Genesis 18:1-10a Psalm 15
As Christians we are invited into this process of renewal and redemption in the here and now, and whenever we take flights of other-worldly fantasies the Church’s own traditions – honestly encountered – bring us right back down to earth. We are saved not as disembodied spirits, but redeemed body and soul. Even our sacraments are material, carnal, one might say; one can’t get any more “materialistic” than eating flesh and drinking blood. No wonder the Roman authorities in our early days accused of cannibalism. Yet, the problem is that the otherworldly, the esoteric, the “spiritual” – in the worst sense of the word – is so much more interesting. Moreover, because these do not represent palpable realities, we can make them into whatever we like. This is perhaps, my greatest concern with much of what passes for spirituality in our post-modern world; it lives in an other-worldly reality of angels, rainbows and emanations, glossing over some the most difficult and challenging aspects of real day-to-day living. In short it, is escapist, unfaithful to this world and to human experience. This is not, however, a new phenomena and it is in part of what the writer of the letter to the Colossians is addressing.
The city of Colossae was located in ancient Phrygia, part of the Roman territory of Asia Minor and near the great road from Ephesus to the Euphrates River. It sat near the town of Honaz in modern-day Turkey. Colossae had a flourishing wool and textile trade, as well as a religiously and culturally diverse population of native Phrygians, Greeks and Jews. The writer of the letter to the Colossians – traditionally believed to have been St Paul, although his authorship is doubted by many biblical scholars – is concerned about the religious situation of the Church there. One commentator writes that “the purpose of the letter was to bolster the faith of the community” in the midst of division. There seems to have arisen within the Christians of Colossae a faction “not holding fast to the head”, that is Christ, and who were promoting – as we can infer from the letter itself – “a complex syncretism that incorporated features of Judaism, paganism, Christianity, magic, astrology and mystery religion.” Certainly, “many elements of the Colossian error have been connected with gnosticism, e.g. asceticism, fullness of God, wisdom, knowledge, dualism, negation of things of this world.” Not only were these beliefs and practices leading many astray, but also causing dangerous divisions and confusion among the faithful in Colossae.
The writer’s response to this all is to remind the Church of the utter supremacy of Christ not only in their lives, but in the created order, in everything. In the midst of speculation about angels, spirits and secret wisdom, the writer reminds them that God does not hide his truths and purposes from human beings, but rather in the person of Jesus reveals them fully. He writes, “[Christ] is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15a)…for in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” (Colossians 1:19) Here the word image is a translation of the Greek, eikon, meaning true likeness. In Jesus’ becoming human God hides nothing of who he is. There is no secret knowledge, no esoteric wisdom, there are no angels that carry messages beyond what already revealed in Jesus to the Church, and through his Spirit which continues to dwell in the Church. Moreover, that revelation is real, it is down-to-earth, it is fleshly. The work of Jesus is a flesh-and-blood work, as the writer points out specifically: “he has now reconciled [you to God] in his fleshly body through death to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before [God]. (Colossians 1:22)
There is always the inclination to withdraw – to construct answers from the simple desires of our minds, to twist reality to our purposes or use the world and the created order to extract from it the answers we want. If we do not like some aspects of the faith or of what the Church teaches, we can simply add bits from other places which are more in line with what we want, or want the world to be. It is easier to believe in the indecipherable messages of angels or secret knowledge or our own fabrications than to put into action the more difficult, but completely down-to-earth precepts of Jesus – love your neighbor, give to the poor, forgive those who hurt you. If you do not like some aspect of the world as it is, it is certainly easier simply to pretend that it is otherwise or to ignore the truth, rather than take on the challenge of really changing things according to a more just or truthful paradigm. We all sometimes want an escape from the harsher realities of the world. We go to the cinema, we read novels, I go to Disneyland. But Christianity is the not the place for escape. It may be the place for comfort, it certainly is the place to be strengthened in hope and vision, but it is not the place for flights from reality; rather the Christian faith, the Church, these are where we learn the absolute importance of reality, of the world, of our flesh-and-blood bodies. We learn their importance because it is there that God meets us, and it is through creation and in our fellow human beings that God works and reveals his purposes. As Franciscan Richard Rohr reminds us, “God comes disguised as your life.”
Later in the letter to the Colossians – and we will hear it next week – the writer says to his fellows in Colossae: “Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.” (Colossians 2:18-20) He pleads for them to engage with reality – the divine truth revealed in the very human person of Jesus, and in whom we find out own authentic humanity. If I can quite Richard Rohr again, he reminds us that the greatest ally of God is what is. God wants us involved with reality, whether rejoicing in its goodness or battling its evils. We do no one any good service, much less the truth of the life and witness of Jesus, by indulging in flights of fantasy or of esoteric knowledge, or by constructing a reality only for ourselves, fenced off from the reality of God and of his Christ in whom has been reconciled all things in heaven and earth. No, here is the place where we encounter God and in Jesus God has revealed to us who God is among us and what God intends for us. Coming to terms with the real can be tough, but it is also amazingly liberating. God is not waiting to trick us, neither need we mistrust the world as it is, or escape from it. We can trust that God has already made our Lord Jesus “the one in whom all things hold together,…head of the body, the church…the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent” and that reality secures for us freedom from fear or the need to escape from what is, it frees us from having to construct things our way all the time, reminding us that that is right here, right now, as we are that God comes to us, and loves us and works among us. And that is a very good thing indeed.
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