Jesus, Be the Center: A Meditation on Colossians 1:15–23
Photo by Stephanie LeBlanc on Unsplash
During late summer this year, our church went through a sermon series on the great worship scenes in Revelation. Those are all centered on the praise of Jesus, the Lamb of God. Then we took a week to consider “new seasons and next steps” in the life of the local church, before moving into a series on what it means to be a Christ-centered community. The sequence prompts questions: How will our worship of the Lamb shape our outreach to our neighbors in this new season? How does praise of the Lamb, in the company of the heavenly worshipers, shape the ethos and practices of our community of Jesus-followers?
“Ethos and practices”—that’s just a fancy phrase for describing the ways we live out our fundamental beliefs. In other words, they are the culture of our community. And here’s the great truth that every expert in organizational leadership will tell us: culture eats strategy for lunch, every single time! So as local churches plan and strategize for “next steps,” it doesn’t matter how promising the initiative or how creative the idea—if it isn’t in sync with the culture of our community, it will be a ship that runs aground. And if the culture of our community isn’t a kingdom culture, shaped by worship of the Lamb and centered on Jesus, then the strategies won’t matter anyway! Our neighbors don’t need our great ideas and grand gestures—they need to see Jesus reflected in his people. “Jesus, be the Center” is more than a catch phrase—it is the fundamental cry of a church that wants to make a difference in its community.
Centers are important, you see. Every person and every community has a center, an anchoring point. Thinking about that over the past couple weeks stirred my hazy memories of physics class. I don’t have a science-wired brain, so the last day of physics was an absolute “hallelujah” moment in my life (never, ever again would I have to take a science class!), but I vaguely remembered discussions of things like “centripetal force” and “centers of gravity,” matters in which the center is really important. Having much more retention of literature than science, my mind also went to the famous lines from William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” which gets at the importance of centers. Just after the bloody carnage of World War I, Yeats wrote:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats saw clearly what happens when communities and societies revolve around a center that is faulty, corrupt, and unable to sustain. Paul calls these unstable centers “thrones, dominions, rulers, and powers” in our Colossians 1:15-23. Rather than holding things (like the falcon) in their proper orbit, these centers loose chaos and the things in their orbit spin wildly out of control. The poem sounds eerily contemporary. A few weeks ago our pastor asked if the world had gone mad, and we all with one voice agreed that indeed it had. Madness and chaos are the inevitable result when life is ordered around a distorted, flawed center. But in our Colossians passage, Paul offers a breath-taking portrait of the true Center that holds all of life together.
Setting the Text in Context (Col. 1:3–14)
The letter to the Colossians opens with Paul’s prayer for the Colossian church. First, even though he has not yet met them, he expresses heartfelt thanksgiving because he has heard of their enthusiastic and fruitful reception of the gospel (vs. 3–8). Then he asks God to fill them with the knowledge of his will, in all wisdom and spiritual understanding—he wants more for them than mere knowledge, more than ever-expanding access to information. He wants their minds and hearts and wills and imaginations to be shaped by the Spirit of God. The result of this will be lives “worthy of the Lord”—pleasing to God, fruitful in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with the mighty power of God, and filled with endurance, patience, joy, and gratitude. Paul envisions for them a life that is beautiful and good and filled with purpose.
At the end of his prayer, Paul grounds both his gratitude and his petition in the monumental work that God has already done for them. Reaching back for exodus imagery, Paul reminds them that God has rescued them from a place of enslavement (the domain of darkness) and transferred them to a place of freedom (the Son’s kingdom). They have been liberated and forgiven. Notice the sequence: after describing the kind of people he prays for the Colossians to become, Paul immediately tells them, “Eyes on Jesus.” Both their current reality (they are members of God’s family and citizens of the kingdom) and their process of “becoming” (that is, their sanctification) are anchored in the person and work of the Son. What was true of the Colossians is equally true of us, and so Paul’s call applies right here, right now: “Eyes on Jesus!”
Hearing the Text (Col. 1:15–23)
There are two unspoken questions that Paul answers in our passage: Who is the Son and why does it matter? Remember, he is offering this to a group that identifies as “Jesus people” in the midst of a pagan culture, so the reminders are pertinent for us today.
Who is the Son (vs. 15–20)? Paul addresses the first question with poetry, as if he knows that mundane prose is simply not adequate for the breath-taking picture that he is painting. Paul describes the Son’s identity in relationship to creation (vs. 15–17) and to humanity, particularly to the church (vs. 18–20). In both halves of the poem, we see three elements: (1) An astonishing statement about the relationship between the Son and the Father; (2) an equally astonishing claim about the scope or reach of the Son’s work; and (3) a deeply comforting expression of the result or effect of what God has done through the Son.
The relationship between the Son and the Father. In verse 15, Paul makes the astonishing claim that the Son “is the image of the invisible God.” That word—image (eikon, icon)—would have had an immediate echo for anyone living in the Roman empire, since it was used for the portraits of Caesar that were stamped on Roman coins. But there’s another echo here, one that makes clear Paul’s intent. It is the echo of Genesis 1, from the creation story: “Let us make humankind in our image” (eikon). The word implies more than a mere representation of one thing by another; it implies a shared essence, a common reality between the two. What Paul is saying is that the embodied Son, Jesus, makes the character and nature of the invisible Father visible to human eyes. John says it this way: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18). The writer to the Hebrews soars poetically, like Paul: “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb. 1:3).
Just in case the Colossians don’t get it, Paul specifies in verse 19: “In [the Son] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” And he repeats it in the next chapter: “For in Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body” (2:9). Everything that is God is present in the Son. And if that isn’t amazing enough, Paul adds a corollary in his Corinthian and Ephesian letters: Believers (you and I) are the image (eikon) of the Son and the fullness of Christ! (See 1 Cor. 15:49; 2 Cor. 3:18; Eph. 1:23; 3:19.) As the Son makes the Father visible to us, so we make Jesus visible to the world.
Can we pause for a moment and consider that at the heart of the universe, at the center of all reality, is a relationship. The scientific community’s elusive search for a “theory of everything” will not be found looking through a microscope or a telescope, but through gazing at the face of Jesus!
The second element present in both halves of the poem is a claim about the scope or reach of the Son’s work. Eight times in six verses, Paul uses some form of the word “all.” Heaven and earth—the Jewish way of talking about everything that exists—it’s all created by him, for him, through him. Things visible and invisible—it’s all created by him, for him, through him. As C.S. Lewis observed, “There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counter-claimed by Satan.”
This all-encompassing scope of the Son’s work includes “thrones, dominions, rulers, and authorities” (Col. 1:16). Whether they acknowledge it or not, these invisible spiritual forces—and the human systems which they influence—owe their very existence to the creative work of the Son. They are not outside the Son’s creative sphere; they belong to him and were brought into existence for him—to reflect his character and carry out his purposes. Having failed to do so, by their rebellion against the Son’s lordship, they became hostile forces arrayed in enmity against the Son and against his church. Paul goes on to say in Colossians 2:15 that these hostile and corrupting rulers and authorities have been disgraced, disarmed, and defeated through the cross of Christ. As N.T. Wright puts it, “Though the powers are now in rebellion, he remains their true Lord.”
Considering the scope of the Son’s work leads naturally to looking at its far-reaching effects. Two key verbs, one in each half of the poem, highlight the impact of God’s work through the Son. The first is “hold together.” Through the Son, God has built into the entire creation coherence, utter goodness, and indescribable beauty. Every corner of the cosmos, from its deepest layers to its furthest reaches, is penetrated by the creating and re-creating work of the Son. “In him all things hold together”; he is the anchor point of it all. And unlike the false and fallible centers in Yeats’ poem, this Center does indeed hold.
The other verb that highlights God’s work through the Son is “reconcile.” Through the cross of Jesus, utter goodness and indescribable beauty are also available to every human being. To reconcile means to bring back into right relationship that which was separated by conflict. In his own body, the Son took sin—the conflict and the barrier that had kept human beings separated from God—and through his own blood, he made a way for peace and restoration between humanity and God.
This brings us to the second unspoken question that Paul answers: why does any of this matter (vs. 21–23)? Why does it matter who the Son is and what God has done through him? What does Paul’s lofty poetry have to do with us? It matters because we are invited into the relationship at the heart of the universe! The intimacy between the Father and the Son opens up to make space for us to join in their eternal dance of love. We have been reconciled to God (that’s a done deal!), set into right relationship with him, and we are being sanctified in him—made holy, blameless, and irreproachable. That’s a present reality! That is the ongoing work of the Spirit in us.
Christ’s work on the cross was not just to “get you saved,” a change in status that will have impact only at the moment of your death. You have already been transferred from the domain of darkness. We already live in the kingdom of God’s beloved Son. The days and weeks and months and years that he gives us are our “dress rehearsal” for the face-to-face dance of eternity! He is providing all that we need to dance now as if we were already in his presence. Having been given new life, we are being equipped to live in accordance with it. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in us, remaking our characters, freeing us from the corrupting effects of sin so that we can live in victory, and enlisting us as co-laborers in God’s great mission of reconciliation.
Living the Text
Paul encourages us, as he did the Colossians, to “continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard” (Col. 1:23). Each individual believer, each local church will have to prayerfully discern what that means in their particular contexts, attentive to the Spirit’s voice of correction (if they’ve been revolving around a center that cannot hold) or encouragement (because in the true Center, all things hold together, despite any chaotic appearance to the contrary). Individually and as communities, we must make a boldly honest assessment of our centers: is the Son himself the anchor point around which our priorities, decisions, values, and practices revolve? Do we acknowledge the Son’s supremacy in everything that we do and say and choose (Col. 1:18)? Are we experiencing the profound security of being held together by the Son, even in the midst of distress or loss or unsettling change? Or we allowed flawed and disgraced “rulers and authorities,” in whatever alluring ideological garb they cloak themselves, to take that pivotal role in shaping us? Have we offered allegiance to defeated powers, giving to them a loyalty that belongs only to the Son? The inevitable result of such a foolish choice will always be chaos.
If our responses to the first set of questions are positive, let us raise a hallelujah to the One who holds all things together! If honesty compels us to answer the second set affirmatively, let us repent, turning our backs on the defeated, disgraced powers and authorities and returning our full allegiance to the Son, by whom and through him and for whom all things have been created. And together, let us all bow in wonder and praise at this spectacular portrait of Jesus the Son, our Center. We can, as Paul urged, remain steadfast in the gospel and confident in hope. To borrow words from Patrick Miller, in the Son we know that “wonders have not ceased, that possibilities not yet dreamt of will happen, and that hope is an authentic stance” for followers of the Lamb.
Rachel Coleman is an affiliate professor of Biblical Studies for Asbury Theological Seminary and adjunct professor, Nuevo Testamento, for United Theological Seminary. Rachel is also the regional theological education coordinator (Latin America) for One Mission Society.