Colossians 3:22-25 — Working for Christ

FRANK: There is a word buried in the middle of this passage that the English almost hides from you. It gets translated "inheritance." And to us that sounds like a nice bonus, a windfall, something extra on top. But in the world Paul is writing to, "inheritance" was the sharpest word he could have possibly chosen, because it drew the exact line between a son and a thing.

LINDA: A son and a thing. Okay, that's a strange place to start. You're telling me the reward at the end of this passage is chosen specifically to shock somebody?

FRANK: To shock the last person in the room anyone expected to be addressed at all. Welcome in, everybody, this is Dig Deeper. Today we are sitting in Colossians chapter three, verses twenty-two through twenty-five, the part of the household instruction Paul aims straight at enslaved believers, and it opens onto something a lot bigger than a workplace tip. Does that make you uneasy?

LINDA: This is the passage a lot of people would rather skip, if we're honest. Paul talking to slaves. It makes the modern reader flinch.

FRANK: It should make you flinch. We are going to sit in that discomfort rather than tidy it up. But let me read it first, and then we'll walk into it slowly. Colossians three, twenty-two.

FRANK: "Servants, obey in all things those who are your masters according to the flesh, not just when they are looking, as men pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing the Lord. And whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ. But he who does wrong will receive again for the wrong that he has done, and there is no partiality." What picture does that word slavery bring up for you?

LINDA: Most of us hear that word and we picture something specific, and I have a feeling we're picturing the wrong thing. Before we go anywhere near the theology, I need you to tell me what slavery actually was here. Because Roman slavery was not the race-based chattel slavery of the later Atlantic world. People became slaves through war, through debt, through birth, sometimes through being abandoned as infants and picked up.

FRANK: You're almost certainly picturing the wrong thing, and getting this right is not a footnote, it changes the whole passage. Roman slavery was not the race-based chattel slavery of the later Atlantic world. People became slaves through war, through debt, through birth, sometimes through being abandoned as infants and picked up. And a household slave in a city like Colossae could be a field hand, yes, but could just as easily be the family doctor. The tutor teaching the children Greek. The accountant. The estate manager. Many of them were literate. Roughly a third of a city like this was enslaved. How wide does that spread?

LINDA: We're not talking about one narrow role. We're talking about a whole layer of the population who did basically all the work.

FRANK: All of it. And here is the thing you have to feel to understand what Paul is doing. In Roman law, a slave was not a person. The legal term was res. A thing. You'd find him listed in the household inventory alongside the furniture and the livestock. He couldn't own property. He couldn't make a legal marriage. He couldn't bring a case to court in his own name. He couldn't inherit anything. If a master beat him, the crime, if it was even counted a crime, was damage to another man's property. Not an injury to a person. He simply had no standing.

LINDA: A voice that doesn't count.

FRANK: A voice that legally does not count. Hold that, because now watch what Paul does. The wider Roman world, when it wrote about slaves in its moral handbooks, addressed them only through their owners, if it mentioned them at all. You talk to the master about his tools. Paul turns, in a letter being read aloud to the whole gathered church, and he speaks straight to the slaves. Directly. By name, as it were. And he gives them the longest single instruction in the entire household section. Picture what that means for someone the culture treated as furniture.

LINDA: Paul walks up to them first and talks to them the longest. The people the culture treated as furniture get addressed before anyone else in the room. What does he remember about that room?

FRANK: Master and slave are sitting there together as brothers. Your owner on Thursday passes you the bread at the Lord's Supper on Sunday. So Paul is not writing a manual for a distant institution. He's talking into a room where both of those people are listening at once. What troubles you about that?

LINDA: This is the passage that got quoted for centuries to tell oppressed people to shut up and work harder. "Obey in all things." That is a dangerous sentence in the wrong mouth. How is this not just a chaplain for the powerful telling the powerless to behave?

FRANK: That is the right objection, and you have to make me earn the answer. So let me earn it. Paul does not say the arrangement is just. He never romanticizes their bondage, never calls it good. He does something else entirely. He changes who the slave is actually working for. Look at verse twenty-three. "Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men." And then the hammer in twenty-four. "You serve the Lord Christ."

LINDA: The real Master isn't the one standing over him with the whip.

FRANK: The real Master is not the legally legitimate owner of him. And now go back to that word we started with. Inheritance. "From the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance." Of all the words available, Paul chooses the one thing a slave was legally incapable of receiving. Inheritance was the bright line between a son and a piece of property. Everyone in that Colossian house knew precisely where that line fell. And Paul steps up to it and erases it. The one who can own nothing and inherit nothing is told, from the Lord you will inherit. Do you feel what he just did?

LINDA: The reward for faithful work is being handed specifically to the people the world had decided were owed nothing at all.

FRANK: Specifically to them. That's the central gravity of it. The reward goes to the ones the empire gave nothing. There's a line from an old commentator, Maclaren, that catches it in one breath. He says, "The stimulus of a great hope for the ill-used, unpaid slave, is added." The unpaid one. The ill-used one. Him. That's who the hope is for.

LINDA: I want to slow down on one phrase, because it's the one that actually reaches me, and I'm not a first-century slave. "Not just when they are looking." That is convicting in a really ordinary way.

FRANK: It's meant to be. That phrase assumes something about you. It assumes the real test of your character is never the watched work. It's the unwatched work. The report nobody will audit. The counter no customer will ever run a finger along. The hour on the timesheet nobody can verify. Paul knows the temptation is to ease off the second the boss steps out of the room, because at that point who's the applause for? What does that do to someone's integrity?

LINDA: If you're only honest when someone's watching, the honesty was never really about the work. It was about the reputation.

FRANK: It was about being seen well. And that's the pride this passage quietly goes after. There's a promise underneath it that Jesus makes elsewhere, that the Father sees what's done in secret and rewards it openly. The unwitnessed labor is not lost. It doesn't vanish into the dark. And you know who that lands on hardest? The person with the least reason to believe their work matters. The slave sweeping a floor in an empty room. Paul says even that, done heartily as for the Lord, is real work rendered to Christ himself. Priestly work, honestly.

LINDA: I have a name surfacing right now. There's a part of my job I coast on because nobody checks it. And I don't like that this passage found it. What does that do in you?

FRANK: It's doing its work. Let it find it. And here is where it turns, because there's one more phrase and it's the one that steadies everyone in that room, not just the slaves. Verse twenty-five. "There is no partiality." The Greek word is prosōpolēmpsia, and it's built from a wonderful picture. It literally means to lift up, or receive, a face.

LINDA: To receive a face. What does that mean, receiving somebody's face?

FRANK: Picture a judge. A partial judge is one who looks at who's standing in front of him, sizes up the rank, the wealth, the connections, and rules according to the face. He receives the face and then he decides. Scripture names that as something God flatly does not do. He does not read the room before he rules. And feel where Paul drops this. Right into a household where everyone assumed the scales tilted toward the master by definition. What happens to him when that lands?

LINDA: The master, who's used to the room always going his way, gets told the Judge isn't impressed by his standing. What about the slave in that room?

FRANK: His labor did not disappear into the dark uncounted. The two of them stand on level ground before Christ, and the only question is whether the work was done in singleness of heart. That's why the same sentence can promise the faithful servant an inheritance and warn that wrongdoing will receive back for the wrong he's done. No title exempts you. No lowly station disqualifies you. The Judge sees the deed, not the standing.

LINDA: That cuts toward the master, then, not away from him. This isn't the comfortable verse people made it into.

FRANK: It's the opposite of comfortable for the powerful. And this whole thread runs down into someone specific, which matters for where this series is going. There's a man tied to this very letter named Onesimus. A runaway slave. Paul writes a whole short letter, Philemon, about sending him back to his Christian master, no longer as property but as a beloved brother. When Paul writes "you serve the Lord Christ," there is a real enslaved man in the shadow of this letter to whom every word of it applied. What does the gospel do to a slave's work that Rome never could?

LINDA: The deep thing is this. The gospel gives him a Boss that Rome cannot take from him, and a standing that Rome cannot assign.

FRANK: It hands him a dignity the empire had no way to give. And the reason it can, the thread underneath the thread, is Christ himself. Paul can tell a servant he serves the Lord Christ because the Lord Christ first took the servant's form. Philippians two. He who existed in the form of God emptied himself and took the form of a servant, and obeyed unto death. So your low place, Paul is saying, is a place he has already stood. And been glorified in. Christ, who commands the obedience, obeyed it first.

LINDA: So the impartial Judge and the servant who obeyed to death are the same person.

FRANK: The same person. And that's the deepest comfort in it. The Judge who shows no favoritism is the very One who justifies the guilty, not by pretending the wrong away, but by carrying it. He didn't lift a face at the cross. He took the full weight of what was owed and paid it evenly, so that the slave and the master could both walk home as sons. The impartial God cannot be bribed. And in Christ, he doesn't need to be.

LINDA: So what does a person do with this on a normal afternoon? Because most of us aren't slaves and we aren't masters, but we all have the unwatched corner.

FRANK: You do the hidden part fully. That's it. That's the only obedience, and it's small and specific. The task nobody will ever inspect, you finish it properly anyway. And the harder version, if you've been coasting on credit that isn't fully yours, you send the plain email that says, I got this wrong, here's the fix. You name the coworker whose overlooked work got missed, and you say their name out loud in the meeting. You let go of applause you were enjoying getting.

LINDA: And that's hard because it's exactly the thing this passage said. Pride doesn't die quietly.

FRANK: It does not go quietly. But here's the release in it. The Christ you're serving already earned the "well done" you've been chasing from everyone else. He's not making you perform for it. He hands it to you. So you can stop auditioning.

LINDA: Then let that be the thing you keep. The Lord you actually serve already sees the work no one else will ever see this afternoon, and he does not forget one hour of it.

FRANK: He does not forget one hour of it. So here's the charge, and I'll put it as a question rather than an order. Where is your unwatched corner? Find it before the day is over, and do that part as though Christ were the only one in the room. Because he is.

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