NOTES for Col 3:12-25

Today’s text is quite straightforward. Not because it is easy to accept, but because everyone has parents, and many have wives, husbands, and children. Consequently, it is very easy for us to see how often we fall short of what we read. If things are not right with our parents, then they are not right with our children; if not with our children, then with our wives or husbands—somewhere, something is wrong. Yet there is a precedent: people have succeeded in realizing relationships like these within a family, when an inexhaustible reserve of goodwill made it possible to live in peace and love and, when necessary, in forgiveness. In the Holy Family we see that it is genuinely possible for a human being to live this way. Someone may say, “Of course—Mary and Joseph were raising Jesus, the perfect Man, whereas my children are nothing like that.” Yet this was more likely an additional difficulty in living the life of the Holy Family, for they bore responsibility for the Savior. What parents usually find hardest to accept is that their own child follows his or her own path and chooses it independently. In this case, the parents had to accept Jesus’ way of the Cross and help Him along that way.

The expression “put on,” which the apostle Paul uses, can stir our imagination. To put something on means to abide in it. We then find ourselves inside a kind of covering that filters our interaction with the world around us. Paul lists some qualities, or properties, of this filter, placing love above all as the perfect expression of perfect relationships. Within this covering Paul establishes a state of peace that comes from God, which calls to mind the words of St. Seraphim of Sarov about the Christian life as the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of peace. And this is what passes through the covering to the heart: the word of Christ. Then everything that comes from us becomes a deed done in the name of the Lord and thanksgiving to God. It seems that this thought is developed in the passage from the Gospel of Luke, which speaks of the deeds to which we are called, deeds of love, because it is precisely through love that we become like the Father, drawing nearer to His perfection (compare verse 36 with Matt. 5:48).

More often people call love a certain feeling, an internal sensation of agreeability from the memory of someone or something, joy upon meeting with this someone or something, and the sharp desire to possess it. Maybe that is why it comes to hear all the time from very various persons something as «I don’t feel loving God or I can’t love my enemy».

All that the Bible says about love is completely different. Love is not feeling, nor sensation, although it can be accompanied by these. Love is not something which lives in the soulful, but rather in the spiritual sphere, and its bearer can be only a personality.

Love is a special means of the spiritual life appearing in relationships and actions. Which? But those, when a certain other person, towards whom are directed these relationships and actions, is more important for me, than myself. God's love is really such, besides, God is love (1Jn 4:16).

We then understand that love is not some kind of my quality, but something superior to me. And we can in particular "put on" love, enter into it - such that all our relationships and actions are fulfilled by God's perfectness. Jesus is exactly Such, and, being bound to Him, we become partakers of this life-love.

For Paul, the Christian life is life in Christ in the most literal sense of the words. It unfolds in the spiritual space of the relationship that binds the Son to the Father. And all relationships between Christians, like their life itself, must exist precisely there. It is no accident that the apostle speaks of peace: inner peace is inseparable from dwelling in the Kingdom as the space of the relationship between the Father and the Son.

But the fullness of the Kingdom is revealed in love. In the Kingdom, love becomes not merely a relationship, but also the environment within which all relationships exist: those between people, those of each person with God and with Christ, and finally that of Christ Himself with His heavenly Father. In itself, the Kingdom is the space in which God's breath predominates, but in the context of all the interpersonal relationships possible in such a space, it is also an environment of love. God's breath is bound up with His life, with His very existence; but when someone else is drawn into His existence, a space of love arises at the point of encounter as the dynamic of that encounter itself. It is precisely love, arising through God's will directed towards the one He loves, that becomes the bridge joining the uncreated God to all the beings He has created and loves, including human beings. In relation to that which cannot be conscious of God's will, His love is revealed as God's Wisdom, present in the world even where no one can recognize it. But in relation to a person conscious of that will and of their own existence, it is revealed precisely as love.

And if relationships between people are built in the space of the Kingdom, like the relationship binding the Father and the Son, they too can only be relationships of love. This is not because a person ceases to be a creature in God's presence, but because in any relationship in which God participates and which He shapes, His love becomes predominant and forms the environment within which it exists. Such relationships cease to be purely human and become divine-human, since they are shaped not only by people but also by God. It is to the formation of such an environment of love among Christians that Paul calls the recipients of his letter, whether in relationships between spouses, children and parents, or slaves and their masters. As long as these relationships remain strictly functional, they cannot be relationships of love. But if the Kingdom comes to the forefront of each person's life and their relationships become relationships of the Kingdom, function—including social function—recedes into the background. It is of such relationships that the apostle speaks in his Letter to the Colossians.

If we are to do everything in the Lord's name, certain limits are placed on the word “everything.” Can we do vile things, in word or deed, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ? Can we kill, steal, commit adultery or bear false witness?! The very desire to do something in the Lord's name already helps us in life, because it rules out clearly wrong choices—choices incompatible not with some formal rules, but with the very person of Jesus.

Gratitude to God is the very foundation of Christian life. It is in thanksgiving that we are furthest from opposing Him: we do not merely accept His will—as if to say, what else can we do?—but joyfully agree that it is good for us. The whole fullness of human, filial gratitude has already been expressed in the Eucharist, in Jesus Christ's prayer and sacrifice of thanksgiving. Our greatest “thank You,” therefore, is union with Him and thanksgiving through Him.