Colossians 1: 11-20 (links validated 6/21/22)

The story is told of a man who emerged from a bomb shelter after a night of terrible bombing. A newspaper vendor was standing in the rubble, trying to hawk that morning’s newspaper. He asked the elderly man, “Don’t you want to buy a newspaper? Don’t you want to know who won last night’s battle?” “I don’t need to read the paper,” the old man replied. “I don’t need to find out who won the battle because I already know who has won the war.” In that way he acted at least a bit like God’s dearly beloved children. Even as we daily battle evil, we can still live with hope and confidence. We can be obedient, loving, faithful and courageous. We hardly need the newspaper or any other media to tell us that the battles with forces beyond our control are very tough. Christians already know, however, who has won the war. We know that we’ve been rescued and transferred from the dominion of darkness to the kingdom of Jesus Christ. The powers of death and evil no longer hold us in their grip.

let me turn back to poetry and the words of Brian Walsh, as he reflects on Colossians: “In the face of a culture of death a world of killing fields a world of the walking dead Christ is at the head of the resurrection parade transforming our tears of betrayal into tears of joy giving us dancing shoes for the resurrection party And this glittering joker who has danced in the dragon's jaws of death now dances with a dance that is full of nothing less than the fullness of God this is the dance of the new creation this is the dance of life out of death and in this dance all that was broken all that was estranged all that was alienated all that was dislocated and disconnected is reconciled comes home is healed and is made whole everything all things whatever you can imagine visible and invisible mountains and atoms outer space, urban space, and cyberspace every inch of creation every dimension of our lives all things are reconciled in him And it all happens on a cross it all happens at a state execution where the governor did not commute the sentence it all happens at the hands of the empire that has captivated our imaginations it all happens through blood not through a power grab by the sovereign one it all happens in embraced pain for the sake of others it all happens on a cross arms outstretched in embrace and this is the image of the invisible God this is the body of Christ.

always good insights!

Ben Witherington III also notes that this poem or hymn follows a common V structure. What’s interesting, he points out, is that the phrase at the nadir of the V isn’t about Jesus’ death on the cross or even about the resurrection, but about the church. Right smack dab in the middle of this hymn is the line: “he is the head of the body, the church.” What are we to make that our attention is focused on Jesus and his church when every other line pulls our attention bigger and higher and further from ourselves? The structure gives us the same feeling that the words do: Christ surrounds everything, is before everything, in everything, after and at the end of everything. And everything is in Christ...

always good insights!

Four years ago my son, Patrick, suffered a stroke. It left considerable damage on the right side of his brain. The left side of his body was paralyzed. Slowly, he covered most, but not all, of the use of his left arm and leg. The therapist explained that the lingering paralysis was due to the brain injury, not the muscles; that the muscles depended on signals from the brain in order to know what to do...

Things are not always what they seem. What seems to be the most obvious can be awfully wrong. An organist was practicing one day in a great church in Europe. A man came up to the organ and asked if he could play. The organist looked at him and thought to himself, "I shouldn't let this man play, just look at him, he is unshaven, his clothes are dirty, he looks like a bum". So he told the man no. But the unkempt stranger asked again and again. Finally the organist let him play thinking he wouldn't play very long, after all what does a bum know about organs. The bum's fingers danced over the keyboard in a way the organist hadn't heard in his lifetime. The stranger played on and on. The organist was spellbound. When the stranger got up to leave, the organist could not contain himself and shouted, "Who are you, what is your name??" As the stranger, who looked like a bum slowly walked away, turned over his shoulder and said, "My name is Felix Mendelssohn." The organist gasped. On the exterior the man in ragged clothes and badly in need of a shave and a shower but in actual fact was a prince of the organ. Things were certainly not as they appeared to be...

("An anonymous author made this striking comparison: "Socrates taught for 40 years, Plato for 50, Aristotle for 40, and Jesus for only 3. Yet the influence of Christ's 3-year ministry infinitely transcends the impact left by the combined 130 years of teaching from these men, who were among the greatest philosophers of all antiquity....")