RECONCILED TO THE TRUTH

I enjoy the TV programme This Is Us. It is a series charting the experience of a group of families over generations, with frequent flashbacks and flash-forwards. Very often the plot turns on moments of truth about the past, previously hidden moments, truths that threaten to lead to disillusionment and conflict in the present when discovered. However, this being a hope-filled programme, these conflicts are not the end of the story. The characters learn even deeper and ultimately comforting truths than they previously knew. They are reconciled to the truth.

This dance between the past, present and future is woven into this opening chapter in Paul’s letter to the Colossian disciples. He begins in the present – commending the Colossians for their faith (Colossians 1:3-4). He flashes forward to the future – reminding them of the hope stored up for them in heaven (Colossians 1:5), and he has a flashback – appealing to the sacrifice made by Jesus on the cross, which makes all this possible (Colossians 1:20). Of course, Paul, the greater intercessor doesn’t neglect to pray for them. He goes on to pray that they would grow in their wisdom and understanding of Jesus and live fruitful lives.

THE INCOMPARABLE CHRIST

The centrepiece of Paul’s opening chapter is the poem depicting the beautiful and incomparable Jesus. He is the visible likeness of the invisible God, showing us who God is and what God is like because God lived fully in him (Colossians 1:19). His was a triumphant life – through his life, death and resurrection, he reconciled ‘all things to himself, making peace through the blood of his cross’ (Colossians 1:20). These were enriching truths that the Colossian Christians may well have known. Paul felt he needed to remind them so that they could be grounded in this truth and live overcoming lives.

And there is more. The hidden, deeper truth that the poem surprises us with is that Jesus Christ was not some latecomer in cosmic history. No, ‘in him all things were created… things seen and unseen… created through him and for him’.

Echoing words that other Jewish writers had used of the Wisdom of God, Paul places Jesus at the heart of God’s original creative work. The creative work that God had pronounced as good. Even
very good.

DEEPER MAGIC MAKING ALL THINGS RIGHT

Whatever has gone wrong with the world doesn’t mean that the world itself was evil in the beginning, as if the goodness that we enjoy every day is an illusion, and not goodness at all. Alongside this, when we discover brokenness in the world, it won’t do to say the whole thing is evil or that it has only ever been broken, just as it won’t do to deny the pain and disillusionment that we are experiencing now.

The God that Jesus reveals to us is only ever good, and what he created was good in the beginning. This is the deeper magic from the beginning of time that CS Lewis writes of in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The one through whom the world was made is the same one through whom and to whom it has been reconciled.

Such reconciliation is not yet fully complete. We long and pray for it. In the meantime, let us not deny the pain, but also let us not be overwhelmed by the problems of our lives and of the world. Instead, let us dwell again upon the deeper truths about our reconciling Christ who dwells in the past, present and future and invites us into hope-filled lives, where present brokenness is never the end of
the story.

RECONCILED IN HIM

I love the way the eternal presence of Christ and this work of reconciliation is described by Eugene Peterson in The Message. As we finish, we dwell again upon these deeper truths: ‘From beginning to end he’s there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so expansive, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe — people and things, animals and atoms — get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.’

Reconciliation through him and by Him is the deep truth that Paul gifts the Colossians and us. Will you receive this gift?