Colossians 1:1-14 Commentary

This is a fruitful season of the year in the world’s northern hemisphere. So my wife and I thoroughly enjoy watching freshly picked fruit and vegetables appear at our local farmstand. While most of our local strawberry plants have finished bearing fruit for the season, we’re now enjoying delicious peaches that have been harvested from a local orchard.

As preachers humbly submit to the Spirit’s guidance, we might choose to view this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson through the lens of a kind of “fruitfulness”. Bearing fruit is, after all, one of Colossians’ 1’s themes. Paul, in fact, uses some form of the word twice (and alludes to it one more time) in the span of four verses.

“The gospel,” he celebrates in verse 6, “is bearing fruit [karpophoroumenon*] and growing [auxanomenon] throughout the whole world – just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood [epegnote] God’s grace.” The apostle’s allusion to fruitfulness lies in the fact that auxanomenon (“growing”) and karpophoroumenon (“bearing fruit”) are almost synonymous.

Then in verse 10 Paul goes on to pray that Colossae’s Christians will join the gospel in continuing to be fruitful. There he writes, “May [you] live a life worthy [axios] of the Lord and may [you] please [areskeian] him in every way: bearing fruit [karphorountes] in every good work [panti ergo agatho].”

This Sunday’s Old Testament lesson also uses fruitful imagery to describe God’s work in God’s Israelite people’s lives. In Deuteronomy 30:9 Moses tells the recently freed Israelites, “The Lord your God will make you most prosperous in all the work of your hands and in the fruit (italics added) of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your lands.” Reflecting on this link between two of this Sunday’s readings, the biblical scholar Brian Walsh, to whom I’m indebted for some ideas for this commentary notes, “In the biblical imagination fruitfulness is always connected to faithfulness while disobedience and idolatry invariably results in fruitlessness.”

With that in mind, preachers might note a couple of points Paul makes about the faithful Colossians’ fruitfulness in Colossians 1:1-14. It is a cause for his deep gratitude to God. “We always [pantote] thank [Eucharistoumen] God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ when we pray for you [proseuchomenoi],” he writes in verses 3-4, “because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love [agapen] you have for all of God’s people.” That at least suggests that fruitfulness that is faithful obedience bears the kind of “fruit” that is thanksgiving in other Christians.

Paul goes on to suggest the Colossians’ faith is, by the power of the Holy Spirit, also bearing a second kind of fruit. Their faith isn’t just public. It’s also impacting the way they respond to their Christian neighbors. The Colossian Christians’ faith, implies Paul, bears the “fruit” that is their self-giving and -sacrificial love for all of their brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ.

In fact, Paul goes on to write in verse 5, the Colossians’ faith and love are themselves, in a sense, “fruit.” “We always thank God,” he writes in verses 3 and following, “because we have heard [akousantes] of your faith [pistin] in Christ Jesus and of the love [agapen] you have for all God’s people … that spring from the hope [elpida] stored up [apokeimenen] for you in heaven and about which you have already heard [proekousate] in the true message of the gospel.”

It’s almost as if Paul suggests that the reservoir of heavenly hope God has stored up for God’s beloved children is so deep that it helps feed not just our faith, but also our love for God and our neighbor. That means that God doesn’t just grace us with hope in order to give us courage for the way ahead. God also gives Jesus’ friends hope in order to equip us to bless our neighbors with self-giving and unconditional hope.

In fact, the apostle adds in verse 6, that gospel through which we heard about our hope is itself bearing fruit. “The gospel is bearing fruit [karpophoroumenon] and growing [auxanomenon] throughout the whole world – just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood [epegnote aletheia] God’s grace.”

The gospel isn’t just a set of propositions about the impact of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. It’s also a kind of power. The gospel doesn’t just give us hope for our future, both now and eternally. It also by the Holy Spirit produces both conversions and faithfulness that honors God and blesses our neighbors.

Yet Paul insists the fruit that is obedience that grows out of the Colossians’ hope isn’t some new, still only half-ripe fruit that’s hard and sour. It is instead, he claims, as old as the Colossians’ faith. In fact, the apostle adds, Christian hope isn’t just fruitful in the lives of Colossae’s Christians. It’s also bearing fruit across the whole world. Once the Spirit helps Jesus’ followers understand the gospel, it impacts the whole world that God so passionately loves.

The Message paraphrases this as “The Message is as true among you today as when you first heard it. It doesn’t diminish or weaken over time. It’s the same all over the world. The Message bears fruit and gets larger and stronger, just as it has in you.”

Yet the Spirit also inspired Paul to keep praying that the Spirit would bear even more fruit in the Colossian Christians’ lives. In verse 9 he goes on to write, “We have not stopped [paumetha] praying [proseuchomenoi] for you. We continually ask [aitoumenoi] God to fill you [plerothete] with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom [sophia] and understanding [synesei] that the Spirit gives.”

Jesus’ friends’ understanding of God and God’s ways remains incomplete even in the most mature Christian. So we might think of verse 9 as Paul’s invitation to join him in continuing to pray that the Spirit will give God’s adopted children what The Message paraphrases as “wise minds and spirits attuned to [God’s] will.”

But as the apostle goes on to remind us, we don’t long for such a deeper understanding of God and God’s ways just for the sake of accumulating more knowledge. God’s dearly beloved people also long for a fuller understanding so that our lives may bear more fruit. In verses 11-12 Paul prays that the Christians in the church in Colossae may “have great endurance [pasan hypomonen] and patience [makrothymian], and giving joyful thanks [eucharistountes] to the Father, who has qualified [hikanosanti] you to share [menda] in the inheritance [klerou] of his holy people [hagion] in the kingdom of light.”

The apostle longs for Jesus’ followers’ deepened understanding to, by the power of the Holy Spirit, bear a harvest of grace. That harvest includes persistent endurance, grateful patience and joyful thanksgiving for God’s rescue of us from slavery to Satan, sin and death.

Preachers might note a couple of things about the fruitfulness that Paul celebrates and for which he prays in this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson. While the apostle mentions the Holy Spirit only once, Christians always remember the Spirit plays a vital role in the fruitfulness to which God calls us. Faith and love (4) are gifts from the Holy Spirit. Even their resulting from the hope God gives us isn’t automatic. Our hope produces faith and love only by the power of the Holy Spirit.

What’s more, by longing for the Colossians’ understanding of God’s way to produce deepened Christlikeness, Paul isn’t being anti-intellectual or -theology. He’s, instead, reminding us that such understanding isn’t an end in and of itself. The Spirit longs for that understanding to result in deeper love for God above all and our neighbors as ourselves.

The Spirit, in fact, actually both longs for that greater holiness and equips Jesus’ followers for it. So Christians study the Scriptures not just so that we may know God better. We also study them so that the Spirit can graciously produce us in greater fruits of faithful obedience that both honors God and blesses our neighbors.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

Khosru is an Iranian refugee attending school in Oklahoma who’s the main character in Daniel Nayeri’s marvelous work of fiction, Everything Sad is Untrue. He understands something about hope’s fruitfulness (5). He says, “I don’t know how my mom was so unstoppable despite all that stuff happening. I dunno. Maybe it’s anticipation.

“Hope.

“The anticipation that the God who listens in love will one day speak justice.

“The hope that some final fantasy will come to pass that will make everything Sad Untrue.

“Unpainful.

“That across rivers of sewage and blood will be a field of yellow flowers blooming. You can get lost there and still be unafraid. No one will chant you off of it. It’s yours. A father who loves you planted it for you. A mother who loves you watered it. And maybe there are other people who are there, but they are all kind. Or better than that, they are right with each other. They treat each other right.

“If you have that, maybe you keep moving forward.

“Imagine you’re in a refugee camp and you know it’ll be a year or more before anything happens. It’s going to be a tough year. But for the person who thinks, ‘At the end of this year, I’m going somewhere to be free, a place without secret police, free to believe whatever I want and teach my children.’ And you believe it’ll be hard, but eventually you’ll build a whole new life — that’s like winning the lottery. It’s like saying you’ll get one hundred million dollars at the end of the year.

“But if you’re thinking every place is the same, and there will always be people who abuse you, and about how poor you’ll be at first. The sadness overtakes you; it’s like saying you’ll get soup and a sandwich at the end of the year, and that’s it.

“Here’s the thing, you’ll both have the same year at [the refugee camp] Hotel Barba. But one of you will be looking around with joy and anticipation, wondering what you can do to prepare your kids for the new world. And the other will be slumped in the courtyard, surrendered to the idea that it’s all one long river of blood. I don’t know which belief is true — nobody does. But what you believe about the future will change how you live in the present” (italics added).