Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Father and Son

There is so much to be digested from the first twenty verses of Colossians - the grace of God, the spreading of the gospel, the love of the saints, the prayer of Paul, the christological hymn - that one of the threads running right through the passage almost escaped me and my less-than-practiced eye. It's a thread found predominantly in the Gospel of John, but which finds a prominent place here in a Pauline prison epistle - the relationship between the Father and the Son, between Theos and Kyrios, between God and Jesus, between...well, you get the point. It would take a whole book to plumb the depths of this relationship as delineated in Colossians, but here are the pertinent verses which I may come back to over the coming weeks:

"Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother..." - 1:1

In other words, God has charged Paul with the task of proclaiming Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah. What does God want to do? Well, He wants to make Jesus known.

"We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you..." - 1:3

Paul understood God as being the Father of Jesus (though in what sense will have to remain unexplored here and now), but he uses a title for Jesus that is quite shocking in the context of monotheistic Judaism. In the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament), the word Kyrios is used for the Hebrew name Yahweh (or YHWH), which is God's personal name; the name given to Moses at the burning bush; the name which means "I AM". In most of our Bibles this name is translated as LORD, all capital letters. Well, here Paul uses that same word -- the word Kyrios -- to denote Jesus. This is the name above all other names that we find in Philippians 2. There Paul says that at the sight of Jesus all people will bow down and confess Jesus as Kyrios, as Yahweh, as Lord, and it will be to the glory of God the Father.

Already in the opening verses we see the selfless love of the Godhead in action: The Father charges Paul to make His Son known, and (admittedly with help from Philippians) the Son's goal is to give the glory to the Father.

"And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him*, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God..." - 1:9-10

Again it is God's will that is at the forefront, and what's more, knowing this will is linked to living the kind of life Jesus lives. The other side of this coin is that looking at the kind of life Jesus lived on earth is to look at the will of God incarnated. Why did Jesus do what He did? Because it was the will of His Father. His life was the enfleshment of God's character, and so it is little wonder that such a life is fully pleasing to God. Note also the word "spiritual" in this passage, which as Gordon Fee points out, should be translated as "Spiritual", i.e. "of the Spirit/pertaining to the Spirit". Here we have Father, Son, and Spirit in intimate connection with one another.

"...giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." - 1:12-14

The Father qualifies people and takes them out of the rule of a broken, corrupt world. What is interesting is where He puts these people - He puts them into the Kingdom of His Beloved Son. The term "Kingdom of God" is familiar to us from the Gospels, but the term "Kingdom of Jesus" is not so common. I think I like the latter term better. As I said in a previous post, the word "God" evokes much that is theologically false, but when we think of Jesus we think of compassion, grace, and self-giving love amongst other things. The kingdom God has already brought Christians into is a kingdom where the risen crucified Jesus is King. As the Disney Song says, "The Lamb becomes our Shepherd King; We'll reign with Him".

Of course I'm not pitting God and Jesus against each other. The Kingdom of Jesus is the Kingdom of God. The compassion, grace and self-giving love of Jesus is the compassion, grace and self-giving love of God. This fact is said most clearly in the following verses...

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation." - 1:15

"For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross." - 1:19-20

These are weighty passages of Scripture, especially vv. 19-20. In these words we hear echoes of Paul's earlier statement to the church at Corinth - "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself". The Jesus who went to the cross in obedience to the Father and out of love for sinners was not the "good cop" in the Trinity. The "bad cop" Father didn't leave Jesus alone to do the redemptive work on the cross while He sat on the clouds self-righteously. All God's fullness was in Christ as He took the judgement of the world upon Himself; as had been quoted on this blog before, the Judge took the Judgement on Himself. Father and Son were in on this redemptive work together in a big way.

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