Colossians 3:1-14 – J B Phillips paraphrase
Last Tuesday, our monthly men’s group was sitting in a corner of a city restaurant. We are companions across a variety of academic interests and personal beliefs, so the conversation is never dull, always polite and mostly edgy. For the barest moment I caught my face in the mirror opposite – and for that bare moment I saw the hidden man.
This is a common enough experience as we see ourselves mirrored in connections and conversations. We are intent on saying this, wanting that, controlling, demonstrating, waiting for a response – and then there is that shattering or transforming moment when we see ourselves. How do we make sense of the self we see in the mirror?
Reading the Colossians text, today’s set reading, had the same effect on me. The words constantly repeated in Christian conversations were conventional enough: after all, I understand the dialect. So, sitting with these Colossian believers we talk like old friends about being transformed in the waters of baptism, there symbolically dying and rising to new life. This is easy talk, until I catch my own face in the mirror and frame deep within my psyche ‘How much water will I need to baptise away my guilt and liberate the hidden man seeking freedom?’
The conversation here is pretty conventional: ‘get your life in order’ and many more urgings of ‘pull-yourself-up-by-the bootstraps righteousness’. Yes, I have heard all this in a thousand sermons and read it in the shallow commentaries that want me to be a victorious Christian. This is easy religion; there is nothing to challenge or hold here. The mirror is cracked and the image of the hidden man is distorted.
My thoughts drift to the afternoon when the person I was sitting with heard a commotion in the next room and shouted out to his 4 year old son ‘Mark, whatever you’re doing, stop!’. Is that all this text from Colossians is about? Thinking about this, I was struck by a comment of Russell Rathbun, founder of the House of Mercy in Minnesota:
Knock it Off! A group of fledgling Christians in one city or another are doing something wrong, so they get a letter telling them to knock it off and then a prescription for how to do it right … Nadia Bolz-Weber, in her gracious and hilarious book, Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian Television, said that of the entire Bible verses quoted during the 24 consecutive hours that she watched TBN, over 85% were from the epistles. A lot of, this is what you have to do and not much of this is what Jesus has done.
Over the years too many of the sermons I have heard on the Epistles were harangues about the wicked acts of society – and by implication, the wicked acts of the people in the pew. So, whatever you are doing, stop! The rest of the sermon then becomes a self-help program to get life back on track. Rathbun adds pointedly: If I am clothed with the new self, how do I make sense of the self I see in the mirror?
Like it or not, the substance of today’s reading is about whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry, anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips and lying to each other. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. This is a very unpleasant and uncomfortable list but we can’t avoid its reality since we too often experience it and yes, let’s be honest, sometimes behave this way. We can’t escape the self we see in the mirror.
I have watched rage burst into uncontrolled violence. The street-scene was consumed by abuse, accusation, the agony of fist on face. In much the same way, I have been the object of another’s rage, where hatred spewed at me. Maybe you also have known that experience in the breakup of a relationship. Maybe you hold in yourself regrets about words spoken that might better have remained locked in the secrecy of your own thoughts. And then there were those thoughts, more violent than any act we might have engaged in. If I am clothed with the new self, how do I make sense of the self I see in the mirror?
But we also know another anger that shapes more subtly in our inner being. It is the anger at injustice. I remember the night I picked up a frail body and heard her shocking story of childhood abandonment – and the violence. It was a common street story that never failed to arouse my passion as I met young people driven into prostitution by the abuse of family members. Anger was the motivation for change. But even there we are too easily paralysed: the social justice program takes extended time to translate into action. If I am clothed with the new self, how do I make sense of the self I see in the mirror?
This chapter from Colossians demanded that I look hard in life’s mirror. If I am going to rid myself of the power of negative anger then I need a change in my self-awareness. If I am going to affirm the power of positive anger that awakens service to others then I need to change my self-awareness. Different motives, but the same conclusion. I know the answer lies in my willingness to re-evaluate my relationships – but that is a time-consuming task: it means I must first face the hidden man, then carefully and cautiously open myself to you.
All this is easier said than done. There are surprising parallels between our society and that of the Colossian believers. Like us they were in tension about a rapidly changing demographic. Population and cultural shifts unsettled older cultural norms. They were struggling to grasp whether the prevailing social and ethical conventions applied to them. And the Christian movement was part of this change.
On the closest textual analysis they were in crisis about the way gender should play in the faith and ethical life of the Christian community (compare the unity passages here and in Galatians).
Then and now pressure comes from people determined to urge conformity to traditional roles, values and power structures. Every evening the ABC news has described the day’s sad commentary about child abuse at the hands of clergy and religious. Every day through all the expressions of regret there is the same tragic litany of self-protection. We need to take a long look at ourselves and know deep within the negative forces that motivate us. When we look deeply in the mirror this text sets up, how do we make sense of ourselves?
But stop right there – the ancient writer had no interest in labouring sin and failure. Instead he says, ‘remember your baptism’, recall that you died to all these old corrupt values and now your life is hidden with Christ. Look in life’s mirror. Behind the wrinkles and the set mouth, the greying hair and the drooped shoulders is the hidden story of struggle and courage and belonging – profoundly belonging to another. I only make sense of myself as I re-capture and re-collect that.
To be hidden with Christ in God is to know the inner self and to trust the inner journey. That journey has taken each of us through many dangers and pitfalls; there may have been long years of self-preoccupation, maybe destructive behaviours, but for the merest moment you catch the hint that ‘you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator’. The fullness of that life is hidden even to me but for the merest moment I glimpse its possibility.
I have left the strong and absolute language of the text to the end of this address. If I have encouraged in you that instant reflection of who you are in the depths of your being then you will know also the tension that surrounds this. You slip back into old ways, you speak without thinking, you treat your neighbour with contempt – is this address then no more than an occasion for guilt.
A strange phrase occurs in this text about human failings – ‘Because of these, the wrath of God is coming’. The phrase is strange to our ears, probably because of its use by hell-fire preachers – but it is a common Bible phrase. Let’s take its ethical meaning to heart:
It is easy to forget that anger can be about love, that being the object of someone’s anger is sometimes about experiencing their love in one of its most intense forms – that its no can really be about a deeper yes. We forget this, I think, because for human beings anger has a dangerous volatility – Sigmund Wollmann.
Wrath like love is a human word about the human condition, and both words are limited by the objects we love or hate. ‘Wrath’ in the biblical use of the term is not about a rescue from hell-fire: it is a recognition that life always needs to face correction and re-formation. To look into the mirror and catch for the moment the hidden self is to be aware that love and all the life-giving qualities are in constant need of recovery. A Christian has no firm rule for every activity, no definition to cover every circumstance. We face the world around us with our uncertain words that flow from the single certainty that we are loved. And then always there is the nudge, the challenge, the demand to see life and our neighbour differently – yes, and ourselves as well.
Perhaps the prophet Isaiah deserves the last word: he describes God as rising up in wrathful judgment ‘to do his work, his strange work, and perform his task, his alien task’ (Isaiah 28:21). And that is to shape us as mature women and men able to face the vision in the mirror and see ourselves with all our imperfections as loved, accepted, sensing God in the inner hidden places of the soul. When we have faced this hidden image we are liberated to love and to serve.
Drink deep of the chalice of grief and sorrow,
held out to you by your dark angel of Gethsemane:
the angel is not your enemy,
the drink, though sharp, is nourishing,
by which you may come to a deeper peace
than if you pass it by,
a ‘health of opened heart’ …
From a slow accepting of our wounds, life within us begins to move outward, bitterness waning, compassion growing …
True prayer is the source, the prayer that comes not from the mouth, but as from the lips of wounds …
Hidden in that prayer is both the crucified Christ and our fellow-sufferers, those whom, in intercession and compassion, we need in order to be ourselves.
There is no higher aim
than to reclaim
another, blinded by life’s pain,
to help him see again.
Seek love in the pity of another’s woe,
In the gentle relief of another’s care,
In the darkness of night and the winter’s snow,
In the naked and outcast — seek love there.
Jim Cotter – ‘This is Holy Week’
A Meditation Homily based on the Epistle reading for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Colossians chapter 3 verses 1 -14 .
2 August 2013