NOTES for Col 1:18

What did the coming of Christ bring into the world? Today's message speaks of a fundamental change on three levels: in a person's personal existence, in relationships between people, and in the relationship between a person and God. Christ accomplishes victory over death, and a person's life no longer ends with physical death, for if there is a firstborn, then there are also those who will follow him. Christ unites humanity into a new organic unity, like a body in which every member is unique, necessary, and precious. And finally, the primacy of Christ restores in the human being the right orientation: love for God and agreement with his will. Strong words, aren't they?

The theme of the entire epistle to Colossians is the unique dominion of Christ in the terrestrial and celestial life. And the apostle Paul points out in this verse, we have just read, three reasons of this dominion: headship, firstborn and preeminence.

Let begin from the beginning - Preeminence. Christ has the right to be the chief, because He is Even the same that He said from the beginning (Jn 8:25). He is the One, by whom all things were made (Jn 1:3), that is why He knows all the ways.

Now about the firstborn. He is first in everything: the first in adoption, the first in righteousness, the first in self-abnegation, first in love, first in resurrection. He is Lord by right of precedence and because He is better!

And finally, the headship. The head - bearer of ideas and the thoughts, the head is most precious and necessary. That is surely why the head controls all the other organs of the body. And behold, in Christ the Creator is connected with His creation, a new humanity - the Church - it is a God-Man body, in which the control part (the head) belongs to God.

Thus, in Christ - the beginning, the way and the purpose of the entire universe, what the apostle Paul wanted to tell us, and, by being connected to Him {the Christ} by faith, we become partakers in the plenitude of His Man - God's life.

Paul speaks in such a way that one may think everything he says should already be known to the addressees of his letter, and that the apostle is only reminding them of what they already know.

Even in pre-Christian times people spoke of the Messiah as the One whom God had intended before the creation of the world, and Paul does not reject this tradition. But he goes still further: he connects the person of the Messiah with that mystery of God's own personhood which only in Christ can be revealed to a human being, at least in part. The point is the connection between the fullness of Christ's life and the fullness of God's life.

For the apostle this is one and the same fullness. He understands that in Christ there acts the same will that created the world, God's will, which conformed its action to the framework of the human nature into which God placed it. Here, of course, there are not yet any theological schemes connected with Trinitarian theology, nor any developed teaching on the incarnation of God, but Paul undoubtedly recognizes the spiritual reality that became the spiritual soil for all these schemes and concepts.

He himself, however, is not troubled or occupied by them. What matters to the apostle are the practical conclusions from what was revealed to him and what he was able to understand. And first of all, the fact that the One who brought the fullness of the Kingdom into the world also bears in Himself the fullness of God, differently from His heavenly Father, but the very same fullness; and the fullness of the life of the Kingdom opened to every Christian is connected precisely with it. Participation in the life of the Kingdom also turns out to be participation in God's life, which is opened to the Christian in the process and in the context of his relationship with Christ. And here there are no longer any barriers or boundaries: the Kingdom is one, and therefore the apostle speaks of Christ as the One through whom God reconciles the world to Himself.

Formerly the fallen world stood opposed to God; now it has been reconciled with Him insofar as it has been transformed into the Kingdom brought by the Savior. For a person, however, such reconciliation is always a matter of relationship with Jesus, a deeply personal relationship that opens to him the fullness of another relationship: that of the Father and the Son. And there the fullness of the Kingdom and the fullness of God's life, accessible to a human being, are revealed to the Christian, and a person receives as much of that life as he is able to receive. This is the life of which Paul reminds the Colossians, presuming that it should already be known to them.

Beginning his letter to the church in Colossae, Paul as it were repeats anew the fundamental truths without which there is and can be no Christianity in its original sense, connected with the experience of the life of the Kingdom. It is no surprise that the center of his witness is the image of the Messiah-Christ, without whom Christianity as the experience of the Kingdom is impossible in principle (vv. 9-17). And if, according to traditional rabbinic ideas, the Messiah was conceived by God even before the creation of the world, then for Paul the Messiah becomes the One without whom the world is unthinkable, the One on whom it rests and who constitutes its true foundation (vv. 15-17).

Such a transformation of traditional ideas is entirely logical: if the Messiah contains all the fullness of the Kingdom (v. 19), and the Kingdom is the only real, true reality through which and for the sake of which everything else exists, then the Messiah Himself quite naturally becomes the foundation on which the universe rests.

But for Christians, whose main task is participation in the life of the Kingdom and then rooting themselves in it, the most important thing is the possibility, opened by Christ's coming into the world, of complete cleansing from sin, without which one cannot enter the Kingdom (vv. 13-14). In former times God cleansed His people from sin through purifying sacrifices, but such cleansing was not complete: one could be cleansed in this way only from a sin committed involuntarily, through ignorance or under compulsion. The blood of sacrificial animals, sanctified by God's presence, was not enough for more than that. Now every seeker of the Kingdom has the possibility of being cleansed from any sin, beginning his spiritual life anew and dedicating it to the path into the Kingdom.

For the apostle the Kingdom is nothing other than the union of heaven and earth; for him the Church turns out in this respect not even to be a prefiguration, but the form of the Kingdom's existence in our world, which is being transformed but is not yet transformed (vv. 18-20). No less important for Paul is the overcoming by seekers of the Kingdom of their own sinfulness, without which one cannot enter the Kingdom (vv. 21-23). The task of the Church is twofold: on the one hand, it must become the space of the Kingdom in the world being transformed; on the other hand, it must be a community of those being saved, a community of people walking the path of the Kingdom but still far from reaching the goal. The unfolding of the fullness of the Kingdom in our transforming world is inseparable from the spiritual formation of its inhabitants, and this process will be completed only at the end of time with the return of Christ.