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Colossians 3:1-11
Rules for Holy Living
Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3 For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
5 Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. 6 Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. 7 You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. 8 But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9 Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. 11 Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.
A couple of days ago, when the daily lectionary started listing readings from Colossians, we said that one of the themes of this book was a call to the Christians in that city to reject a strain of religious teaching that had been introduced among them. You might remember that we said the New Testament scholars haven’t come to any agreement about what this new teaching was all about, but it seems clear that it included elements of traditional Hebrew theology along with some forms of mysticism that seemed to have been drawn from Greek philosophy.
It’s probably not surprising that alternative teaching would arise among them including both elements of Hebrew and gentile thought. Colossae was a fairly important city of the Greek world, so the church there would probably have quite a few people who had been raised as ‘pagans’ – as worshipers of the Greek gods we all studied about in school. But the majority of the first Christian leaders had been raised in the Hebrew tradition, including of course the apostle Paul. And Jesus himself had been a Jew, and his teaching was based on the Hebrew scriptures. So it was probably inevitable that early Christian thought would have ideas drawn both from Hebrew and Greek thought.
That mixture of Hebrew and Greek ideas led to controversy in the early church. That controversy was about how much of Jewish religious law the members of the Jesus movement should be required to follow. It seems that the Christians who had been raised as Jews just assumed they should go right on obeying the traditional laws of Moses. In fact, you might remember us mentioning in past Reflections that lots of the Jewish followers of Jesus continued to go to synagogue services on Saturday and Christian worship on Sunday. And the Acts of the Apostles tells us that the apostle Paul personally observed the traditional laws of Moses, at least some of the time. But the question that arose concerned gentiles who converted to the way of Jesus. Did they have to be circumcised, for instance, or obey the purity laws, or eat only kosher food?
You might remember that the leaders of the early church held a big meeting in Jerusalem to talk this over and decide what to do. (You can read about this meeting in the 15th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.) After prayer and discussion, they decided that with a couple of minor exceptions, the new followers of Jesus didn’t have to be bound by traditional Hebrew laws and practices. All Christians were called to practice sexual morality, and refrain from some of the practices of Greek culture, things like orgies and pedophilia and temple prostitution. They were also to avoid eating meat from strangled animals, which was apparently a practice followed by one of the pagan cults. But aside from that, the church leadership decided that gentile Christians would not be expected to live by Jewish practices.
But gentile followers of Jesus were still to follow the moral code that arose out of God’s commandments. In this passage we’re reading today, for instance, Paul tells followers of Jesus (former Jews and former pagans alike) to refrain from a number of other behaviors that do not represent “holy living.”
One thing on that list of unacceptable behaviors is greed, which Paul says is “idolatry.” That term, of course, means making a god of something in this world. It seems that the point Paul is making is that greed amounts to making a god of money.
Now, you might say, no one would actually worship money, in the sense of bowing down and praising it. (Although when I was first training to be a lay minister, I once attended an Amway rally, which seemed uncomfortably close to a religious revival worshiping money.) But you might remember that in the past, we’ve said that maybe a better way to define your ‘god,’ is not as something you actually bow down and worship, but rather as something you look to for salvation. If you think of it that way, it’s easier to see what Paul is getting at, because there are lots of people who really do look to their financial resources to save them – to save them from need, from worry, and from poverty in old age. In that sense, money really can be considered a god for some people.
In this passage, Paul also lists a lot of other things that are incompatible with ‘holy living’: “anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language.” These sins, of course, apply every bit as much to the Jewish believers as they do to the former pagans. Especially when you substitute the term ‘gossip’ for slander – gossip is probably what Paul had in mind.
The real point Paul seems to be making here is that all of us who make a commitment to following Jesus need to face the fact that our new life as his disciples places moral obligations on us. Discipleship means being willing to set aside the world’s ways of doing things. There are lots of behaviors that are perfectly acceptable to the world – and that might even be considered as admirable to the world – but that are not acceptable for someone who’s trying to live in imitation of Jesus.
And that applies just as much to those of us who might always have thought of ourselves as “religious.” I suspect that our self-righteous ‘religiosity’ might be just as offensive to God as the sexual immorality and other ‘sins of the flesh’ of those outside the church. Because our religiosity can become a false god, too – it seems to me that lots of people who call themselves Christians are really relying on their own religious behavior to save them.
Living a truly holy life requires a radical switch of perspectives, as Paul says at the beginning of this passage – ‘setting our hearts on things above.’ What do you most want to accomplish in life? Think about that. I think Paul would say the right answer is, “I want to follow Jesus and play a part in the fulfillment of God’s kingdom.” It seems to me that adopting that purpose for your life is what Paul means by ‘having your heart set on things above.’
So if we want to live holy lives, our daily prayer should probably be that God would forgive us for our past and present sins, and shape us away from committing those sins in the future, and little by little make us into new people in the image of Jesus, so that when the world looks at us, they see the image of Jesus in us.
Let’s pray. Lord, we do ask your mercy for our sins, and we ask that by your Holy Spirit, you will turn us away from those sins and help us live more and more Christ-like lives. Help us to live in such a way that others encounter Jesus in and through us. Amen.
Every Blessing,
Henry
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