Colossians 3:12-14 — Clothe Yourself

FRANK EDWARDS: Forgiveness is a piece of clothing. And you already know how to put clothing on.

LINDA BROWN: A shirt does not have a grudge sewn into it, Frank. I put a shirt on without thinking. I do not put mercy on without thinking, I mostly do not put it on at all. So if that sentence is going to hold up, you have some work ahead of you this afternoon.

FRANK EDWARDS: Work I am glad to do, because Paul is the one who said it, not me. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody. Today is Colossians three, verses twelve through fourteen, and the picture Paul reaches for is the most ordinary thing you did this morning... you got dressed. He says compassion, kindness, forgiveness, love, they go on the same way. Linda, would you read it for us?

LINDA BROWN: Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with hearts of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with one another and forgive any complaint you may have against someone else. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which is the bond of perfect unity.

FRANK EDWARDS: "Clothe yourselves." Hold that phrase for a second, because the first word of the passage is actually "therefore," and a therefore is always pointing backwards. What is it pointing at? Three verses earlier Paul writes, "you have taken off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self." So the dressing in verse twelve only makes sense because an undressing has already happened. And his readers would not have heard that as a metaphor. In the early church, baptism was a physical change of clothes... the candidate stepped down into the water stripped of the old garment, went under, and came up to be clothed in a fresh robe, often a white one. Their culture worked this way everywhere. A freed slave was handed new clothing to announce a new standing. A son coming into his inheritance was robed. To be given a garment was to be given an identity you did not possess a moment before. So when Paul says put on compassion, he is talking to people who can still remember the weight of a wet robe on their shoulders. He is saying, keep wearing every ordinary morning what the water already declared over you.

LINDA BROWN: The water declared something. Fine. But what I actually hear when I read "clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility" is a to-do list with nicer vocabulary. Be more patient. Be more gentle. I have seen that list on a poster in a break room. Why is this any different from try harder?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because of the list that comes before the list. Read the front of the verse again, slowly. "As the elect of God, holy and beloved." Chosen. Set apart. Loved. Those three words are not Paul being warm. Those three words belonged to Israel. God says through Moses in Deuteronomy seven, "the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His prized possession." Holy, set apart for Himself. Beloved, the object of covenant affection for centuries. For most of the people in this little commercial town in the Lycus Valley, former pagans, those were another nation's honors, an inheritance they had only ever watched from the outside. And Paul lays every one of those words over them without blinking. This matters because of who was troubling Colossae. The false teachers wanted these believers to earn standing through rules and rituals and visions. Paul cuts straight under it. You are already chosen. You are already holy. You are already beloved. Now get dressed like it.

LINDA BROWN: The behavior follows from the name, then, and never the other way around. Nobody in that room is putting on kindness to get chosen. They are putting it on because the choosing already happened, and the clothes are supposed to match.

FRANK EDWARDS: Indicative before imperative, is how the older theologians put it. What is true of you comes first, and the command grows out of it. Justification, God declaring you righteous in Christ, sits underneath sanctification, the slow business of your life catching up to that declaration. Reverse the order and you get exactly the break-room poster you were describing, a list of virtues with no floor under it. Keep the order and the same list becomes something else entirely. But that raises another question I want to put to you. Why these five? Compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience. Where does Paul get that particular set?

LINDA BROWN: A committee wrote them. That is what it sounds like. Five agreeable qualities that nobody could object to, the kind of thing you get when you ask a room what a good person looks like. Tell me I am wrong.

FRANK EDWARDS: You are wrong, and pleasantly so. Go back to Exodus thirty-four. Moses is on Sinai, and God passes before him and speaks his own name out loud, and this is what he says: "compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion and faithfulness." Now lay that beside Colossians three. Compassion. Kindness. Patience, which is just slow to anger in a different translation. Paul is not inventing a moral code, and he is not polling the room. He is describing God's own self-portrait and telling a church to wear it. The command is an invitation to resemble your Father. That is why these five and not courage, or ambition, or cleverness. Those might be good things. They are not what God said when he was asked who he is.

FRANK EDWARDS: And the prophets show you what that character costs the one wearing it. Hosea eleven. God is looking at a faithless people and he says, "How could I give you up, O Ephraim? ... My heart is turned within Me; My compassion is stirred!" Mercy and judgment are fighting inside God, and mercy wins, and the reason he gives is "I am God and not man." [short pause] So the compassion Paul asks you to put on... it was agony before it was a garment. It got poured out finally at a cross. You are not being handed something cheap to wear.

LINDA BROWN: "Bear with." That is the phrase I keep stopping on. Because everything you just said is enormous, and then verse thirteen sounds so small next to it. Bear with one another. That is what I say through my teeth about a coworker. Tolerate. Put up with. Grit and endure until they leave the room. Is that really what Paul means?

FRANK EDWARDS: The Greek verb is anechomai, and yes, it does mean bear with, put up with. What makes it costly is everything around it: in love, alongside forgiveness, not through gritted teeth. Anechomai is holding something up. Propping it. Taking the weight of a thing into your arms and not setting it down even when your arms would very much like to. It is the effort of continuing to hold when dropping the load would be easier and, honestly, more reasonable. Paul uses the same word in Ephesians four, "bearing with one another in love," and in Second Corinthians eleven he begs a church to bear with his foolishness, to keep holding him up while he says something awkward. So this is the language of weight-bearing among flawed people. And look where it sits in the sentence. First bear, then forgive. Long before you have processed what someone did to you, long before you are anywhere near releasing it, you are asked to keep holding that person up.

LINDA BROWN: Bearing comes before forgiving, then, and I do not get to wait for the second one to feel possible before I start on the first. That is harder than tolerate. Tolerate lets me stand across the room. This has me under the load with them.

FRANK EDWARDS: Under the load is the right picture, and Paul knows exactly where he learned it. Isaiah fifty-three says of the Servant, "He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows." Christ did not forgive us from a safe distance. He bore us. He held the full weight of it on the cross and did not put it down until he could say it was finished. The one telling you to bear with your brother bore you first. And then verse thirteen gives you the measure of the forgiving too. "Forgive as the Lord forgave you." Not as much as you can manage. As the Lord forgave you. Do you remember the parable Jesus tells in Matthew eighteen, about the servant and the debt?

LINDA BROWN: The ten thousand talents, the man who gets forgiven a fortune and then chokes someone over pocket change. I know it. And I will be honest, that parable always feels rigged to me. Of course the second servant looks ridiculous. But what about when the person actually did the thing? When I am genuinely the one who was wronged, when the complaint is real and I could win the argument in any courtroom in the world? The passage says "any complaint." Does Paul really give me no exception for being right?

FRANK EDWARDS: The passage gives you no exception, and I think that is deliberate. Notice what it does not say. It does not say forgive complaints that turn out to be misunderstandings. "Any complaint you may have against someone else." The Greek word there is momphē, a grievance, a legitimate cause for blame. Paul is assuming you have one. He is assuming you are right. And he still ties your forgiveness to a debt you could never repay, because that is the only comparison that survives being right. The servant in the parable was also right about the pocket change. His fellow servant genuinely owed it. That was never the question. The question was what he had just walked out of the king's chamber having been released from. So the parable is not rigged against you. It is rigged against the version of you that forgot the size of your own account.

LINDA BROWN: [quiet] There is a name in my head right now. There is a message I keep not sending, and every time I draft it I add one more sentence that proves my point, and then I do not send it. What this costs me is not the forgiving. It is the case I have been building. I would have to stop building the case.

FRANK EDWARDS: Stop building the case. That is smaller than a reconciliation speech, and it is harder. It looks like this: the name lights up your phone, or they walk in this weekend, or you are replaying the argument at two in the morning and rehearsing your side one more time... and in that moment you set the argument down. Or it is nearer than that. The point in your evening when the house is loudest, the kids are slow, the sharp reply is already rising, and the difference between a garment and a poster is one breath and a lower voice. Or the small habit you have quietly catalogued about the person you share a bed with, the story told twice, the running late, and this once there is no sigh. None of that is a grand gesture. It is getting dressed. And Paul has one more piece of clothing to hand you, and it goes over all of it.

LINDA BROWN: That opens up the part I skipped past. "Over all these virtues put on love." Why "over"? If love were just the sixth thing on the list he could have put it with the others. What makes it sit on top?

FRANK EDWARDS: Sundesmos is the word for bond, and Paul has already used it once in this letter. Back in chapter two he describes the body held together by its joints and ligaments, and ligament is this same word. A sundesmos is the connective tissue. It is not a limb. It is the thing without which the limbs fall in a heap. So love here is not one more virtue in the wardrobe. Love is the belt cinched over the whole outfit, holding compassion and patience and forgiveness in place so they do not slide to the floor as a scattered set of good intentions. And First Corinthians thirteen is that belt spelled out, patient, kind, keeping no record of wrongs. You can hear how every earlier virtue lives inside it. Ephesians four gives a different church almost the identical list, humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another, "with diligence to preserve the unity of the Spirit." Which tells you these were never personality traits some Christians happen to have. They are the ordinary shape of a church, anywhere, held together by one cord.

LINDA BROWN: "Perfect unity." That is the word I would underline, and not because I like it. Perfect. I can imagine bearing with someone badly. I can imagine forgiving someone slowly and with a bad attitude. I cannot imagine perfect anything, and the sentence ends on it.

FRANK EDWARDS: Calvin felt that exact weight. In his commentary on this letter he wrote, "There remains nothing, therefore, but the righteousness of faith, because perfect love is nowhere to be found." He is not being gloomy. He is being honest about the room. No church in Colossae or anywhere since has ever worn this outfit perfectly, and the perfection in the verse is not the standard you are being graded against. It is what the bond aims at, and the ground you stand on while you aim is Christ's righteousness, not your own. Which takes you back further than Colossae, to the first garments in Scripture. God clothed two sinners in Eden with clothing he provided, at the cost of blood that was not theirs. He is doing that again. Christ dressed you in his own righteousness before he ever asked you to dress in kindness. Every garment in this passage is one he wore for you first.

FRANK EDWARDS: So the flat claim I opened with. Forgiveness is a piece of clothing, and you already know how to put clothing on. Here is what I meant. You do not generate a shirt in the morning. You reach for something that is already yours, already hanging there, already fits, and you put it on because of who you are and where you are going. That is the shape of this passage. You are already the beloved. The wardrobe is simply catching up to the name. Let it work on you.

LINDA BROWN: Paul does the charging today, then, not us. Five words, and you already know which face they belong to. "Forgive as the Lord forgave you." The question for the rest of your day is only this: does that person see the clothes, or the case?

FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA BROWN: Thanks for listening. Go gently, and we will see you next time.