Dr. Dwight Zscheile—Year C Reign of Christ

Anthony: Our final pericope of the month is Colossians 1:11-20. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Reign of Christ Sunday on November 23. Dwight, this is one of my favorite passages, so read it well, brother. No pressure.

Dwight: All right, so here we go.

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. 15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, 16 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. 17 He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 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.

Anthony: Whew. That is a doozy of a passage, and I want to give you an opportunity to proclaim it, to just riff on the supremacy of Christ. So, preach, preacher. What would you say?

Dwight: Oh, yes. This is such a rich — it’s really almost a hymn, I think, or a poem almost, in the way that it is just so rich. And I think where I want to go in this is thinking about these terms, strength, and power: “may you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power.”

His glorious power, right? From God’s glorious power, from Jesus’ power, which again, is power that’s made known in weakness, that’s revealed on a cross, “so that you may have all the endurance and patience, giving thanks to the Father.” So, this sense of needing to endure patiently. And the root of patience, of course, is to suffer, right?

Anthony: Yes.

Dwight: As we’re taking this journey together with an eye toward an inheritance, right? We have this gift that’s coming from God and he’s transferred us from the power of darkness, from the dominion, if you will, of the world and its powers into this kingdom, this reign of his Son, which is this upside-down reign where the crucified God is the ultimate authority, right? It’s turning on its head so much of what we see in our world and its structures. And being transferred into that realm, if you will.

I used to live in Virginia and I used to joke when I lived the, in Virginia, as we talked about, the old dominion and the new creation. I like it. And so, even though we were living still the old dominion of Virginia, we were living in the new creation, right? And so, we’ve been transferred into that kingdom, that new creation. And so, what does this yield for us? It’s this redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

And I think so many of people in our society are living haunted by the mistakes they’ve made, the estrangement and broken relationships that they suffer and don’t know where to turn for an alternative. How, what’s a way out of this, right? And so, people just double down. Again, as we talked about earlier, grievance or resentment or enmity, hate, and things like that.

But Paul here is saying, we have this gift that fundamentally reorients our relationships. And it begins with God’s relationship with us, and that is restored in Christ, right? The forgiveness of sins, the redemption, the freeing from whatever we’ve done, from all of the things that have kept us from God and from one another. We have been transferred into this other reality that we live in. And we have the grace and the power and the strength that comes from that so that we might suffer, endure, serve, minister joyfully, right? This paradox here of freedom and joy that comes through being restored to our kind of relationship that is not about our own kind of self-justification or self-aggrandizement, but really about being joined in Christ to God’s life and then through Christ to one another. We live not to ourselves, but to Christ.

There’s so much here in this text. But I think if we can unpack these words and bring it down to earth for regular people, saying, what is it that’s keeping you from the freedom of trusting that God has made you right with God and is freeing you to be right in right relationship with everyone else in your life?

Anthony: You know this song, poem, hymn to the supremacy of Christ is a theological tour de force, right? And so, I’m curious from your perspective, what are the theological implications of the statement — and it’s just an awesome statement — that the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Christ.

Dwight: So, I love, again, I love this. This is about the incarnation and I think so often, Christians don’t take the incarnation as seriously as we should. There’s a kind of lingering, often Docetism, I think, that happens in the church where people are kind of, “Yeah, yeah, God became flesh, but we’re not really comfortable with like, how that actually works.”

So, I don’t know if you’re a “Chosen” fan or if you watch “The Chosen”, but there’s a remarkable. documentary called Jonathan and Jesus. I don’t if you’ve seen that, but …

Anthony: Yes. I haven’t watched it, but I did see it advertised.

Dwight: So, it’s about Jonathan Rumi, who of course is the actor who plays Jesus in “The Chosen.” And it’s a little documentary following around his own story. It is really quite remarkable. He’s a faithful disciple of Jesus himself. But what’s powerful to me watching that is they show him being in public different places in the world and people will just come up to him and almost ask for a blessing from him or almost fall at his feet just because they know he’s Jonathan Rumi, the actor, and there’s something about the image, the presence of, here’s this person, embodying the Lord. Even it’s just in a show that we’re watching on TV, but the physicality of that, the tangible incarnation of that, has this effect on people. And you see these people just weeping and wanting his blessing.

And I think there’s something in that that’s a reminder of when Jesus came in human flesh to be with us to heal and redeem and restore us. That is the only way that God could restore human nature from the fall to its glory — that taking, sharing our place, taking our place, if you will, is the way, right? And it’s the kind of crazy claim of Christianity, the scandalous claim, right, from the very beginning it’s been offensive to all kinds of people and yet it is the good news for us that God has joined us in the flesh, right?

So, when I read in this about the fullness of God dwelling in Christ, it is to say that — I’ll go back to Martin Luther — that what we know of God’s love is what we see in the life, in the face of Jesus, and particularly in the suffering of Jesus, his willingness to join us in the worst of human experience.

And so, if we can trust that God’s love is that deep and that wide, and that profound, to meet us where we are, even when we hate him, even when we crucify him, then there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God, to get to Romans 8, that there is truly nothing that can that can separate us. And I just think that is a message we need to hear over and over again. We have a lot of stories, a lot of figures in our culture that are trying to be literally influencers, to influence us in different ways. And so many of them are leading us astray from God’s way.

And so, for us to recenter ourselves and say, if we want to know what ultimate reality is like, if we want to know what human nature, what abundant life, a good life is like, we need to focus on Jesus and we see it in him. We see it in the whole of his life, death, and resurrection. And we are to be conformed into that image through the power of the Holy Spirit, through the practices of the community in life together.

Anthony: Amen and amen. There is no other God behind the back of Jesus. He is the highest resolution image that we have of the very nature and being of God as the writer of Hebrews tells us. And God was pleased to have his fullness dwell in Christ. Hallelujah. Praise God.

Gospel Reverb exists to help pastors and preachers and teachers proclaim the word. And I just want to remind our listening audience that I believe the best kind of preaching leaves the congregation talking about Jesus, not the preacher, not the sermon, but Jesus and the text that was read. So, thank you for what you’re doing.

Dwight, it’s been a joy having you on the podcast. It’s a delight to meet you and we praise God for the work that he’s doing in and through you, especially helping the church understand how we can be swept up in all the good things God is doing through his mission. Thank you so much for joining us, and I also want to thank our team of people who make this podcast possible, Reuel Enerio, Elizabeth Mullins, and Michelle Hartman. It’s a joy to work with them. And again, Dwight, thank you. It’s our tradition on Gospel Reverb to end with prayer, and we’d be delighted if you’d pray for us.

Dwight: Wonderful. Let’s pray.

God, our Creator, we just give you thanks for the ways in which you are renewing the world, the ways in which you have joined us in Christ and bound yourself in love to us to heal all that is broken and estranged and all of the things that keep us from living abundantly. And Lord, we just pray that your Spirit may encourage all of the listeners on this podcast, all of those who are entrusted with the sacred work of proclaiming your Word. May you give them confidence and clarity and wisdom. Help them to listen carefully to their people. Help them to be rooted in you and your presence and your love. And Lord, we just pray for all those neighbors outside of our churches who don’t know your gospel, Lord, that all your people may live into their vocations as witnesses and ambassadors of reconciliation. Lord, we pray for encouragement and hope always in the gospel. We pray this in Jesus’ name and in the power of the Spirit. Amen.

Anthony: Amen.