the behaviour which belongs to their former life, and (3:12–17) replacing it with that which characterizes the true humanity given in Christ. This truly human behaviour is to characterize both home life and Christian witness before the world (3:18 – 4:6).
This general summary holds true, I believe, whatever view is taken of the particular teaching Paul is opposing. Of that much-debated question I have given an account in the Introduction (see above, pp. 25–33). I there suggested that the teaching in question is not (as often supposed) a strange amalgam of Judaism and paganism. It is in fact Judaism itself, portrayed (as we saw that it sometimes portrayed itself) in the guise of ‘just another religion’, which might appear attractive to those who, having left paganism behind to join the church, might be tempted to see Judaism as the fulfilment of Christianity instead of vice versa.2 I believe that the detailed exegesis of the present passage will provide strong support for this view. At the same time I trust that if any remain unpersuaded by my arguments, and prefer to adopt one or other of the alternative analyses (there is at present no scholarly consensus whatever on the matter), they will still find this section of the commentary helpful.
6–7. These two verses sum up neatly the message of the entire letter. In them Paul draws together the awesome Christology of the introduction and the practical teaching that is to be based on it: So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him. The emphasis, in the light of the letter’s long introduction, must be: it is this Christ (God’s Image, God’s Wisdom, God’s Mystery) that you have ‘received’ in becoming Christians. Moreover, this Christ is none other than the crucified and risen Jesus, now exalted as Lord. Each of the three parts of the phrase ‘Christ Jesus … Lord’ is thus to be given its proper weight.
But what does Paul mean by ‘receiving’ Christ? Here we must guard against anachronism. In popular language today the phrase ‘to receive Christ’ often expresses that conception of becoming a Christian which focuses on the new believer’s invitation to Jesus Christ to enter into his or her heart and life. Such an idea is powerful and evocative, and relates closely to the Pauline doctrine of Christ dwelling in the hearts of his people (Rom. 8:9–10; Eph. 3:17). The difficulty here is that Paul’s phrase ‘to receive Christ’ almost certainly carries quite different overtones. The verb ‘receive’ (paralambano-) is sometimes used in a technical sense, taken over from Judaism, referring to the transmission of teaching from one person or generation to another: compare ‘just as you were taught’ in the next verse.3 There are, in addition, several hints in the passage to suggest that he has the moment, and significance, of baptism in mind. The phrase ‘Christ Jesus the Lord’ corresponds closely to the early confessional formula ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ (Phil. 2:11; cf. Rom. 10:9; 1 Cor. 12:3), which converts would profess at their baptism. Paul mentions baptism explicitly in verse 12, and various related ideas occur elsewhere in this passage (see below). All this points to the probability that by ‘receiving Christ Jesus as Lord’ Paul here refers to the Colossian Christians’ acceptance of the proclamation of Jesus the Lord, to their consequent confession of faith, and to their new status as members of Christ’s body (see 2:19). All of these became theirs when (greatly daring in their pagan context) they took their stand of faith and submitted to Christian initiation.
Those who have (in this technical sense) ‘received Christ Jesus as Lord’ must continue to live in him: NIV thus brings out well the continuous force of the present imperative. The English word ‘live’ is ambiguous: it could mean life itself or ethical behaviour. Here, however, Paul’s meaning is clear. Literally, the word means ‘walk’, which, in Jewish thought (see on 1:10, above) was and is the standard term for ethical conduct. Here the emphasis is on the sort of conduct appropriate for one who claims Jesus as Lord. This, the ultimate goal of Paul’s argument, will be spelt out (3:1–4:6) after he has warned against a road which turns out to be a blind alley.
The new sort of behaviour has become a possibility for those who, having received Christ Jesus as Lord, are rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. How many of these metaphors were still ‘live’ for Paul it is hard to say. Even he must have had difficulty imagining Christians ‘walking’ in Christ by being well rooted like a tree, solidly built like a house, confirmed and settled like a legal document, and overflowing like a jug full of wine. Each of the images, nevertheless, has its own point to make. It is particularly worth noting that, whereas ‘rooted’ is an aorist, indicating a once-for-all planting of the Christian ‘in’ Christ, ‘built up’ is in the present, suggesting continual growth – an important theme in this letter to a very young church. It is grammatically uncertain whether, by ‘strengthened in the faith’, Paul means that their faith should itself become stronger, or that they should become stronger (in other respects) by means of their faith, or that they should become stronger in their grasp of ‘the faith’, i.e. Christianity as a whole. Paul could have said any of these: the immediate reference to the teaching they had received indicates that the last is probably correct. Thankfulness, filling the church so full that it constantly spills over, is placed in this letter at the centre of Christian living (see 1:2ff.; 3:15, 17; 4:2). As we saw above, gratitude to God is to be the main characteristic of God’s people, ‘a sign that they are indeed living in the new age’.4 The church that learns truly to worship God is a church growing to full maturity. Paul has already given the Colossians plenty of reasons why they should thank God, and will shortly give them still more.