Colossians 1:18-20 — Head of the Body

FRANK EDWARDS: There is a small word in the middle of today's passage that carries more than its size, and it is the word "pleased." God was pleased. All of his fullness, everything he is, was pleased to make its home in a man... and that man bled to death outside a city wall on a Roman cross. I do not want to rush past that. I want to hold it up to the light for a few minutes and see what Paul is actually saying.

LINDA BROWN: Colossians one, verses eighteen through twenty, is where we are today, and this is Dig Deeper. Frank has coffee, I have coffee, and we have three verses that somehow manage to talk about the church, the resurrection, the nature of God, and a public execution in the space of two sentences. Would you read it for us before we take any of it apart?

FRANK EDWARDS: And He is the head of the body, the church; He is the beginning and firstborn from among the dead, so that in all things He may have preeminence. For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through the blood of His cross.

LINDA BROWN: Head of the body. Firstborn from the dead. All his fullness. Blood of his cross. Every one of those could be an episode by itself, and Paul stacks them like he is in a hurry. Where does the thread actually start?

FRANK EDWARDS: It starts with a picture that everyone in that valley already had in their heads. The ancient world liked to imagine the universe as one enormous living body, its parts arranged in ranks, and in the spaces between the earth and the far heavens they imagined unseen powers governing the different regions, each one with its own jurisdiction. That was simply how educated people talked about the cosmos. So when Paul picks up the language of a body and a head, he is not inventing a metaphor, he is borrowing theirs... and then he does something with it that nobody in Colossae would have expected. He takes the headship of that vast ranked body and hands it to one person. And more than that, he says the body this person is head of is the church. His other prison letter, Ephesians, puts it almost in the same breath: God made him head over everything, for the church, which is his body. The Lord of every authority is given, as a gift, to a congregation in a bypassed little town. Why would Paul narrow it like that? Why the church, of all things?

LINDA BROWN: Because they had the best possible boss. That is honestly what "head" sounds like to me... an org chart. Christ is the CEO, the church is the staff. Which is fine, I suppose, but I do not see why it needs a whole cosmology behind it. Isn't that just a title?

FRANK EDWARDS: A boss sits at the top of the chart and the chart would survive without him. Paul means something closer to what your head is to your body: the place the life comes from, the thing without which nothing below it moves or breathes or knows where it is going. Source and ruler at once. The church is not an organization he presides over. It is a body that is alive only because he is. And then, before you can even settle into that, Paul tells you why he gets to be head in the first place. He is "the beginning and firstborn from among the dead."

FRANK EDWARDS: That word for firstborn is prōtotokos, and it is easy to hear it as a simple count, who came out of the grave first. But Jesus was not the first person raised from the dead. The widow's son at Nain was raised. Jairus's daughter was raised. Lazarus walked out of a tomb with the cloths still on him. Every one of them died again. Nobody ever called Lazarus firstborn from the dead. In the Old Testament, firstborn is a word about rank and inheritance, the right of the heir. God calls the whole nation of Israel "my firstborn son" in Exodus, and he says of David's line, "I will make him my firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth." Highest. That is the sense. So when Christ rises he does not simply return to life the way Lazarus did. He inherits a new kind of existence that death cannot reach, and he opens it as the heir who brings the rest of the family through behind him. Paul says it another way in First Corinthians, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep... the first sheaf that guarantees the harvest. And John, in Revelation, gives him the identical title, "the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth," in one breath.

LINDA BROWN: The rank follows from the grave, then. He is highest because he was the first one through death and out the other side into something permanent, and everybody else who was raised just came back into the same old life they left. That is why "beginning" and "firstborn" sit next to each other.

FRANK EDWARDS: Firstfruits. That is the technical name for what you just described, and Paul reaches for it deliberately, because a first sheaf is not impressive on its own... it is a promise about the rest of the field. Which is why the sentence ends where it does: "so that in all things he may have preeminence." First place, everywhere. And then Paul gives the reason underneath the reason. "For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him."

LINDA BROWN: Fullness is a soft word to me. Full of what, exactly? It reads as a compliment more than a claim.

FRANK EDWARDS: The Greek is plērōma, and the plainest way I can put it is the complete amount, the total with nothing held back and nothing left over. If you filled a jar to the brim and then said, that is the plērōma of the jar, you would mean there is no more that could go in. Paul says that is what God did in Christ. And to feel the force of it you have to remember what the Colossians were being taught by the people drifting through their town. There was an outlook taking root there, one that would later grow into full Gnostic systems, which held that matter was low and unclean and God was far too pure to touch the world directly. So how did you reach him? You climbed. A ladder of intermediary beings, angelic ranks, emanations, each holding one fragment of the divine, and the enlightened soul worked its way up rung by rung. Christ, on that scheme, was a rung. A high one, perhaps. But a rung.

FRANK EDWARDS: Plērōma cuts the ladder off at the root. Not a portion of God. Not one link in a chain of go-betweens. The whole of God settled in this one person. Paul says it even more bluntly a chapter later: "in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form." Bodily. In the very stuff the false teachers called unclean. There is no higher rung. There is no hidden hierarchy to negotiate. If you have met Christ you have met God with nothing withheld.

LINDA BROWN: That's an ancient problem. Nobody I know is trying to climb through a ladder of angelic beings, Frank. They are trying to get through the week. Sell me on why this fight matters to someone in a parking lot at school pickup.

FRANK EDWARDS: The ladder never went away, it only changed its rungs. Almost everyone carries a quiet version of it: God is up there, and the way you get closer is to become a better version of yourself first. More disciplined. Cleaner. More spiritual than you were last month. Then you will be fit to approach. Calvin saw straight through that in his commentary on this letter. He wrote, "But the Spirit declares there, that the greatest purity is vile, if it is brought into comparison with the righteousness of God." Your best rung does not reach. And Paul's answer is not, try harder, it is, the whole God you are straining toward is not up there at all. He came down the ladder and stood at the bottom of it in a body. That is the fullness. And then comes the collision, because this same fullness, Paul says, made peace... "through the blood of his cross."

LINDA BROWN: Peace through blood. That is the phrase I cannot make hold still. Those two words do not belong in one sentence. Peace is what you get when the bleeding stops.

FRANK EDWARDS: A first-century reader felt that collision far harder than we do, because they knew exactly who made peace in their world and how. Pax Romana. The peace of Rome was the empire's proudest boast, calm across the whole Mediterranean, secured by force. And everyone knew the instrument that kept it. The cross was Rome's answer to rebels, runaway slaves, anyone who threatened order. It was slow, it was public, it was placed by the roadside so travelers would see and remember. It was reserved for the lowest. A Roman citizen could not lawfully be crucified. In polite company you did not even say the word. So hear the sentence the way a Colossian heard it. Rome made peace by nailing its enemies to the wood. God made peace by letting his own Son be nailed there. The empire's symbol of crushing strength becomes the place where reconciliation is achieved. The peace of God did not come by conquering. It came by being conquered.

FRANK EDWARDS: And look how far Paul says it reaches. "All things, whether things on earth or things in heaven." Not a rescue of a few souls. The fracture that ran through the whole created order is being mended by the same one through whom it was made. That fracture has a first page. Genesis three, God speaking to the serpent: enmity between you and the woman, he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel. The victory comes by a wound. The head-crushing and the heel-striking are the same event... the cross is that event. Paul, in Second Corinthians, says God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's trespasses against them. And then, in the very next verse after our passage, he turns the whole cosmic scope around and points it straight at the reader. "Once you were alienated from God and were hostile in your minds because of your evil deeds."

LINDA BROWN: Hostile in your minds. That is the line I would underline. He goes from things in heaven, powers in the sky, the serpent in Eden... straight to me, and the word he picks for me is hostile. Not distant. Not confused. Hostile.

FRANK EDWARDS: Hostile is Paul being honest about where the enmity of Eden actually lodged. It did not stay out in the cosmos. It settled in human hearts, in the way you think about God when nobody is watching. Which is why Isaiah, centuries early, put the two words you cannot hold still into one line: "the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed." This is the doctrine of reconciliation, or the older word, atonement... two estranged parties made one, and the cost of it borne entirely by the party that was wronged. God does not overlook the offense. He does not negotiate. He absorbs it, in his Son, and the peace is real because the price was real. So if the peace has already been made, and made at that cost, what is actually left for us to do with it?

LINDA BROWN: Spend our pride, I think. There is a conversation almost everyone listening is going to be in this week, in a kitchen or over text, where it turns tense and the sharp reply is already half-typed. And the honest thing is that firing it feels like strength. Peacemaking cost him his blood. What it costs me is the sharp line I really wanted to send, and asking instead, help me understand what you meant. That is a small thing to spend, and I do not want to spend it. [short pause] There is a name in my head right now and I know exactly which message I would rather send.

FRANK EDWARDS: Preeminence "in all things" is the phrase that presses on that, and it presses on one room in particular. Most of us have handed Christ nearly the house, and kept the deed to one room. For a great many people that room is money. The paycheck, the account, the plans for it... the one domain that feels like ours to run. And the moment comes, a giving line on a form, a real need standing in front of you, money that just cleared, and there is a reflex to keep it all under your own management, give a token and call it settled. Paul does not say Christ has first place in most things. He says all things. That is not a suggestion, and admitting it costs something. But hear what sits underneath it. He made peace through the blood of his cross while you owned nothing that could repay him. Giving does not buy his favor. You already have it.

LINDA BROWN: And underneath that sits the harder room, the one nobody chooses. Grief. Because "firstborn from the dead" is aimed straight at that, isn't it, and some people listening today have a loss that is very fresh, and some have one that is years old and still sitting at the table.

FRANK EDWARDS: Firstborn is exactly the word for that room. Not first back, first through. He went ahead into a life that death cannot touch a second time, and he went as the heir who opens the door for the family. Paul is not saying death is not real, or that the chair at the table is not empty. He is saying it is not the end of the sentence for anyone who belongs to the firstborn. His empty tomb is the promise of theirs. Reading that one verse over a name, and letting "firstborn" mean what it actually means, is not a sentimental exercise. It is taking Paul at his word.

LINDA BROWN: The love follows from the price, then. That is where the whole passage has been walking. God was pleased, the word you started us on, pleased to put all of himself into a man who would bleed, and the reason he was pleased to do it is the same reason the peace reaches all the way down to someone hostile in her mind. It tells you what you are worth to him.

FRANK EDWARDS: The peace you long for was already purchased, and its price tells you exactly how much you are loved. That is the one sentence I would take out of this room. Not the cosmology, not the Greek, though I love the Greek. That God, complete and undiminished, was pleased to make peace with you by being conquered. Let it work on you.

FRANK EDWARDS: I am going to hand the last word to you, Linda, because I think it belongs to the listener today, not to the teacher.

LINDA BROWN: Then it is a question, not a charge, and you have to answer it before the day is out. Which room is it... the one where you are still holding the deed? A message you will not send, an amount you will not give, a grief you will not let "firstborn" speak to. He made peace through the blood of his cross. What is he asking you to spend today?

FRANK EDWARDS: This conversation is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if it is not on your phone yet, Dig Deeper is in the app store waiting for you.