Colossians 1:15-20 Review and Expositor, 87 (1990)

Colossians 1:15-20
Eduard Schweizer
In Colossians 1:15-20 the author of the letter1 quotes a hymn, probably known to and often sung by the addressees.2 What do we do when we sing a hymn? In preaching or teaching we face those around us and try to bring something home to them. It is our audience, its needs and longings and temptations that shape our speech. We have to say what our message means for them, how it changes and challenges their existence, how it solves their problems, or comforts them in their bereavements. Praying is closer to singing, but still the praying person or community usually plays quite a role in it. We give thanks for what God has done in our lives and we ask him to grant us what we, perhaps including the whole church or mankind, need. In singing a hymn we face Him, God or Christ, himself. Sure, we are also in the picture; it is we that sing the hymn, and this singing is in itself an expression of our faith. We may even mention our wants and what the Lord has done for us. There is no need, however, to explain to God or Christ how strong or weak our faith is and what it would need. Everything is focused on him, and him alone, especially in a hymn in the strict sense of the word, in a hymn of praise. Nothing and nobody, not even we ourselves, should obscure this focus. He is important, not we, not even our faith or sin. Thus, our hymn praises Christ in a first stanza as "the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation, in whom, through whom, to whom all things were created," in a second stanza as "the beginning, the first-born from the dead, in whom, through whom, to whom all things were reconciled." A short middle stanza says: "And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together, and He is the head of the body." Between creation and reconciliation nothing is mentioned of the fall of man. The singing community does not need to tell Christ about this, or about its repentance and belief, he knows all that. They are singing face to face to him, the creator and the reconciler, praising him jubilantly for being this. There is no need to speak about how his creatures on our earth today still oppose what he has already fulfilled. The singing community is, in the act of singing, with him, beyond space and time, and sees only what he has done, once and for all. The times of adoration, in which we are, individually or corporately, living face to face to Christ, seeing him as he was, is, and will be, forgetting many other facts that are also true, form a dimension of the life of faith that cannot be neglected without detriment to the church.

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The Original Hymn, Interpreted by the Author

The author of the letter does not sing; he is teaching. Therefore, he must also speak of what this means for the community and its relations within the world. In the hymn, the only subject of the verbs is "He" (Christ), and the only object "all things."3 The introduction in verses 11-14 and the comments in verses 21-23 speak of "you" and "we." This is the concern of the author. Thus, it is quite natural and to be expected that he inserts some interpreting glosses into the hymn that refer to the church in Colossae and its situation.4 The first addition is, very probably, the word "the church" in verse 18. The second stanza, referring to the resurrection, starts only after this sentence. The idea of Christ as "the head" of the body is new. In 1 Corinthians 12:21 the head is just one of the members of the body. In Hellenistic texts, including Philo (the Jewish philosopher, contemporary of Jesus), the world is seen as the divine or great "body" governed by its "head," Heaven or Zeus (the highest God) or his Logos ("Word" or "Mind" as in John 1:1!). This suggests that the hymn thought of Christ as the head of the cosmos,5 of which the first stanza exclusively speaks. The author of the letter, however, wants to remind the addressees that it is only in the church that this intimate communion of head and body takes place.6 The second gloss is to be found in verse 20. Verses 18-19 refer to Christ's resurrection as the beginning of the new creation as the saving event that reconciled "all things" to God. The author of the letter reminds the Colossians that it is the death of Christ which reconciled them. He expands this thought in verses 21-23, where he repeats the verb "to reconcile,"7 substituting, however, "you" for "all things." The wording of verse 20 still shows that the reference to the cross has been added to the original sentence. It runs literally: "... through him to reconcile to him all things (making peace by the blood of his crossthrough him) whether that on earth or that in heaven." The second "through him" takes up, after the gloss, the same phrase in the original hymn. It is, of course, not impossible that other phrases may stem from the author of the letter, for instance the list of thrones, dominions, principalities, and authorities in verse 16 or the final clause at the end of verse 18, but this remains uncertain.

The Message of the Original Hymn: God in Nature

Can we detect God in nature? Might it even be better to go to hiking or surfing or skiing instead of going to a church service? There are three, slightly different, answers in the New Testament. According to Acts 17:24-29 Paul, in his Areopagus speech, emphasized that man could, but did not see God's work in creation. Therefore, God "overlooked the times of ignorance" and has sent "a man by whom he will judge the world," and legitimated his call to repentance by raising him from the dead. Romans 1:21-23 even states that men did know God from what they saw in his creation, but that they perverted their knowledge to idolatry, because they claimed to be wisewhich is the sin of the gentiles, as claiming to be righteous is the sin of the Jews. The third answer is that of Colos-

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Colossians 1:15-20 Review and Expositor, 87 (1990)

sians 1:15-20. Creation, in and of itself, is ambiguous. In its harmony, it speaks of God and his marvelous wonders. A deer in the early morning dew of a forest-glade, a purple sky at sunset, or a fish playing in a lagoon of the South Sea praise their creator. But in winter time the deer is chased by a wolf until it is totally exhausted and lacerated by its persecutor, the purple sky may be due to airpollution, and fish may die slowly and painfully in a dried up lagoon. This latter view was the dominant view of the Hellenistic world in the time of Colossians. A widespread pessimism, very similar to what we feel today, seized the people. The earth was seemingly dying; heaven was far away, if it existed at all; the sky was like a brazen dome on which all prayers rebounded. If there were gods, they did not care for mankind. Blind destiny held the course of nature and history under its immovable decree. "Fate" and "Destiny" (Heimannene and Tyche) ascended to the rank of the greatest goddesses. Against all this pessimism, the church in Colossae sang of the Christ who united heaven and earth again. This was the message for the Hellenistic world of that time, as it may be for many people in our world today. They did not so much think in terms of sin and atonement, but rather in terms of separation from God and reunion with him. They were lonely, homeless, insecure, and abandoned by God whom they had abandoned first. It was rather a feeling of being lost than of being wrong. They were thinking in spatial dimensions of a heaven removed from their earth, rather than in temporal ones like the Jews, who knew of a saving history and a future completion. In creeds like 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, God's history is the focus, witnessed in "the scriptures," fulfilled in Christ, and leading to the final forgiveness of sins in the last judgment. In hymns like Colossians 1:15-20, it is the reunion of two separated realms, of the divine and the human world. In 1 Timothy 3:16, for instance, three times the contrasts of heaven and earth are repeated, alternating in a pattern of a-b/b-a/a-b (as we find it in Proverbs 10:1-5, speaking of good and bad people, etc.): Flesh and Spirit, angels and nations, world and heavenly glory have been brought together again by Christ. In the same way, the Colossians praised their lord, who was the ruler of all creation and had brought it back into the union with God. In him, God manifested himself as love to all his creatures, as promise that none of them should simply perish in the waste, but finally be brought to perfection. Since that creative love of God has become flesh in Jesus Christ, it is Christ indeed in whom, through whom, and to whom everything has been created. The singing community knows Christ and, therefore, it has become able to see God's love also in the work of creation. He, Christ, is the "the image of the invisible God." This is not said of Jesus, the incarnated Christ, but of the mediator of God's creation. As in Philo, and, in the last analysis, in Plato, "image" means the representative, the one in whom God is acting. Incarnation is taken for granted as the phrase "from the dead" in verse 18 showsbut it is not mentioned explicitly, since the hymn addresses the risen Christ at the right hand of God, who is now, after Easter, the life and reconciliation of all creatures. The term "first-born"

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describes here the one who is prior to all creation.8 Thus, in the first stanza, the singing community remembers that it was God's love, the love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father (as it became visible in Jesus) that reached out to creation in the Spirit. The intermediate stanza says that it is still God's love that sustains the world, for Christ (God in the act of bestowing his love upon it) is still its head. This affirmation was declared in a time that knew how fragile the world was. Philo describes it, as many Hellenist contemporaries would do, as a ceaseless fight of all the elements against one another. The catastrophe of the universe would have happened long ago, if the Jewish New Year Festival had not reconciled the elements to one another every year. Moreover, the Jewish high priest had the symbols of the cosmos embroidered on his robe. Thus, whenever he entered the temple, the cosmos was remembered to God.9 Against this pessimism and this fear of a worldwide catastrophe, the hymn praises Christ as the only hope of the world because he has reconciled all the elements (we would rather speak of the atoms) once for all, not so that it had to be repeated every New Year. This is what the second stanza expands. It focuses on the resurrection of Christ as the beginning of a new creation. In his resurrection God manifested himself in his "fullness" as the one who has bridged the gulf between heaven and earth and brought home all his creatures. Facing Christ, thanking him for his act of reconciliation, the congregation can but praise his limitless grace, in some way anticipating what on earth is not yet manifest but will be manifest on its last day. He, Christ, does not restrict atonement to this or that part of the cosmos. He embraces and permeates the whole creation. In him, the fullness of God "reconciled all things on earth and in heaven to himself, making peace." Today, only the eyes of faith can see it, but it has been finished once for all, and the church sees the future completion in its visions.

The Hymn in the Context of the Letter

This is the hymn which the author quotes in his letter. As he does not speak directly to Christ (like the singing congregation) but of Christ to the Colossians, he is concerned with what all this means for them. They have personally experienced what the hymn expresses. They were "transferred from the dominion of darkness to the kingdom of God's beloved son" (v. 13). They have been freed from an "estranged" life into a "holy" life, into a life that, with all its positive and negative points, belongs to God (vv. 21-23). Therefore, it is so important that they continue in this faith, "preached to every creature" (v. 23). The author also uses "cosmic" or "universal" language, but he refers to the worldwide mission of Paul, by which the gospel reached "every creature." Universal reconciliation is not simply a fact that the church could, certainly gratefully, state and praise, as if it had happened somewhere outside. It is they themselves that are primarily concerned. The truth of the hymn would become untruth if they ever forgot that they would still be living far away from God, under "the dominion of darkness," in "evil deeds," if Jesus Christ had not gone to the cross (v. 20). Without his

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Colossians 1:15-20 Review and Expositor, 87 (1990)

"body of flesh" (v. 22) they would not be "the body" under Christ as its "head" (v. 18). Therefore, what has been done, implicitly, for all creatures has become explicit in the church that has recognized the reconciliation in Christ and started to live in the new creation. With the words of Romans 8:15-29: Those who "have received the spirit of sonship . . . are the children of God," and "the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God" and their "glorious liberty" (when Christ will come again and the world reaches its completion).

Preaching on Colossians 1:15-20 (First Stanza: w . 15-18a)

This is no easy task. We might even preach on verses 15-18a in a first, on 18b20 in a second sermon. Whether we do so or not, we have to proclaim both: on the one hand, the jubilant praise of the all embracing love of God to all his creatures and the reconciliation of heaven and earth, completed in the resurrection of Christ once for all, as expressed in the original hymnon the other hand, the warning that this praise would fade, maybe even into untruth, if we ceased to sing it as the church, reconciled on the cross of Jesus and living by this deed of God in all our feeling, thinking, acting, and singing. We might start from the fact that the text is a praise of Christ. When we "praise" someone, we say (as a child formulated in Sunday School): "you have made it well." We are all rather bad in praising Christ. We see the news in the papers and on TV. What they praise (or simply report) usually comes up in our dreams, not the praise of God. Nevertheless, being very unskillful singers of this praise of God we may yet follow a voice which sings clearly and steadily the tune, of which we are not so certain. Colossians 1:15-20 is such a voice. The persecuted Huguenots' psalms of praise, the wild melodies of African churches, and also the songs of praise on the Ups of dying Jews in the Warsaw ghetto are such voices. The Colossian hymn speaks of God's love for the "world" (though the word itself is missing). "World" has ambiguous connotations today. We speak, positively, of world famous people, of women of the world, of world championships, but also, negatively, of worldlings and worldliness. Verses 15-18a do not cringe at the world nor curse it. The author(s) of the hymn certainly knew of all the evil in the world. God is "invisible" to human eyes. But the hymn knows of God's "image," of Christ. In Christ it became manifest that God loves his creatures. If we know Christ, we hear a hymn of praise everywhere in nature despite all catastrophes and all sufferings (Psalm 104:1-5 and 31-34 might be a fitting Old Testament lection). We might even intimate what "trinity" means: God is, for those who sing this hymn, not a static principle; he is a living "person." Since God is one and no other God beside him, one person is a good metaphor. However, since he is love and love is not possible without someone (or: something) being loved and loving again, the metaphor of "two persons" united in love, Father and Son, would even be better. More than that: as, for instance, the love of father and mother creates the atmosphere in which a baby may grow up, the love of Father and Son turns,

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in the Spirit, towards creation.10 This love wants a world come into being, creatures that are able to say "Thou" to God. Speaking, therefore, of "three persons" is by no means a definition of God (in the language of definitions, one is never three and three never one). It is good metaphoric language, imparting the mystery of God as dynamic love, as a living (and therefore also always changing) being. The reference to "thrones, dominions, principalities, or authorities" reminds us of all the powers that fight against God and his plans for his creation. Evil is a fact, no doubt, and God is suffering from it. Our enthusiasm about God's good creation should never seduce us to extenuate this side of nature. On the contrary, we may learn from God himself to suffer with him and to get more and more sensitized to its suffering (Rom. 8:22-23). If any group cannot neglect or tune down the suffering of nature, it is the church; for it knows that evil is no longer the only fact. Christ is living, and by him all the powers are surrounded and defeated. Verse 17 emphasizes that this did not merely happen once in the past. It is still true and becomes true time and again. Christ is still the "head" of the whole world (v. 18a). Loving and praising him is only possible, however, for those who know that they have been loved and praised themselves by him long before. Thus, in this world, it is the church that is living consciously in and by this love of God. How does this truth become really true? How does it get out of the Sunday morning service in a more or less distinguished building into the real world? It seems to be illogical that exactly those who know that Christ alone can and will subdue the opposition of all the powers are motivated especially to fight against them. The logic of life shows that this is so, however. Knowing of what mankind is in the presence of God we are not prone to illusions. We know that mankind can be evil, and actually always is evil in some innermost layer of the self. At the same time, knowing of God's victory in the end we are not prone to despair. We know that God is greater than all our defeats. Thus, we might be freed from illusions and from self-pity, and we might learn to stand against all other powers. In a very unspectacular way we may oppose the unqestioned "authority," for instance, of a father in a family or of a friend in a discussion group, or of a pastor in a church. We may oppose the unquestioned "dominion" of all the comfort and luxury in which we are living, and in which the life of nature gets choked more and more. We may oppose the unquestioned "principality" of political principles, beliefs, and slogans. We may even be able to detect the "thrones" on which we are sitting and living ourselves. Thus, being a believer means, first of all, that, in the midst of our anxieties and misgivings, our failings and defeats, we go to the community in Colossae for singing lessons: to learn from them to live as "the church" under the "headship" of Christ, to find the basis of our lives in him. "Through him" we know that God is love, despite all contrary appearances; "in Him" we are kept, even if we cease to hold fast to him, and "to him," to the final completion by him, all our lives are tending.

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Colossians 1:15-20 Review and Expositor, 87 (1990)

Preaching on Colossians 1:15-20 (Second Stanza: w . 18b-20)

The second stanza starts with the praise of the risen Christ, the beginning of the new creation. On the one hand, face to face to God, in adoration, we can only confess that God has, in the event of the resurrection of Christ, brought together heaven and earth, has "reconciled all things to himself." On the other hand, we confess it as "the beginning" of an on-going process. All things are reconciled "to him," so that they are living now towards Christ (or God) and he has become their only goal. Both views are right. When we are sure that tomorrow some splendid holidays will begin, or that tomorrow we have to undergo very serious and painful surgery, the expectation of what is coming shapes our today very much. First Peter 1:12 calls the tomorrow of the church, the future which it expects, "things into which angels long to look." The Greek word even suggests that they are looking very eagerly, bent forwardlike some lovable urchins trying to look through a hole in a partition wall, which still hides the marvelous attractions of the coming fair. Thus, in some way, all has been done once for all. All the marvelous things are ready behind the partition. The "fullness" of God, God as he really is, has become visible once, in the resurrection of Christ. Even more, in it the future has started to come into beinglike the water from a source, which is now flowing on, all its way down to its goal, the sea. Parenthetically, we might even say something about universalism. There are passages in the New Testament describing the group of the blessed and that of the cursed ones (as in Matthew 25:34-41), and there are other passages declaring that "all men have been consigned to disobedience that he (God) may have mercy upon all" (as in Romans 11:32). We certainly need the warning of Matthew 25 that there is a dimension of eternity in which all our living on earth has to be seen. We also need, equally urgently, to be reminded of God's grace (as in Romans 11), from which nobody and nothing can separate us, which is stronger even than our disobedience. This twofold message is the word of God, as it has to live among us. But if we tried to build up a doctrine of an indispensable belief in hell or of universal salvation, we would put ourselves above God, since we would pretend to know exactly how he would have to act on the last day. How he will really act in the last judgment is beyond the threshold of human knowledge, and nobody is allowed to pass this threshold before it is revealed in the parousia of Christ. Again, how will this message get out of the church building into our everyday life? First of all, it will free us from our anxieties and fears. In the resurrection of Christ what we shall be became visible. On Easter day God spoke his definitive and full yes to us and to all his creatures. This is the truth, much more so than all other things which we may observe and under which we may suffer. God's final yes is the reality in which, by which, and to which we and the whole creation are living. Whatever may come cannot make the love of God untrue (Rom. 8:38-39). Therefore, whatever may emerge from our subconscious parts and may try to convince us of our separation from God has already lost its power. This is the very end of all inferiority complexes, of all feelings of unwor-

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thiness. Verse 20 reminds us of Jesus, who had to die on the cross. It was only in this way that God could come near us, totally into our existence, not merely in our good days, but also in the worst ones. This keeps us from an enthusiasm that would be blind to the world as it is, and, especially, to ourselves as we are. At the same time, it keeps us from resignation or despair. It helps us to do whatever is possible for us, to put up, in the midst of our evil and suffering old world (to which we ourselves also belong), signs for God's new, actually the real, world. As the love of a mother sees in her son, as he is entering the stage of puberty and becomes obstinate and extremely difficult, the man he will one day be, we see, in Christ, already in our world the world to come. In that day the love of God, which became actual in Jesus' death and visible to the disciples in his resurrection, will totally dominate our lives. Therefore, it is the community's hymn of praise that sees the reality of our world, viewing it in the light of what God (in Christ!) has created"and God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31)and will one day create"then I saw a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev. 21:1). Let it become real in our present lives.11 The style and contents of the letter to the Colossians differ unmistakably from other Pauline letters. The author might be Paul in his old age, much more probably, however, a disciple of his. The address mentions Paul and Timothy as senders, just as in 2 Corinthians, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians. Since these letters have been written (or dictated) by Paul himself, though spiritually united with Timothy, who by his very presence influenced him in his writing, might it not be the other way around in a time of stricter confinement of Paul, which would no longer allow him to write or dictate? Then Timothy, "of the same spirit (literally: soul) like no other" (Phil. 2:20), might actually write the letter, spiritually united with the apostle and even formulating "I, Paul" (1:23) to avoid the misunderstanding, as if Timothy would want to praise himself. It might even have been written after the death of Paul. Be this as it may, the development from Pauline thought in his main letters should be seen. 2 Arguments in E. Schweizer, The Letter to the Colossians (Minneapolis: Augsburg, and London: SPCK, 1982), pp. 55-56. 3 In the passive mood, of course, "all things" are grammatically, the subject, which is handled by "Him." 4 In a similar way, when I use Psalms 130 as a prayer in church, I replace "I" by "we," change v. 7 ("Israel, hope in the Lord") to "we hope in you, Lord" and speak in v. 8 of "your people" instead of "Israel," etc. 5 Therefore, we read "the body," not "the body of Christ" or "his body," as Paul invariably formulates it. 6 Ephesians 1:22-23 combines both views: Christ is "head over all things for the church, which is his body." 7 The Greek word appears in the New Testament only in Colossians 1:20,22 and, dependent on this passage, in Ephesians 2:16. 8 The Greek text can mean: firstborn within creation, or: before creation (comparative genitive). 9 Evidence: Schweizer, Colossians, pp. 129-130. 10 Whereas, "Father" and "Son" are male terms, "Spirit" is, in the language of the Old Testament, a female one. "Cf. Schweizer, Colossians, esp. pp. 84-89.
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