Colossians 1:15-28 Commentary

My maternal grandfather had to drop out of school after completing the sixth grade in order to help his widowed mother provide for his ten siblings. Yet while his formal education was limited, my Grandpa Steenbergen remained a lifelong learner. His almost insatiable appetite for learning made him a voracious reader.

One of the books my grandpa kept next to his easy chair was J.B. Philipp’s Your God Is Too Small. I’ve never actually read the book. In fact, I was too young to even engage my grandfather in a discussion of it (though I regret never having done so). But the title, Your God Is Too Small came to mind as I re-read this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson. After all, it sometimes seems as if it’s not just Christians’ understanding of the Triune God that’s too small. Our understanding of the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ also sometimes appears to be too small.

Consider, after all, the Son of God’s roles we choose to emphasize. Many brothers and sisters in Christ readily profess that Jesus is our Lord and Savior. That profession is not wrong. After all, it’s through Christ’s life, death and resurrection that God graciously rescued us from slavery to Satan, sin and death. And yet as Colossians 1 reminds us, he is also so very much more than our Savior.

Some Christians emphasize how Jesus cared for people on society’s margins. He modelled and embodied grace by constantly reaching out to people whom others ignored or even condemned. Other Christians prefer to think of Jesus as a prophet who called out people who claimed to love God but actually loved religious trappings, others’ attention and themselves more. Still other Christians emphasize Christ’s lordship over creation. And yet as Colossians 1 reminds us, he is also so very much more.

Preachers want to let the Spirit shape how exhaustive we choose to be in describing shrunken Christologies. However, it may be a more productive use of our time to spend virtually all of it proclaiming Paul’s extraordinary characterization of Jesus the Christ. While that task is enormous, it’s a vital one for Jesus’ 21^st century friends.

After all, it’s not just that a shrunken Christology limits and sometimes even perverts the scope of our understanding of who Jesus is. A limited understanding of who Christ is also limits our understanding of the scope of his care. That potentially limits how Jesus’ friends choose to faithfully respond to God’s amazing grace in and through him.

We perhaps especially glimpse the enormous scope of Christ’s work, care and interest in this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s repeated use of Greek words that we generally translate as “all.” It virtually begins with several references to the creation. In verse 15b Paul calls Christ “the firstborn [prototokos] over all [pases] creation [ktiseos].”

Preachers can admit that this is a mysterious profession. It’s likely related to the place of honor and responsibility that eldest sons, including Rome’s emperor, held in Paul’s day. So the apostle is asserting that Jesus rather than the emperor holds the place of both highest honor and responsibility in God’s creation. Christ doesn’t just lovingly rule over his individual followers as well as his Body that is the Church. He is also firstborn over every square inch of God’s creation.

Paul, in fact, fleshes out Jesus’ relationship to the whole creation in verses 16 and following. “In” Christ,” the apostle writes there, “all things [panta] were created [ektisthe]: things in heaven and on earth, visible [horata] and invisible [aorata], whether thrones [thronoi] or powers [kyrotetes] or rulers [archai] or authorities [exousai]; all things are created in and for him. He is before all things [pro panton], and in him all things hold together [synesteken].”

Preachers might note a couple of things about this reference to the scope of Christ’s involvement with all created things that is one of the most breathtaking professions in all of the Scriptures. Paul insists that everything that was created was created en (“in”) Christ. That includes both what can and can’t be seen. That which was created “in … through … and for Christ” even includes people, institutions and places over which people and powers claim to have dominion.

In a letter that Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat (Colossians Remixed, InterVarsity Press, 2004) call a direct challenge to the Roman Empire and its emperor, this assertion is a dangerous one for Jesus’ friends who live in various empires. Empires and emperors, after all, often claim to create and control all things. They, as a result, claim their citizens’ complete loyalty and submission. Paul makes a radically different claim. He insists that Christ, not any empire or emperor is supreme. In, through and for Christ, all things were not just created but also continue to hold together.

Yet, of course, part of Paul’s claim about Christ’s relationship to all that is created is a bit puzzling. After all, most Christians have traditionally ascribed the work of creation of heaven and earth to God the Father. With the Church down through the ages and across the world, we’ve professed our belief “in God the Father, maker of the heavens and the earth.”

But perhaps Paul’s assertion of Christ’s creative work is part of his response to Colossae’s Christians’ confusion about the relationship between God the Father and Son. As much as we struggle to fully understand just what we mean when we profess God is Triune, the Colossians seemed to struggle with it even more. So Paul may be teaching them little more than that Jesus was the Son of God who played his own role in the Triune God’s creation of all things.

In verse 15a the apostle seems to bolster that claim by professing Christ is “the image [eikon] of the invisible [aoratou] God.” While Jesus shares that image-bearing with people, we naturally so deeply blur that image that it’s sometimes almost unrecognizable. Jesus, by contrast, is the perfect image of God. When Jesus’ contemporaries saw him in the flesh and we “see” him in the Scriptures, we see the God whom no human being can live to tell about seeing.

In verse 19 Paul makes a related claim about the Supreme Christ’s divinity. “God,” he writes there, “was pleased [eudokesen] to have all his fullness [pleroma] dwell [katoikesai] in him.” This echoes verse 15’s claim that Jesus isn’t some lesser god or junior member of the Trinity. Jesus is fully God. “Everything of God,” as The Message paraphrases this profession, “finds its proper place in him without crowding.”

Yet it isn’t just the whole creation over which Paul insists Christ reigns supreme. While the apostle doesn’t use a form of the word “all” in describing Christ’s supremacy over his Church, he implies it in what he writes about it. In verse 18 Paul professes Christ is “the head [kephale] of the body [somatos], the church [ekklesias]; he is the beginning [arche] and the firstborn [prototokos] from the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy [proteuon].”

This profession is, candidly, sometimes easier to make than live out. Who would dare to claim, after all, that anyone or anything but Christ is the head of the whole Church? Yet Jesus’ friends are naturally tempted to act as though things including tradition and theology call out the Church’s marching orders. In that context, the apostle continues to summon Jesus’ individual friends as well as his whole Church to submit both ourselves and every part of Christ’s Body to our Head, Jesus the Christ.

Part of Jesus’ role in the whole Church and creation is to piece back together who and what human sinfulness has broken. Parts of verses 21-22’s talk about that reconciling work in and with God’s people is familiar. “Once you were alienated [apellotriomenous] from God and were enemies [echthrous] in your mind [dianoia] because of your evil [ponerois] behavior [ergois],” Paul writes there. In other words, even Jesus’ closest friends naturally choose to make ourselves God’s enemies.

“But now,” Paul goes on to celebrate, God “has reconciled [apokatellaxen] you by Christ’s physical body [somati tes sarkos] through death [thanatou] to present you holy [hagious] in his sight [katenopion autou], without blemish [amomous] and free from accusation [anenkletous].” Here the apostle reminds his sometimes unholy, flawed and guilty readers that Christ lived, died and rose again to make each and every one of us God’s adopted children. While all of Jesus’ followers naturally choose to use our bodies to act and even think in sinful ways, Christ used his body to reconcile us to God.

Yet Paul professes Christ’s reconciling work wasn’t done when he made us God’s children. After all, in verse 20 he goes on to write how God was pleased, “through [di’] [Christ] to reconcile [apokatallaxai] to himself all things [panta], whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace [eirenopoiesas] through [dia] his blood [haimatos] shed on the cross [staurou].”

In a passage that Paul packs with breathtaking and startling imagery, this profession may be the most dazzling – and at least somewhat mysterious – of all. He notes how the relationship between all of creation, its creatures and God was somehow broken. We might even say all created things were alienated from God.

Yet Paul insists Christ gave everything to restore a healthy relationship between God, the entire creation and every one of its creatures. Jesus didn’t, in other words, just give his life in order to save God’s adopted children’s souls. He also surrendered everything to both rescue the entire creation and restore its right relationship with God.

Our Jesus is too small if we fail to recognize his interest in and sovereignty over every created thing. Yet once the Spirit begins to broaden our understanding of Christ’s supremacy in and over all things, we’re freed to live as those for and about whom he deeply cares. This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s emphasis on Christ’s reconciling work may, in fact, especially summon us to work for reconciliation not just between God, creation and its creatures, but also between fellow image-bearers of God.

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

Illustration

In her essay entitled “Wilderness” in her book, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, Marilynne Robinson muses on the connection between human sinfulness and creation’s fallenness. She notes, “The oldest anecdotes from which we know ourselves as human, the stories of Genesis, make it clear that our defects are sufficient to bring the whole world down.

“For decades, environmentalists have concerned themselves with this spill and that encroachment, this depletion and that extinction, as if such phenomena were singular and exceptional. Our causes have even jostled for attention, each claiming a special urgency. This is, I think, like quarreling over which shadow brings evening.

“[In] Utah, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico wilderness is where people want to hide things, like nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. Hide them not only from ‘foreign enemies’ but also from ‘domestic critics. Those who live in the wilderness are ‘poor and scattered’ and don’t count so much as critics. But even the wilderness itself can accept insult and contain it only to a degree … Utah is holy land to Mormons, and a nuclear waste dump to the rest of us.”