Sermon on Colossians 3: 1-10
THE point Paul is making here is this. In baptism, Christians die and rise again. As the water closes over them, it is as if they were buried in death; as they emerge from the water, it is like being resurrected to a new life. Now, if that is so, Christians must rise from baptism as different men and women. Wherein is the difference? It lies in the fact that now their thoughts must be set on the things which are above. They can no longer be concerned with the trivial passing things of earth; they must be totally concerned with the eternal truths of heaven.
We must note carefully what Paul means by that. He is certainly not pleading for an other-worldliness in which Christians withdraw from all the work and activities of this world and do nothing but contemplate eternity. Immediately after this, Paul goes on to lay down a series of ethical principles which make it quite clear that he expects Christians to go on with the work of this world and to maintain all its normal relationships. But there will be this difference—from now on, Christians will view everything against the background of eternity and no longer live as if this world was all that mattered.
This will obviously provide a new set of values. Christians will no longer worry about things which the world thought important. Ambitions which dominated the world will be powerless to touch them. They will go on using the things of the world, but they will use them in a new way. They will, for instance, set giving above getting, serving above ruling, forgiving above avenging. The standard of values for Christians will be God’s, not the world’s.
And how is this to be accomplished? The Christian life is hidden with Christ in God. There are at
This will obviously provide a new set of values. Christians will no longer worry about things which the world thought important. Ambitions which dominated the world will be powerless to touch them. They will go on using the things of the world, but they will use them in a new way. They will, for instance, set giving above getting, serving above ruling, forgiving above avenging. The standard of values for Christians will be God’s, not the world’s.
And how is this to be accomplished? The Christian life is hidden with Christ in God. There are at least two vivid pictures here.
(1) We have seen repeatedly that the early Christians regarded baptism as a dying and a rising again. When someone was dead and buried, the Greeks very commonly spoke of that person as being hidden in the earth; but Christians had died a spiritual death in baptism, and they are not hidden in the earth but hidden in Christ. It was the experience of the early Christians that the very act of baptism wrapped them round with Christ.
(2) There may well be a word-play here which a Greek would recognize at once. The false teachers called their books of so-called wisdom apokruphoi, the books that were hidden from all except from those who were initiated. Now the word which Paul uses to say that our lives are hidden with Christ in God is part of the verb apokruptein, from which the adjective apokruphos comes. Undoubtedly, the one word would suggest the other. It is as if Paul said: ‘For you, the treasures of wisdom are hidden in your secret books; for us, Christ is the treasury of wisdom, and we are hidden in him.’
There is still another idea here. The life of every Christian is hidden with Christ in God. That which is hidden is concealed; the world cannot recognize Christians. But Paul goes on: ‘The day is coming when Christ will return in glory—and then the Christians, whom no one recognized, will share that glory, and it will be plain for all to see.’ In a sense, Paul is saying—and saying truly—that some day the verdicts of eternity will reverse the verdicts of time, and the judgments of God will overturn the judgments of this world.
CHRIST OUR LIFE
Colossians 3:1–4 (contd)
IN verse 4, Paul gives to Christ one of the great titles of devotion. He calls him Christ our life. Here is an idea which was very dear to Paul’s heart. When he was writing to the Philippians, he said: ‘For to me, living is Christ’ (Philippians 1:21). Years before, when he was writing to the Galatians, he had said: ‘It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2:20). As Paul saw it, to Christians, Christ is the most important thing in life; more, he is life.
This is the kind of peak of devotion which we can only dimly understand and only haltingly and imperfectly express. Sometimes we say of people: ‘Music is her life—Sport is his life—They live for their work.’ Such people find life and all that it means in music, in sport, in work, as the case may be. For Christians, Christ is their life.
And here we come back to where this passage started—that is precisely why Christians set their minds and hearts on the things which are above and not on the things of this world. They judge everything in the light of the cross and in the light of the love which gave itself for them. In the light of that cross, the world’s wealth and ambitions and activities are seen at their true value—and Christians are enabled to set their hearts on the things which are above.
THE THINGS WHICH LIE IN THE PAST
Colossians 3:5–9a
So, then, put to death these parts of you which are earthly—fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, the desire to get more than you ought—for this is idol-worship; and because of these things the wrath of God comes upon those who are disobedient. It was among these things that you once spent your lives, when you lived among them; but now you must divest yourselves of all these things—anger, temper, malice, slander, foul talk which issues from your mouth. Do not lie to one another.
Paul begins with a vivid demand. The New Testament never hesitates to demand with an element of violence the complete elimination of everything which is against God. The Authorized Version translates the first part of this section: ‘Mortify your members which are upon earth.’ In seventeenth-century English, that was clear enough; but it has lost its force in modern language. Nowadays, to mortify the flesh means rather to practise abstinence and self-denial. And that is not enough. What Paul is saying is: ‘Put to death every part of yourself which is against God and keeps you from fulfilling his will.’ He uses the same line of thought in Romans 8:13: ‘If you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.’ It is exactly the same line of thought as that of Jesus when he demanded that people should cut off a hand or a foot, or tear out an eye when it was leading them into sin (Matthew 5:29–30).
We may put this in more modern language, as the New Testament scholar C. F. D. Moule expresses it. Christians must kill self-centredness and regard as dead all private desires and ambitions. In their lives, there must be a radical transformation of the will and a radical shift of the centre. Everything which would keep them from fully obeying God and fully surrendering to Christ must be surgically removed.
Paul goes on to list some of the things which the Colossians must cut right out of life.
Fornication and uncleanness must go. Chastity was the one completely new virtue which Christianity brought into the world. In the ancient world, sexual relationships before marriage and outside marriage were the normal and accepted practice. The sexual appetite was regarded as a thing to be gratified, not to be controlled. That is an attitude which is not unfamiliar today, although often it is supported by arguments that lack any sound basis. In his autobiography, Memory to Memory, Sir Arnold Lunn has a chapter on Cyril Joad, the philosopher, whom he knew well. In his pre-Christian days, Joad could write: ‘Birth control [he meant the use of contraceptives] increases the possibilities of human pleasure. In enabling the pleasures of sex to be tasted without its penalties it has removed the most formidable deterrent not only to regular but to irregular sexual intercourse … The average clergyman is shocked and outraged by the prospect of shameless, harmless and unlimited pleasure which birth control offers to the young, and, if he can stop it, he will.’ Towards the end of his life, Joad came back to religion and returned to the family of the Church; but it was not without a struggle, and it was the insistence of the Christian Church on sexual purity which kept him so long from making the final decision. ‘It’s a big step,’ he said, ‘and I can’t persuade myself that the very severe attitude to sex which the Church thinks it necessary to adopt is really justified.’ The Christian ethic insists on chastity, regarding the physical relationship between the sexes as something so precious that indiscriminate use of it in the end spoils it.
There was passion and evil desire. There is a kind of person who is the slave of passions (palkos) and who is driven by the desire for the wrong things (epithumia).
There is the sin which the Revised Standard Version calls covetousness (pleonexia). Pleonexia is one of the ugliest of sins; but, while it is quite clear what it means, it is by no means so easy to find a single word to translate it. It comes from two Greek words; the first half of the word is from pleon, which means more, and the second half is from echein, which means to have. Pleonexia is basically the desire to have more. The Greeks themselves defined it as desire which cannot be satisfied, and said that you might as easily satisfy it as you might fill with water a bowl with a hole in it. They defined it as the sinful desire for what belongs to others. It has been described as ruthless self-seeking. Its basic idea is the desire for that which we have no right to have. It is, therefore, a sin with a very wide range. If it is the desire for money, it leads to theft. If it is the desire for prestige, it leads to evil ambition. If it is the desire for power, it leads to sadistic tyranny. If it is the desire for a person, it leads to sexual sin. C. F. D. Moule describes it as ‘the opposite of the desire to give’.
Such a desire, says Paul, is idolatry. How can that be? The essence of idolatry is the desire to get. People set up idols and worship them because they desire to get something from them. To quote Moule, ‘idolatry is an attempt to use God for man’s purposes, rather than to give oneself to God’s service’. The essence of idolatry is, in fact, the desire to have more. Or to come at it another way, those whose lives are dominated by the desire to get things have set up material possessions in the place of God—and that precisely is idolatry.
Upon all such things the wrath of God must fall. The wrath of God is simply the rule of the universe that we will reap what we sow and that no one ever escapes the consequences of sin. The wrath of God and the moral order of the universe are one and the same thing.