Nielsen’s Nook

I am using the new WordPress 2.5 engine for my blog and really like the new interface in the control panel. One of the bonuses was that I found a post from my Colossians series that should have definitely been public. I lost about 150 sermons and all my seminary papers and notes last summer when my hard drive crashed so I am delighted that some of that work still endures here at Nielsen’s Nook.

Sorry for the anachronistic nature of this Colossians post, but here’s the link to the now public bit from Colossians 2:8-15.

Commentary

[1] σου ὁ θεὸς See note in Metzger’s Textual Commentary. To summarize, there is early and good support for αὐτοῦ instead of σου (P⁴⁶ א B). However, the great external witness to σου and the internal difficulty that αὐτοῦ presents both syntactically and grammatically left Metzger’s committee and most scholars to believe that σου ὁ θεὸς was the more likely original.

[2] διὰ τοῦτο would seem to indicate that on account of Christ’s love for righteousness and hatred of lawlessness he was exalted in the way that is being discussed by the writer of Hebrews. Righteousness the likeness of God and that likeness is described in the Law of God, namely the Decalogue. Lawlessness (ἀνομία) would then be the antithesis, the unlikeness of God. Human beings, created as the image of God to be the likeness of God, walking in fellowship with him, chose a course that was unlike God and consequently destroyed fellowship with him. The Son has been exalted because he has as the image of God (i.e., a human being) loved the likeness/righteousness of God and hated the willful unlikeness of God and in his exaltation his people are restored to fellowship with God (c.f., Colossians 1:15-21).

[3] παρὰ when used with the accusative of person may be employed in a comparative sense (BAGD, 611). Luke 13:2 gives another scriptural example of this use of παρὰ. καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· δοκεῖτε ὅτι οἱ Γαλιλαῖοι οὗτοι ἁμαρτωλοὶ παρὰ πάντας τοὺς Γαλιλαίους ἐγένοντο, ὅτι ταῦτα πεπόνθασιν; And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were sinners more than all Galileans because they have suffered these things?” (author’s translation)

[4] This is a direct quotation from Psalm 44:7-8 LXX.

17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

“That is,” writes Farley, “they are to manifest the Lord’s life on earth, as His Body.” ¹ I remember one of the extremely helpful and paradigmatic books I read in seminary by Benjamin B. Warfield. In this little booklet that he wrote to incoming students to Princeton Seminary, he encouraged us that there is never a time that we would turn from worshiping the Lord to our books or from the study of our books to the worship of the Lord (to paraphrase). ²

Warfield, Farley and St. Paul all resonate symphonically together here. The strange thing about truth is that it transcends all kinds of boundaries, traditions, cultures, and time. Colossians 3:17 underscores union with Christ the paradigmatic element of Christian theology and life. This union is in fact a participation in the divine energies (workings, ενεργη) and is most profoundly proclaimed at the Lord’s Table, where Christians by faith receive the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus—where God gives us himself and we give Him ourselves. And so we say during the consecration of the Bread and Wine:

And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him. ³

This is of course a continuation of the theme we find in John 15, where Christ makes plain his desire that we abide in Him and He in us, as He—the Second Person of the Trinity—abides in His Father. In this way Christians graciously participate in the divine life given to us in Christ Jesus. “[Our] life is His life. [Our] existence is to be one continuous outpouring of thanksgiving to God in His Name. The Christian calling is to be a eucharistic man.” ⁴

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 186.

² Warfield, Benjamin B. The Religious Life of Theological Students.

³ Book of Common Prayer, 336.

⁴ Farley, 187.

9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. 11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. (ESV)

It’s amazing how sometimes just a turn of a phrase will strike you in a way that makes an amalgamation of the familiar burgeon into something fresh and stirring. Writing about Colossians 3:9-11, Farley writes:

The only abiding reality is Christ—He is all and everything and the only thing that matters. And He is in all. He is in everyone in the Church, without regard for their former race, religion, culture, or social position….¹

There is a boldness here that, to some, might verge upon audacity. Farley’s point is that the Apostle Paul seems to intimate that if Christ is the Incarnate Deity, the Savior of the World, the Perfect Imprint of the Father; then, indeed there is a cosmic reordering that is at hand. You see this echoed in Farley’s idea of former. In a very real and transcendent sense there is no longer race (and gender, c.f., Gal 3:28-29). There is no longer religion. There is no longer culture. There is no longer society. There is Christ—all in all.

Have we contemplated what it would be to allow Christ to more fully transform and renew the way I think about race, for example? In Christ, I am formerly a Caucasian. What does that mean? It seems to mean, at least on the surface, that Salvation circumscribes every aspect of the world in which we live, every facet of who I am as an individual and member of humanity. It does not obliterate our distinctions but puts restores them to their purposed places in the mosaic of Creation.

Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Help us to think cosmically about your work in our lives and in this world. Amen.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 182-3.

Commenting on Colossians 3:1-4, Farley writes of the parallels between the Gnosticism of the Lycus Valley during the time of the Apostle Paul and the theological novelties of today:

The many forms of theosophy, anthroposophy, and other variations of the New Age spirituality still offer a potent and heady mix to those seeking a spiritually more exotic than what they think they know as the traditional Christian Faith. … The Church will always have to contend with those who falsely claim to offer a more “spiritual” approach. And its answer will always be the same — to reveal the ultimately earthbound nature of such “spiritualities” and our transcendence of them through our union with Christ. ¹

There is not an expression of Christ’s Church on earth that finds itself exempt from this statement. What has struck me about Farley’s comment is the way it speaks to the individuals and the corporate body in one stroke. One the one hand, it asks the individual to consider the desire to make the Church and worship of God after her own image. In chasing after the so-called spiritually more exotic experience, in making what religion does for us the measure, do we not remove ourselves from the self-evident course of Christ’s Church through the experiences of history? In other words, it is not novelty that has endured over millennia in the context of Christ’s Church, but the tradition (i.e., the deposit of faith) that has been faithfully handed down from the Apostles and Prophets. Paul’s words then, when applied to us post-modern persons is as a two sided coin. On the one side is the face of encouragement, pierced hands extended, bidding us to progress patiently and faithfully in the faith to which the Scriptures bear witness. However, upon turning the coin over our eyes would fall upon a great and vicious beast that warns us of the fate of all who would presume to worship God after their own image.

Corporately, this passage gives warning to the Church on how to persevere through the ages. During the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that plagued Protestantism at the turn of the twentieth century (and perhaps the controversy that plagues the Episcopal Church USA today), the Church was faced with modernists, on the one hand, who sought creative, rationalistic, and sophisticated ways to throw-off the deposit of faith handed down to them in their age, namely to divorce themselves from the yoke of scriptural-authority that this deposit necessitated. Fundamentalists responded ultimately by remotion. That is, when the Fundamentalist saw the spiritual rebellion happening in modernist circles, they became anti-modernists, which also misses the deposit of faith that the Apostle Paul has handed down to us in Colossians 3:1-4. It is not in being an anti-modernist that demonstrates the Church’s essential mystical union (hidden with Christ in God), but in being unswervingly focused upon the Christ, beholding His glory, exalting His Name, and being faithful to pass on the tradition and scriptural-authority that has and will continue to be the way that Christ sustains His Church hidden with Him in God.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 179.

On the one hand, it is good to see so many people so concerned and thoughtful about the 2008 Election. The desire for strong leadership, for a person and administration that can keep one safe and provide an environment in which a person and their family might indeed thrive is a good and natural desire. But how long will it last? How much can one President in our political expression or a king or Prime Minister in others actually do?

I am reminded of our cosmic need for beneficent rule from Colossians 2:15 this morning. In particular, as our own political process in America continues to be reduced to cesspools of slander. This process serves to tickle our curiosity but not answer the questions, many times, that a citizen needs answered in order to vote well. The political fight employs the weapons that only insure more wounding and political blood-letting continue.

Perhaps, the weapons of warfare, political or otherwise, are all wrong for us, for politicians and for the citizens that elect them. “Having stripped-off the rulers and authorities, He disgraced them openly, having led them as triumphal captives through [the Cross],” Lawrence Farley translates Colossians 2:15.

Most politicians want to sincerely change the world, or at least their world. However, with all the rhetoric about change this term, I wonder about the substantive mechanism to get us there. We elect those who conquer best with the weapons that we think are mighty. The Cross would remind us that might is fleeting and can turn upon its wielder: the sword cuts both ways. The Cross for Christians is in fact the place that we find not only salvation from what would swallow us whole, but the way forward in all spheres of life. Indeed, the Cross is “the invincible trophy, the weapon of peace” as Farley reminds us in the kontakion of the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 174-5.

Lawrence Farley writes regarding Colossians 2:8-9:

Christ is not just one link in the Fullness of the Godhead’s series of emanations. All the Divine Fullness dwells in Him. And not only that, but the Divine Fullness dwells in Him bodily. It is not, as the Gnostics asserted, that the true Divine Nature would not deign to soil Itself with contact with the bodily; corruptible world. On the contrary, the Fullness of God has actually assumed a body, sharing our physical nature.

Meditating on this passage from Colossians and from Farley’s reflections, there are two things that confront me. First, is of course the importance of my human body. God himself was pleased to take on a body like ours and in that there is great impetus to care for my own body. This point of impetus is related to the second confrontation I experienced. Elsewhere Paul will write about offering our bodies as living sacrifices (Rom 12:1-2) and we find Jesus concerned in the Gospels not only with what our body does but also with what our minds (in connection with our bodies) think.

Insofar as we participate in Christ, we participate in one who has a body that is perfect. That is, he has a body that fulfills the purpose for which human bodies were created and the destination that human bodies in Christ are headed. In other words, Christ’s body then provides for us a cosmic goal and direction. And so when I sin in body or mind, in things done or in things left undone, I do with my body that which is immature, that which is in a direction other than the cosmic final direction that Christ has laid down for us and then raised for us on the other side of death.

Lord, in your mercy, forgive us the use of our bodies for those things that are unlike Jesus, so that we might abide in the fullness of the One person in whom the fullness of the Divine indeed dwells. Amen.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 171-2. Commenting on Colossians 2:8-9.

In commenting on Colossians 2:5, Lawrence Farley writes:

… for in this — in [Paul's] love for [the Colossian Church] and his spiritual agony at the thought of their danger — is his moral authority to exhort them. He has never actually met them. They are Epaphras’ spiritual children. His moral authority to teach them lies in the fact of his suffering for them (see Col 1:24). For it is only insofar as we love and suffer for others that we have the right to teach and direct them. ¹

As I reflected on this verse and commentary, it occurred to me that many of the things that frustrate and even anger me at times are, in fact, opportunities in which God would increase and bless myself and others by teaching us to give and receive a love more authentic. In other words, true rich thick authentic love is most inconvenient - that is, unless you think God had His crucifixion for the life of the world merely scheduled out in His pda. Inconvenience, then, for the Christian, is filled with the immeasurable and redemptive possibilities of divine love.

Lord have mercy that your church, starting with me, would recognize authentic love and would be most industrious in its dispensing in this world.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 162. Commenting on Colossians 2:5.

This was the mystery long hidden from the world in the secret counsels of God and the wisdom that Israel did not expect. Israel expected the Jewish Messiah to come, to exalt the Jews to a place of prominence in the world (with the Gentiles as their servants) [much like some Christians today], and to reign physically from the city of Jerusalem. the full glory and political prominence would come with the first appearance of the Messiah. (That was what the Jewish crowds were expecting when they welcomed the Lord into Jerusalem on that fateful Palm Sunday; see Mark 11:10.) They did not suspect the riches of the glory of God’s mystery, or the overflowing generosity of His grace. They did not suspect that God would pour out His grace upon all flesh — even the Gentiles, thereby abolishing the distinction between Jew and Gentile.

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Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 162. Commenting on Colossians 1:26-28.

[Christ's] death on the Cross was Bloody, painful, and real. Human physicality was thus not something of which to be ashamed. Rather, it was the instrument of our salvation. The Gnostics retreated in revulsion from the flesh as if it were something unworthy. For them, there was a great dichotomy between flesh and spirit. But this was an error: for the Incarnation of Christ dissolved this dichotomy, making the flesh spiritual and making the physical world a channel of divine grace.

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Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 162. Commenting on Colossians 1:21-23.