Cosmic

The scriptures referred to are Colossians 1:15-28.

Disney continues its relentless campaign to remake its classic cartoons into flat live-action versions with lots of CGI but lots less magic. I haven't seen the new version of Aladdin so I can't criticize it but neither have I heard or read a single review that proclaims it to be better than the original. I like Will Smith but he's no Robin Williams. That said, from the trailers I know that it retains the genie's line, “Phenomenal cosmic powers! Itty bitty living space!” And I was reminded of that when I read our New Testament passage today.

We can easily date the letter to the Colossians because in 61 AD an earthquake devastated the city and it was never fully rebuilt. So Paul had to have written it before that. He is writing from prison, probably in Rome. (Colossians 4:18) The usual date given for its writing is about 60 AD. That means it has only been 30 years since Jesus was crucified. People who knew Jesus were still alive and active in the church. And yet Paul feels safe in presenting this exalted picture of Jesus as not just the Messiah but as a whole lot more.

He starts with “He is the image of the invisible God...” Think of the best person you know. Would you claim they were the spitting image of God? Do you think even if you gave it thirty years you could convince people that your mom or your history teacher or your pastor was the image of the invisible God? No. But as early as 50 AD, in the first New Testament book written, 1st Thessalonians, the church is openly calling Jesus the crucified and risen Lord, who is frequently mentioned in the same breath as God the Father. And here Paul is saying if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.

This is mind-blowing. People often picture God as a vast, vague and somewhat impersonal force, who is not necessarily interested in us or our welfare. But in Jesus we see this immense and frankly unimaginable God focused in the form of a human being. And he is definitely interested in us and in our good. In fact, he loves us and he does so to the extent that he is willing to suffer pain and sacrifice his life for us. That is the true picture of God.

Paul goes on to call Christ “the firstborn of creation.” Now this can mean the first in time or the first in place. In the light of what Paul says in Philippians 2 about Christ Jesus being equal with God and having the very nature of God, it seems unlikely that Paul is saying here that Jesus was God's first created thing. In fact, most translations render this “the firstborn over all creation.” [emphasis mine] In the ancient world to be the firstborn meant to be preeminent. And it is in this sense that Paul uses the term. Jesus is preeminent in all creation. This is the same way that Jewish writer Philo used the word “firstborn” when referring to God's personified Wisdom from Proverbs 8. And it's from Philo that the Gospel of John gets the concept of the logos, translated “Word” in John 1:1. The logos was the divine reason for creation and the organizing principle underlying it. John identified the logos with Christ and Paul seems to be working along the same lines.

So he says, “for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.” The “thrones, dominions, rulers and powers” were names for the hierarchies of angels in popular Jewish lore. They were thought to be the spirits behind the forces of nature and even the stars were seen as angelic. They also served as mediators between God and creation. In Colossians Paul seems to be fighting some kind of heresy, possibly a proto-Gnosticism mixed with Jewish mysticism. In this philosophy God was seen to be too holy and spiritual to have made or even be in direct contact with the material universe and so God has to be filtered through various emanations. But Paul is asserting that, as we see in Genesis, the physical world was created by God. And as God's divine Wisdom, Christ is the blueprint of creation, through which everything was made. Also it was all made for him as God's Beloved Son. So God and Christ are very invested in creation.

“He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” He is not part of creation but existed before anything was created. And everything is connected through him. As the New Living Translation puts it, “he holds all creation together.” The Good News Translation renders it “in union with him all things have their proper place.” I really love the way the Weymouth New Testament translates it: “through Him the universe is a harmonious whole.” Again the underlying idea is that Christ, the logos, is the pattern of how reality is designed to work.

Why doesn't humanity feel like a harmonious whole? Because we have been given our own wills. God wants us to love him and each other but real love is a choice. Yet having our own will means we can choose not to love. Every day we see what happens when people choose not to love God and not to love other people. We are the opposite of an harmonious whole.

What is the solution? Again it is Jesus. If we connect with him, we are connected to the pattern of creation. Thus Paul continues: “He is the head of the body, the church...” The pattern of interconnection, of people working together for the benefit of the whole as the parts of our bodies do, comes from Jesus. But we must let him be the head, the brains, so to speak. And since we now know both rationality and emotion originate in the brain, not the heart, this means we must follow his lead in acting lovingly.

“He is the beginning, the firstborn of the dead...” Jesus is preeminent in the new creation as well as the old. And the new creation really kicks off with his resurrection. It shows that the rules of life have really changed. And it shows us the pattern God is following to address the ruining of his creation by sin. It will not ultimately end up dying but through him rising to new life.

And all this is “so that he might come to have first place in everything.” Because Jesus is the first principle of creation. Things go wrong when people forget and stray from their first principles. Hospitals were created to take care of patients, not to make profits. Our system of laws was created to ensure justice, not to protect certain classes of people from the consequences of their actions while punishing those without power. Our government was created to serve all the people, not to become an oligarchy or kleptocracy. The church was created to model the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus, not to make people feel comfortable or justified in perpetuating society's status quo. When we forget that Jesus should have first place in our lives, things go awry—or they just stay as they are: unredeemed.

“For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” Two rival ways of understanding the nature of Jesus arose in the early church and neither did credit to the relationship of his divinity and his humanity. One was to see his humanness as an illusion. Because the Gnostics saw the material world as evil, God could not have become a real flesh and blood man. So they said he only seemed to; Jesus was a kind of hologram. That means, of course, he did not really suffer or die on a cross. The other idea was that Jesus was a mere man whom God designated as Messiah. But that means God delegated to someone other than himself the redemption of the world through a painful death on the cross, making Jesus almost a patsy.

Both of these ideas diminish what God is doing in Christ. The church refused to oversimplify the unique nature of Jesus. It affirmed the great paradox: that he is fully God and fully human. When praying to or contemplating what Jesus said and did we are dealing with God, not someone imaginary or secondary. God is fully present in Jesus and it pleased God to do this himself.

“...and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” Again Paul is saying Jesus had an actual body which actually bled on a cross, a death the Romans intended to be shameful. This was no shadowplay. It also means God in Christ knows what human suffering and death are, firsthand.

And the reason he underwent all this it was to reconcile all things to himself, to God. He was reconciling the way things have become to the way they should be, the way they were designed to be and will be again someday. And that was a painful process for the God who created them and modeled them on his Beloved Son. What happened on Golgotha was not just another martyr dying but God absorbing the evil we created when we chose to act in opposition to his pattern of love. On the cross a cosmic drama was taking place.

And it has ongoing consequences. “And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him...” When I had my accident the first of my operations was to simply save and stabilize me. It was to put me firmly on this side of the divide between life and death. That's what Jesus has done for us on the cross. Through his death, he brings us back from spiritual death. His blood transfuses us with his life. He gives us his heart as a donor would. His dying gives us a second chance at living a real life.

“—provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel you heard...” When they wheeled me out of that first surgery into ICU, or even the 5 subsequent surgeries, I wasn't out of the woods yet. I had to do physical therapy. I had to follow doctor's orders so that I could walk again. I could have refused it because it was so painful and hard. And we can use our will to refuse to follow through on what Jesus has done for us. I think there are a lot of people in churches who aren't walking in the Spirit because it is too painful and difficult. In Ephesians Paul writes, “Walk in love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us...” (Ephesians 5:2) Fear of loving people that much is what keeps a lot of Christians from truly following Jesus.

And that leads to them shifting from the hope promised in the good news. A recent article published by the daughter of a prominent Evangelical leader tells of how 14 years on, the kids she grew up with in a megachurch have in many cases drifted from or lost their faith. The catalyst was the suicide of one of their group, a girl who had the most fervent faith of all of them. And, yes, that will rattle anyone. Yet I can't help but think that at least part of the reason their friend's death shattered what they believed was that they were sold this theology that downplays suffering and sacrifice and promises them a pleasant and prosperous life. Much of Evangelicalism's version of Christianity is targeted to those who have it easy and tells them that is how things should be. The worst they can expect is to face some unpopularity because of their beliefs. Which is why real tragedy hits such people like a betrayal rather than the reason we have a God who has experienced betrayal, suffering and death. Christianity arose among those who had hard lives: the poor, the despised, women, slaves. In the old translation of the Apostles Creed, it says of Christ, “He descended into hell.” If you too have been there, the good news of Jesus speaks to you with greater power.

Paul suffered in bringing the good news to the world. He says, “I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel. I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” What does Paul mean when he says he is “completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions?” He is not saying that Jesus didn't suffer enough or that Paul is somehow acting as a co-redeemer of humanity. Rather since we are part of the body of Christ, the ongoing embodiment of God's Spirit, we can expect to share in his sufferings. As Paul says elsewhere, “My aim is to know him, to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings, and to be like him in his death...” (Philippians 3:10, NET) In 1 Peter Christians are told to rejoice to the degree that we are partakers in Christ's sufferings. (1 Peter 4:13) If what Jesus did to redeem humanity was difficult and painful, we can expect that bringing that to a resistant world will be difficult and painful as well. Some even saw this as the birth pangs Jesus mentioned would precede the his coming again. (Matthew 24:8-9) It comes from being united with Christ. But pain is not all we receive. Paul writes, “For just as we suffer abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds in Christ.” (2 Corinthians 1:5)

At the heart of this is what Paul calls a “mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints.” In the New Testament all believers are called saints, not because of any holiness we have achieved on our own but because Christ has saved and sanctified us. But what is this great mystery? “Christ in you,” Paul says. He has spent all of this time explaining how Jesus is not merely a man but the cosmic Christ, the divine first principle in all creation, who is also head of the body of believers. But the surprise is that not only are we in Christ's body but Christ is in us.

In the Old Testament God dwelt among his people in the tabernacle in the wilderness and later in the temple in Jerusalem. On occasion it was said that the Spirit of God filled certain people like leaders and prophets. But of the last days it says in Joel, “...I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves in those days, I will pour out my Spirit.” (Joel 2:28-29) Peter quoted this on the first Pentecost. God has now entrusted Jesus' mission to us, the body of Christ on earth. And Paul says, to help us we have access to “the riches of the glory of this mystery.”

The riches Paul refers to are the spiritual blessings that we have because we are in Christ and Christ is in us. These include the fruit of the Spirit, direct access to God, unity with other Christians and our transformation into a new creation in Christ. It means to be spiritually alive and, like all living things, to grow. Because the goal of following Jesus is to grow to be like Jesus. Or as Paul puts it “mature in Christ.” It could also be translated “complete or perfect in Christ.” That's what we are aiming at. That's what we will one day become if we let the Spirit of Christ work in us.

And that's what made me think of the genie's words in Aladdin about cosmic power living in something small. Christ's phenomenal spiritual powers reside in us, who are neither the biggest nor the strongest nor the most numerous creatures here on earth. There are times when I even doubt we are the smartest. But Jesus has put his wisdom and the power of his love and grace and peace at our disposal. And while we do not get 3 wishes as in Aladdin, if we ask in his name Jesus promises us whatever we need to accomplish our mission.

And we have each other. When Paul says “Christ in you,” in Greek the “you” is plural. Together in Christ we are strong. We can share our gifts, our ideas, our experiences and our skills to do what the Spirit is guiding us to do. That way we can make a greater impact than one of us acting alone. That's what the church has done in the past. It has created schools and universities and hospitals and clinics and food pantries and homeless shelters and disaster teams and prison ministries and helped people in need all over the world.

And it has brought hope. Paul calls “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” When things are really bad, we can despair of it ever getting better. And when we are a big part of the problem, we can give up on ourselves. But in Christ, we have the hope of becoming like him. As it says in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” We know one thing: Jesus is glorious. And one day we will be too.