Lent 24 post 7

 Colossians 2.6-15

Were you,  with the crowd,  amazed yesterday, as Jesus, by the finger of God, liberated one tongue and one pair of eyes belonging to one man afflicted by one evil spirit? (I hope we never lose our sense of astonishment at familiar Gospel stories.) But there are much larger communities of people afflicted by much wider forces of evil.

Captivity of the mind

Whole cultures can be victims of a captivity of the mind and imagination. Hostile spiritual powers corrupt and infiltrated the social fabric of human life, including political structures and authorities, ideologies, world views, even the way people habitually think and act as ‘normal’. 

Things that are in themselves part of God’s good creation, such as our diverse ethnicities and cultures, our sexuality, food and drink, economic activity in the workplace, all of these can be corrupted into idolatries, pervaded by subtle powers of evil. 

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that Christians should be immune to all that. Haven’t we turned from idols to the living God? Haven’t we renounced the evil one and all his ways? Well, yes. But we can so easily be sucked back into the world’s mindset by the sheer pressure of the culture around us (remember Romans 12.1–2). Or even by religious rules that sound so spiritual, but end up suffocating the life out of us. We don’t exhibit any of the Hollywood movie caricatures of ‘demon possession’. But powers of evil that have colonized the world around us shape the way we think. 

Stay free! 

Paul wants the believers in Colossae to be free from all such bondage. He warns them not to get ‘taken captive’ by deceptively plausible ideas that are merely human, worldly and idolatrous (.8). In Paul’s world, that would have included the cultural seduction of Roman power and civilization, and the religious attraction of forms of Judaism that had not accepted Jesus as Messiah. What do you think might fit that description in the world around us these days? 

So how does Paul fight back against such powerful forces? He confronts them with the cross! And he reminds the Colossians of the victory God accomplished there. 

From death to life (.12–13a) 

Paul sees baptism as a symbol of how we share Christ’s death and resurrection. His story is our story. The first half of verse 13 describes the Gentile Colossians (‘you’) from a Jewish point of view, ‘dead in sins . . . and uncircumcision’. Paul expands that vividly in Ephesians 2.11–12. But, like the Prodigal Son, God has brought the dead to life, as alive as Christ himself is. 

From sin to forgiveness (.13b–14) 

But death is the penalty for sin (as we have known since the Garden of Eden). So, to give us life out of death, God must deal with sin. And he has, says Paul triumphantly! He has forgiven us (Paul knows that he and his fellow Jews are as much sinners in need of forgiveness as the Gentiles) all our sins. How? In a vivid metaphor, Paul sees our sin as a massive debt. But God chooses to cancel this debt and nail the accusing document to the cross itself. Which means that God, in Christ, chose to pay the debt himself; the cross was the cost to God of our forgiveness. 

From captivity to freedom (.15) 

But sin and death were not the only powers that God dealt with at the cross. All ‘powers and authorities’ that deceive and enslave, whether working through political and economic structures, or religious systems, or spiritual idolatries, or human ideologies and rules (as in .8 and .16–23), have been exposed and disarmed at the cross. Christ’s apparent defeat was the place of his glorious triumph. And by his victory we are set free. 

Anyone looking at the cross of Jesus with a normal understanding of the first-century world would think: the rulers and authorities stripped him naked and celebrated a public triumph over him. That’s what they normally did to such people. 

Now blink, rub your eyes and read verse 15 again. On the cross, Paul declares, God was stripping the armour off the rulers and authorities! Yes: he was holding them up to public contempt! God was celebrating his triumph over the principalities and powers, the very powers that thought it was the other way round. Paul never gets tired of relishing the glorious paradox of the cross: God’s weakness overcoming human strength. (Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters, p. 170–171)