Colossians 4:16-18 — Final Greetings

LINDA BROWN: Remember. That is the word I cannot get past in this passage, and I think it is the strangest request in the entire letter. A man is in chains, he gets the pen in his own hand for one line, and he does not write "pray that they release me." He does not write "petition somebody." He writes... remember my chains. Who asks for that?

FRANK EDWARDS: A man who knows exactly what remembering does, which is where we are headed today. Because our English word has gone soft. We remember where we parked. We remember a birthday, usually late. The word Paul reaches for is doing something much heavier than that, and the moment he uses it, the handwriting on the page had just changed. The listener in Colossae could see it.

LINDA BROWN: The handwriting changed. You mean literally, on the papyrus, the letters look different?

FRANK EDWARDS: Literally, on the papyrus, and we will get there. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everyone. We are at the very last verses of Colossians, chapter four, sixteen through eighteen, the sign-off. Three verses that look like housekeeping and turn out to be one of the more remarkable moments in the whole letter. Should I read them?

LINDA BROWN: Read them, and read them slowly, because I have skipped this kind of ending in every letter I have ever... well, in every letter, period. This is the part your eye slides off of.

FRANK EDWARDS: After this letter has been read among you, make sure that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans, and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea. Tell Archippus: "See to it that you complete the ministry you have received in the Lord." This greeting is in my own hand, Paul. Remember my chains. Grace be with you.

LINDA BROWN: Housekeeping. That is exactly what it sounds like. Pass this along, tell Archippus to do his job, signature, bye. Sell me on why this is anything more than the last paragraph of a memo.

FRANK EDWARDS: Start with the first instruction, because it opens a window onto how these people actually lived. "After this letter has been read among you." Read among you. Nobody in Colossae is sitting at home with a personal copy of Colossians on the nightstand. Most of them could not afford a scroll, and a fair number of them could not read one if they had it. So the letter arrives by courier, probably Tychicus, the man Paul named a few verses back, and he hands it to the gathered assembly and stands there while somebody reads it aloud, start to finish, to the whole body. Then it gets copied. And the copy walks on. We have talked before about how close these towns sit along the Lycus valley, Colossae, Laodicea, Hierapolis, a few miles apart along one river road. A letter that finishes its reading in one church on the Lord's day could be read in the next one before the week is out.

FRANK EDWARDS: And this is not Paul inventing something. Think about Deuteronomy thirty-one, where Moses commands that the law be read before all Israel in their hearing when they gather. Think about Nehemiah eight, the exiles come home, Ezra reads the Book of the Law aloud and others explain it so the people understand what is being read. God has always spoken to his people through words written down and then read out loud over a gathered crowd. So when Paul says read this, then send it on, he is stepping into a stream that is already a thousand years old. He is also, without quite saying so, telling them what kind of document they are holding. You do not command a church to read a personal note aloud in worship. You do that with Scripture.

LINDA BROWN: Scripture. That is the claim I want to slow down on, because it sounds like a stretch. Paul is writing to friends. He is saying hi to people by name two verses earlier. At what point does a letter like that get treated as the Word of God, and did Paul actually think of it that way, or is that something the church decided later?

FRANK EDWARDS: Paul thought of it that way, and he says so elsewhere in almost identical language. To the Thessalonians: "I charge you before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers." Charge you before the Lord. That is not how you talk about a note. That is how you talk about something God is saying through you. And the churches received it that way, copied it, passed it hand to hand along that valley, and that process, humble as it looks, is partly how the New Testament you own came to exist. Not a committee in a room centuries later deciding what counts. Congregations, in the first generation, recognizing an apostle's voice as God's voice and treating it accordingly.

FRANK EDWARDS: Which brings us to the puzzle in the middle of verse sixteen, and I want to take real time on it. "And that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea." Paul wrote a letter to the Laodicean church. We do not have it. It did not survive. Scripture never tells us what was in it, never quotes it, never mentions it again. Some people have guessed it was actually the letter we call Ephesians, circulating through the region under a different name, and that is a reasonable guess, but it is a guess, and an honest teacher has to call it one. What we know is this: an apostle wrote a letter, a church received it as God's Word, and God did not preserve it.

LINDA BROWN: Did not preserve it. That should bother you more than it seems to. If these letters are the Word of God, and one of them is just... gone, then either God dropped something, or it was never really Scripture in the first place, and I do not love either option.

FRANK EDWARDS: Gone is the right word for it, and I do not want to soften it. But turn the question around. What would it mean if God had preserved everything Paul ever wrote? We would have his grocery lists. The doctrine here, and the church has a name for it, is providence, God actively governing what happens so that what he intends comes to pass. Applied to the Bible it means the Spirit who inspired the words also superintended which words reached you. So a letter to Laodicea was true, was authoritative for the people who heard it read, did its work in that room, and was not needed by the church across the centuries. Nothing needful was lost. That is not a shrug. It is a confidence. The sixty-six books open in front of you are not the survivors of an accident. They are the collection God meant his people to hold.

LINDA BROWN: The letter you have is the letter you were meant to have, and the one you do not have was never yours to keep. I can live inside that. It actually makes the Bible on my desk feel less like a lucky accident and more like a delivery.

FRANK EDWARDS: Delivery, and here is what she has not seen yet: the delivery had a seal on it. Verse eighteen. "This greeting is in my own hand, Paul." A first-century reader would have understood exactly what just happened on the page, because the handwriting itself changed. Paul dictated his letters. A trained scribe, an amanuensis, took down his words with a reed pen on papyrus, and that was skilled work; a professional hand produced even, practiced, tidy letters, line after line. So when the neat script stopped and a different hand took over, rougher, larger, less practiced, the congregation could see it as the scroll was unrolled. In Galatians he even jokes about it, "See what large letters I am using to write to you with my own hand!" In Second Thessalonians he calls it "my mark in every letter."

LINDA BROWN: Isn't that just a signature? People sign things. I sign things. Why does a signature deserve its own beat in a Bible study?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because forgery was a live danger, not a theoretical one. Paul tells the Thessalonians not to be shaken by "a letter seeming to be from us." Somebody, somewhere, was already writing in his name. A letter carried authority. A false letter could unravel a young church in a month. So Paul's hand at the bottom was the seal in the wax, the mark that told a congregation across the valley, you can stake your obedience on this, it is truly mine. God cared enough about his Word being trustworthy that the care is written into the actual handwriting.

FRANK EDWARDS: And then look at what that hand writes first. The scribe steps back. The apostle who has just dictated the highest Christology in the New Testament, Christ the image of the invisible God, the one in whom all things hold together, reaches over, takes the pen, and with a hand that has iron on the wrist, the very next thing he writes is: "Remember my chains."

LINDA BROWN: [short pause] Which is where this gets sharp for me, because I opened on that word and I still do not have an answer. Why remember? Why not ask for something?

FRANK EDWARDS: The Greek is mnēmoneuō. It does not mean to recall a fact. It means to keep something actively present so that it goes on shaping how you live. The picture the older commentators reach for is a widow who keeps her husband present not by thinking about him occasionally but by the way she still lives, the habits she keeps, the choices she makes because of him. That is mnēmoneuō. Paul is not asking for sympathy. He is asking the Colossians to let his chains keep working on them.

FRANK EDWARDS: So why would chains do anything for a church hundreds of miles from the cell? Because they are proof. This letter has made staggering claims. Christ over every throne, every ruler, every power. You died with him, you were raised with him, your life is hidden with him. Words are cheap. Anybody can write words like that. But here is a man who has staked his freedom and probably his life on those words, who could have his freedom back tomorrow if he would just take them back, and he will not. His chains are the notarized signature underneath the theology. Remember them, and you remember that this gospel is worth being bound for.

LINDA BROWN: The chains are the proof that the letter is not just talk. That is the recap, and if that is right, then the lowest point of Paul's life is doing the most work in this letter, which feels backwards.

FRANK EDWARDS: Backwards is precisely how Paul describes it, and he leans into it. He calls himself the prisoner of Christ Jesus, not the prisoner of Rome. He tells the Philippians that his imprisonment has actually advanced the gospel, that people are speaking more boldly because of it. The thing that looked like defeat became the pulpit. Rome thought it had silenced him. Rome was carrying his mail. And behind Paul stands someone else in chains. Christ was bound before Paul was. The Lord of glory stood in Pilate's hall with his hands tied, and the servant who follows him wears the same marks. That thread runs from Isaiah's suffering servant, through the cross, through Paul's cell, to every believer who has ever paid something for the name. His imprisonment is not an interruption of his ministry. It is his ministry.

LINDA BROWN: I have a situation in my head right now, and it is not prison, and it is not heroic. It is the thing in my week that feels like it disqualifies me. The circumstance I would edit out before I told anyone about my faith. And you are telling me the circumstance might be the witness.

FRANK EDWARDS: Often it is the witness. Not because suffering is good, it is not, but because a person who keeps trusting Christ inside a hard thing is saying something a person in comfort cannot say. Your chains are held, in turn, by the pierced hands of the one who was bound so you could be free. That changes the next question, which is the one about Archippus, because he gets a chain of his own in this passage, just a different kind.

LINDA BROWN: Archippus gets one sentence and it sounds like a manager checking on a project. "See to it that you complete the ministry." Was he slacking? Because that is what it reads like.

FRANK EDWARDS: We do not know whether he was slacking, and that is worth admitting. What we know is the shape of the sentence. "The ministry you have received in the Lord." Received. Not achieved, not built, not chosen. Grace gave it, grace sustains it, grace will finish it. That is almost word for word what Paul later tells Timothy, "endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry." And notice who is speaking to Archippus. The same letter that has Christ supreme over every power stoops, in its last lines, to remember one man in one small church and charge him to finish well. The Lord who holds all things together holds him too, by name.

LINDA BROWN: Complete. That is the hard word, not "ministry." Because I can name the thing right now. Whoever is listening can name it. The conversation you owe someone and keep rehearsing in the car. The commitment you made in front of people and quietly let lapse. The role you said yes to and now half-do. And what it costs to finish it is not dramatic. It is one unpolished email sent today instead of sitting in drafts. It is saying the actual sentence, "I was wrong, and I am sorry," out loud, to a face. Smaller than I fear and harder than I want.

FRANK EDWARDS: Smaller and harder, yes, and you do not finish it alone. Christ completed the work the Father gave him. He said so from the cross. His Spirit lives in you to finish yours, which means your unfinished thing is already sitting under grace before you move a finger toward it. You act from that, not toward it.

FRANK EDWARDS: And that is the word he lands on. Grace be with you. Four words, the last thing the chained hand writes. Alexander Maclaren put it this way over a century ago: "All possible blessing is wrapped up in that one word, Grace." The letter opened with grace in chapter one and it closes with grace in chapter four, and everything in between, the Christ hymn, the warnings about hollow philosophy, the household, the names, hangs between those two bookends. A prisoner who could barely move his wrist wrote a blessing over people he had never met. That is the gospel in miniature.

LINDA BROWN: Grace, written by a hand in iron. If I take one thing out of this room, it is that image, and I think you should hand the last word to Paul rather than either of us.

FRANK EDWARDS: Paul's own words, then, and take them as spoken to you, because they were read aloud over a room of ordinary people exactly like this one. See to it that you complete the ministry you have received in the Lord. Remember my chains. Grace be with you.

LINDA BROWN: Take it with you. The name that came to mind when Frank said "complete," go to that person first, before the day is over, and let grace be the reason you can.

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

LINDA BROWN: Grace be with you, as Paul says. Thanks for reading this letter all the way through with us.