A Series of Scandals--January 2, 2025

A Series of Scandals--January 2, 2025

"For in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross." (Colossians 1:19-20)

The longer I am a Christian, the more it seems to me that the Gospel is a series of increasingly scandalous notions that nest inside of one another, like a set of those Russian nesting dolls.  Each claim of good news gets more audacious than the one before it, and yet each is more impossibly beautiful and compelling.  That hits home to me as I reflect on these words from the letter to the Colossians this Christmastide.  These are some powerful ideas, and each one has its own way of blowing my mind from a slightly different angle.

Let's start with the widest claim: that there is a God.  Right off the bat that's a claim that speaks hope against the immense darkness and chaos of the universe.  To say that God exists, even before we go any further and speak of Jesus, is to say at the very least that the cosmos is not an accident or a random chance event, and you are not a mistake or a meaningless lump of carbon living on a slightly larger ball of rock spinning around in the vast, cold emptiness of space.  We may well indeed be carbon-based life-forms living on a planet that whirls through the darkness, but if God is real, then our existence is no mere fluke. We are beings of meaning and purpose, created by the One who is the Source of our meaning and purpose.  That by itself speaks good news over against the abyss of meaninglessness we might feel ourselves pulled toward when the world feels out of control and full of meanness.

But the writer to the Colossians is just getting started.  He insists--as the Christian witness has, ever since--that this God who exists and gives us our existence also has come to share our humanity, fully and completely, in Jesus Christ.  This was a mind-blowing claim in the first century--to say that the Creator of all things could (and then would!) live among us, not in costume pretending to be a human, not appearing in some vision, and not as some bullet-proof Superman-type form, but as one of us in the utter vulnerability of this human flesh, blood, and breath.  The idea of God becoming embodied in the same kind of carbon-based mass of muscle and bone that we inhabit is scandalous!  For the ancients, it sounded undignified for a divine spiritual being to traipse around in the same skin and sinew as anybody! One of the perks of being a deity, they assumed, was that you didn't have to deal with messy human needs like hunger or sorrow, like getting a runny nose when you have a cold, or a brain-freeze headache when you eat something cold too fast.  And here in just a few words, the writer of Colossians has pulled down the barrier between the human and the divine and claimed that in Jesus Christ, we have the "fullness of God" dwelling.  The meeting of heaven and earth, it would seem, is not at a point on the map or a moment in time, but in a person--in the human life of Jesus. There is no authentic version of the Christian faith that pictures God staying "safe" up inside the walls of heaven away from the messiness, the suffering, or the sinfulness, of real human beings in the real world that you and I live in.  God comes to dwell with us, as one of us, sharing all the fragility, beauty, finitude, and peculiarities of being human.  That's an even more outrageous claim than saying God exists in the first place.

From there, this passage from Colossians pushes the envelope even further, by saying that this human life, Jesus, in whom God dwells completely, has come not just for a short information-gathering visit or in order to zap us with a heavenly sneak attack, but in order to reconcile all things to himself. It is Good news that the God-human, Jesus, has come, because his reason for coming is to mend the broken relationships across all the universe. Everything and everyone, everywhere, that is out of step with the way of God (which is really what "sin" is all about), is being brought back into right relationship through Christ.  God has come, not to smite, but to save, and it happens in the person of Jesus.  Like the well-known verses from John insist: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.  Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him" (John 3:16-17). These words from Colossians say the same: that God's intention through Jesus is to reconcile with the whole estranged world and to make peace and grant forgiveness all around.  That's amazing, and again, so different from the way, say, the ancient Greeks thought about divine visitations.  When Zeus would take the appearance of a man or an animal in the old myths and pay the human world a visit, it was often to seduce a woman, get something in return, or to play a malevolent trick on some poor unsuspecting schlub.  Rarely was it to be helpful to the humans, and if Zeus did do some kind of favor for them, it was for a select few and it always came with a catch or a price.  The New Testament's claim that God has entered the world as one of us in Jesus in order to save and reconcile with all the universe is utterly mind-boggling.  And yet here the writer of Colossians just comes out and states it plainly like it is the most obvious thing in the world.  I absolutely love it.

And then, maybe most scandalously of all, the letter to the Colossians says that God accomplishes this universal reconciliation between God and all things through... a cross.  God bears the hatred, violence, and rottenness of all humanity's sin, taking it all into the embodied life of Jesus, who chooses to answer our evil with love by absorbing our worst all the way unto death--and on the particularly nasty sort of death that a cross entails.  If it weren't enough to claim that there is a God, or that this God chooses relationship with us in our own humanity, or that this God chooses to reconcile with every last thing in heaven or on earth, then here is the most wonderfully baffling truth of all: God is willing to accomplish this universal reconciliation even though it comes at the price of a cross.  It's not merely a snap of a finger or a wave of a magic wand that sets things right--it is the costly choice to bear torture, rejection, hatred, and death at the hands of the very beings God is committed to reconciling with.

All of that is what has happened through the coming of Jesus.  We have been given no less than the meeting of heaven and earth in him, and more than that, the choice of heaven to give everything for the sake of restoring relationship with the whole world.

Before you and I pack up our Christmas decorations and move on with our plans like it's all over for another year, maybe it is worth sitting with this truth for a bit longer.  This is how you and I are loved.  This is the good news inside the good news inside the good news of the incarnation.  Let it sink in.

Lord God, we are in awe at your commitment to loving us, as one of us, in order to reconcile with all of us.  Don't let us rush past that news in the hurry to get to after-Christmas sales.