Andrew Torrance—Year C Proper 10

Anthony: Alright, let’s transition to our next pericope of the month. It is Colossians 1:1–14. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 10 in Ordinary Time on July 13. Andrew, would you read it for us, please?

Andrew: Yes, of course.

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, ² To the saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father. ³ In our prayers for you we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, ⁴ for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, ⁵ because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel ⁶ that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God. ⁷ This you learned from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf, ⁸ and he has made known to us your love in the Spirit. ⁹ For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, ¹⁰ so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. ¹¹ May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, so that you may have all endurance and patience, joyfully ¹² giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. ¹³ He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, ¹⁴ in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Anthony: Whew. That’s a mouthful. There’s a lot going on here. And I’m curious. Before I get into the questions, I wanted to ask you when we come to scripture, the first question of theology is, who is God being revealed in Jesus Christ? So, what would you want to say to a congregation, your congregation, about God as revealed in this text?

Andrew: Very simply, it’s easy to think about God as this kind of transcendent reality that doesn’t really engage with us in this world in a way that we can really see and be receptive to, that is tangible. So often, when we talk about God, we think about spirituality in ways that are very removed from the world in which we find ourselves.

Anthony: Yeah.

Andrew: And that’s just not the case. The heart of the Christian message is the fact that God becomes one amongst us in and through the eternal Son, assuming human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, such that we are given a clarity into who he understands humanity to be, and communicates to us with a much, much greater clarity than anywhere else about who God is for us in this person. So, we can, we should, of course, take seriously the whole of scripture. But I think at the heart, the core of scripture is this revelation of God’s very self in this person of Jesus Christ that kind of gives us a center, a clarity as to who God really is. There is no God behind Jesus Christ. God is with us in and through the very person, Jesus Christ. And so, if we really want to know God, we look to this person.

And if we come … we often hear things that might make us nervous about who Jesus Christ is. And in those times, we can set our eyes upon Jesus and get a clarity. Just, I often find myself asking myself, “Can I imagine these words being in the mouth of Jesus Christ.” And if I can’t, I think that should really give me pause, in questioning, in asking whether it really is telling us something about who God is and the way that God relates to the world.

Anthony: I’m really grateful for that, because as we come to my next question about walking worthy of the Lord, it’s a phrase that we see often in Pauline epistles. And if we’re not looking to Jesus Christ, we can be thrown back on ourselves, that, “Oh man, I’ve got to buckle up here and walk worthy.”

And there’s a both/and, right? There’s the fact that Jesus walked worthy of the Lord and thanks be to God. So, I wanted to know what does this phrase mean to the original hearers? And how should we interpret this imperative and live accordingly?

Andrew: So, it’s always hard to work out exactly, but it means the original hearers. But I suspect it probably means something similar to how we would hear it today, insofar as I understand it this far. And that’s saying that we need to live in a way that is true to the person Jesus Christ, and also to his ministry, to the ministry to which he calls us — is to recognize the importance of embracing his call on our lives, to seeing his call as a story, descriptive of the ways in which we live our lives in this world. Okay? So very simply, I think it means that we need to live our lives in a way that takes Jesus seriously.

And it’s by doing that, that we come to reflect the reality of who he is into this world, that we live our lives in a way that bears witness to this reality of the gospel. And now, I think in some ways this is a … we have quite simple methods. We just need to follow Jesus Christ in ways that really take seriously who he is and what he is calling us to.

But this is something that all the time, I think the church is failing to do in this world. So many of the ways in which Christians are represented in the world, I just do not think reflect the reality of who Jesus Christ is. And I often find myself just thinking, when I hear Christians say things that I think are a bit dashed, I just wish they would really take a bit more time to reflect on the ministry of Jesus Christ and ask themselves whether the kinds of things they’re saying about what the church should be in this world is really reflecting on the ministry of Jesus.

Anthony: And what you just said strikes me as thinking about Karl Barth. I think it was Barth that talked about how all of us need to be theologians, ultimately, which is our understanding of God, our God talk, our God speech, that we really do need to think, and God has given us his highest resolution of himself in the person of Jesus, right?

So, it goes to what you said — taking Jesus seriously. And so, with that in mind, I ask a question that we find parked in verses 12 and 14. It seems to me as we exegete those verses, God is making all the salvific moves, not us. So, what is your theological take for preachers and teachers who will be proclaiming this text to their congregations?

Andrew: Yeah, I think it was just absolutely right. This verse says that our salvation, our redemption, is fundamentally grounded in what God is doing for us in and through the person of Jesus Christ. It’s not something that God is starting to do and then putting things in our hands to finish a job.

Everything about redemption is accomplished in and through the person of Jesus Christ. Okay, so redemption has been established as a reality for this world. It’s a reality for creation. This world has been made new in and through the person of Jesus Christ. But, of course, when you look around in this world, we see so many ways in which this world continues to be broken, to be confused, to be sinful.

And that’s because we’re sleeping. We’re sleeping to the reality of redemption, and we are needing to be woken up from our slumber. We need to allow the Spirit to empower our lives so that we can reflect the reality of redemption, the reality of this good news, of the fact that all things have been made new in and through Jesus Christ.

And by waking up we become people that are living into God’s kingdom, that are participating in God’s kingdom of redemption, and that enables us to become empowered as witnesses to that reality, to become people who are showing the inauguration of God’s kingdom in this world.

And when we do that, when we participate in God’s kingdom, one thing that I think that we need to become clear as we grow into this redeemed reality is that we need to stop pretending to be the kings and queens over our own kingdoms, to recognize that we’re participating in something that is far greater.

And again, this is in some ways, it’s an obvious theological point to make. But there’s ways in which we, it’s almost a default for us, to keep returning to seeing ourselves as the center of this world, the kind primary or authority over our lives. There are so many ways in which I think autonomy can be understood to be a good thing and a proper thing, but there’s ways in which you can often overemphasize it in ways that allows us to view ourselves as the primary meaning makers of what this world is all about.

And that’s just not the case. And so far as we are redeemed, we’re called to discover who we are as new persons, and through Jesus Christ we’re called to see this is what redemption means — that all things have been made new. And this is something that we need to see.

We need to open our eyes and our ears. We need to wake up and smell a coffee. And that’s not something that we can do again by ourselves, but something we depend upon the Spirit to do in our lives. We need to know. And we need to go to places to participate in life, in church, to go to practices, to pray, to read our scripture, because it’s through these things that the Spirit is working the world again, encouraging us to wake up and smell the coffee.

Anthony: Yeah, that’s interesting, it’s been years since I’ve studied it, but if I remember correctly, the word redemption there in the Greek is apolytrōsis. Which means to be set free just for freedom’s sake, not to be used by the master in abusive ways, but to be set free.

And once you’ve been set free, you want to go with the one that set you free, who has made that salvific move. And to participate in his reality — like you said, to wake up. And this is something, I don’t know if you face it in the UK, but here in the United States, man, everybody wants agency and they’re just demanding agency.

But agency has to be understood in the light of Jesus Christ, right? That, yes, I get to participate, but I’m not the master of my own domain. I’m not the king or queen, as you said. That is such an important word, don’t you think for today’s scenario?

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that we forget, in some of the ways in which we think about what freedom is, that we often think that freedom is the freedom to do whatever. But when we’re thinking about what the freedom is as it’s defined by the gospel, freedom involves us being awakened to see the prisons in which we are enslaving ourselves by sin, that it’s to open our eyes to the problem of sin, to make ourselves conscious of sin as something that is not freeing us, but constraining us in a state of bondage, and that we are tying ourselves down from embracing the reality of who we truly are as we are known by God. And when we do that, we don’t flourish in the way that we are truly called to flourish in this world. We can’t know who we truly are unless we know the one who truly knows us.

Anthony: Bam. There it is.