Sermons
December 22, 2024 (4th Sunday of Advent)
In the Flesh
Colossians 1:15-20
We learn it in Sunday school and pastors’ classes, we hear it in sermons, and we can all say it with some certainty: God takes away our sin through Jesus Christ—specifically, we might say, through Jesus’ death on the cross. But what’s it mean?
If we’re well-versed in Scripture, we might quote 2 Corinthians 5:19, which says that God was in Christ reconciling all things to himself—repairing the broken relationships between God, God’s people, and God’s creation. But what’s it mean?
I could give you a scholarly lecture on the meaning of atonement and the various models the Church has employed down through history to try and understand the effect atonement has on humanity and creation. Paul often tried to do that.
He’d start pretty well, and he’d begin laying out his ideas. But before too long he’d get stuck—he’s trying, after all, to describe in human language things that are beyond human understanding—and then he’d break into a doxology or, as he does in this passage (and in Philippians 2), a hymn.
I can almost picture Paul—if it was Paul who wrote this letter, and scholars agree on that—pacing the floor while a secretary wrote down his words. I can picture him dictating the first part of Colossians 1, the greeting and thanksgiving, and then getting wound up tighter and tighter as he tries to figure out how to flesh out what he’s just said.
Maybe he got a little frustrated as words just wouldn’t come to him. But then something did.
Maybe he burst into song, much to his secretary’s surprise (although if this was the same amanuensis, or secretary, he’d worked with before, they shouldn’t have been surprised). “He is the image of the invisible God…” Our whole text for today is a hymn that was probably familiar to the Colossians, although to the scholars who’ve studied it, it looks like Paul may have stopped singing at least a couple of times to clarify something the hymn said.
That got him unstuck, and he was then able to continue in the paragraph that comes after our reading, to make his point about what God has done for us in Christ—reconciling us to God through his death—and how our lives should be lived in light of that.
Now I could be all scholarly and explain the meaning of reconciliation, how the paragraph after our reading includes three words, “holy, blameless, and irreproachable,” are religious and legal terms, the first two referring to sacrificial animals set apart for God and as near perfect as creatures can be, and the third a legal term meaning a person can’t be accused of a crime because they’ve done nothing wrong. I could do that, but we’d all be asleep before I got two sentences out; so what I’m going to do is tell a story.
Once upon a time, there was a young man who was very religious. He had the best education possible; he studied Scripture under one of the greatest theologians of his day.
His faith taught him that there was a set of laws he needed to observe diligently in order to be considered righteous before God. So he did the best he could to observe those laws. He studied the laws constantly and he and his fellow students discussed how best to apply the laws to their situations.[1] This young man was a good, respectable member of his congregation, and he was well on his way to being a scholar respected among all who practiced his faith.
But then, seemingly out of the blue, there came a group of people who were followers of a man they claimed to be the One who would save them. The young man knew that this person they claimed to be the One had been executed by the empire under which they all lived—but these people actually believed he’d risen from the dead! They called this executed man the “Son of God,” which to the young scholar’s ears sounded like blasphemy. They prayed to God in his name, and claimed that he had sent the Holy Spirit—which previously had only come to the prophets—to be with them and teach them and guide them.
The young man, scholar of his faith’s laws and sacred texts, was very angry at what these people were doing. He thought they were dead wrong, and they were preaching their wrong beliefs publicly and getting lots of others to follow them. They had to be stopped.
So, with the blessing of some of the leaders of his faith (although not his own teacher, who was not prepared to give his blessing to this kind of violence[2]), the young man got a few people who agreed with him, and they got busy inventing charges and imprisoning or killing the followers of this executed man they claimed was the One. The young man’s whole existence became devoted to stamping out this group. He kept his righteous indignation fired up by talking endlessly with those who agreed with him about the wrongs of the followers of the executed One. He didn’t associate much with anyone else, because to tell the truth, they didn’t understand his anger and got tired of hearing it all the time.
And every day he got angrier and angrier, as the followers of the executed One scattered out of his reach and he heard reports that they were preaching their lies everywhere they went and that more and more people were coming around to their way of thinking.
One day this young man set out to go to another town where he had heard there were a bunch of those people living and preaching. But something happened to him on the way.
The young man saw a blinding light, and he heard a voice speaking to him, although it wasn’t the voice of anyone who was with him. The voice asked the young man, “Why are you persecuting me?”
The young man asked, “Who are you?”
And the voice replied, “I am the executed One, and when you persecute my followers, you are persecuting me.” Then he said, “Get up and go on into the city, and you’ll find out what I want you to do.” So he did, although he had to be led there because the light had left him totally blind, and he stayed totally blind for three days.[3]
Meanwhile, a man in the city, a follower of the executed One, heard the same voice telling him to meet up with the young man who’d been struck blind. But this man knew about the young man, and he was afraid. “He’s coming here to kill us. Why would I meet him?”
The voice told him, “You have to meet him, because I have picked him to be the one who will tell all the world about me.” And so the man of the city went to meet the young man, and he told him about his own vision.
And the young man, who as a Roman citizen had two names: his Hebrew name, Sha’ul, or Saul, after the first king his people had had; and his Roman name, Paulus, or Paul, became a follower of the executed One, Jesus Christ. The Christians in Damascus welcomed him and taught him, even though they knew what he had done. And he began to preach the gospel.[4]
As long as Paul lived, he never forgot that experience. He came to realize that his anger and plots to kill Christians was wrong, that he had been in the grip of evil. He remembered how Jesus had chosen him while he was still doing these horrible things, and how that part of his life had come to an end suddenly in a flash of blinding light on the Damascus road. And—perhaps in the hospitality of the Christians in Damascus, not to mention the advocacy of Barnabas on his behalf in Jerusalem[5]—Paul began to recognize the grace and forgiveness of God, made available to him and to all people through Jesus Christ.
Everything Paul taught, wrote, and did after that was rooted in that one experience. He wrote that he knew Christ had been raised from the dead, because he himself had seen and spoken to him[6]—on the Damascus road. He wrote that through Christ God had reconciled all the world to himself[7]—just as God had reconciled Paul to himself. He wrote about how people who were once estranged and hostile were now, through God’s saving act in Christ, forgiven and counted as perfect and innocent in God’s sight.
And Paul in today’s reading goes beyond mere forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ into the cosmic realm of the first eighteen verses of John’s Gospel, with the hymn about Jesus being the image of the invisible God, God’s very essence—steadfast love and faithfulness, grace and truth—in the flesh.
He wrote it because he knew it. It had happened to him. God’s love was proven in that while he was still a sinner, Christ died for him, and for us.[8] He called himself “foremost of sinners,”[9] but God had loved and forgiven him, even though he didn’t deserve it, and he wanted everyone to know that was available to them, too.
The question I have—and Paul anticipates this question in Romans 6—is, since God has forgiven us, even though we don’t deserve it, is it okay for us to continue in the old way of doing things, the way we were before Christ made it possible for us to be reconciled with God?
Would it have been right for Paul to keep persecuting Christians after encountering Christ on the Damascus Road?
Is it right for someone who has been forgiven to turn around and carry a grudge against their brother or sister or neighbor? Or could we, knowing in Christ how much God loves us and what grace and mercy have been poured out on us, show how much that means to us by being loving, and merciful, and gracious toward others—even though we might not feel like they deserve it?
[1] Paul was a Pharisee, and this is what the Pharisees did: they studied the Scriptures and figured out how to apply them to the lives they were living at that time. It was the Pharisees’ approach to Scripture that allowed them to re-interpret and thus preserve the Jewish faith after the destruction of the temple in 70 ce.
[2] Paul’s teacher was the great rabbi Gamaliel, who in Acts 5:33-42 argues against killing the apostles of Christ, indicating that if they were following a false Messiah, their movement would fade away soon enough; but if it turned out to be from God, they would not be able to stop it, and “in that case, you may even be found fighting against God!” Whether Acts portrays Gamaliel’s opinion of the Jesus movement accurately, I can’t say, not being all that familiar with him outside what Acts and Paul say about him.
[3] I’m pretty sure the three days of Paul’s blindness are meant to call to our minds the three days of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection.
[4] The story of Paul’s redirection (I hesitate to call it a conversion, because he always considered himself a Jew, and the Christian faith in its earliest days was a Jewish sect, not a distinct religion separate from Judaism) is found in Acts 9.
[5] See Acts 9:26-27.
[6] See 1 Corinthians 15, particularly verse 8.
[7] 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
[8] Romans 5:6-11
[9] 1 Timothy 1:12-17