Did any of you meet an Epaphras this week? Someone who told you about the love of the saints of Canberra Baptist Church?
If you are wondering what I am talking about, last Sunday we began a series on Colossians – a book New Testament scholar Tom Wright calls one of the shortest, but also the most exciting of Paul’s letters, written to a young church exploring what it means to follow Jesus in their day (and our day) – starting with why we always (or regularly) give thanks for the church; because this is where we hear about Jesus (and we need Jesus!), because this, this gathering, is the visible sign of God’s reconciling work, and because this, now, is the start of our future with God. And we spoke about Epaphras (Colossians 1:7-8) who told Paul about the love of the Colossian Christians and how we also need Epaphrases telling us stories about the love of the saints for the saints.
And today we’re looking at Colossians 1:24 to 2:7 where Paul continues speaking about giving thanks – more personally, from his own experience – but more puzzlingly because he speaks about rejoicing in suffering. How is it possible to give thanks when we are suffering? It looks like an oxymoron. It sounds masochistic. How can we be joyful when we are undergoing pain or distress or hardship?
Firstly, Paul says, we rejoice because suffering reveals we are God’s new people.
Paul – and Jesus – shared a world view developed out of Old Testament writing during the intertestamental period that world history consists of two ages – the present (evil) age and the age to come. In the transition from one age to the next, God’s people, it was believed, would experience great tribulation, called the ‘Messianic woes’. As Romans 8:22-23 says, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”
Paul developed this Jewish thinking, however, in new ways. Rather than one age ending and another age beginning, Paul saw the two ages overlapping: the time between Jesus’ resurrection and his return being an extended period of tribulation.
I have this image of what happens when a wave is receding from the beach and a new wave is rushing towards the beach. There is this place where they meet, where the water gets choppy and turbulent, and then the power of the new wave keeps going.
The people of God experience suffering because they are in this place where the waves are choppy and rough. Suffering then, Tom Wright says, is, “evidence that the sufferers are God’s new people. That is why Paul can talk of rejoicing in his sufferings, as opposed to merely rejoicing in the midst of, or despite them. Just as the Messiah was to be known by the path of suffering he freely chose…so his people are to be recognised by the sufferings they endure.”
Perhaps it helps us to realise that although this suffering does include persecution, all who respond to the call of Christ experience suffering. Tom Wright again: “through the long, slow battle with temptation or sickness, the agonising anxieties of Christian responsibilities for [others] for a church, the constant doubts and uncertainties which accompany the obedience of faith and ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’, taken up as they are within the call to follow Christ.”
Secondly, Paul says, we rejoice in suffering because we suffer for God’s new community.
“I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake,” says Paul, “and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” Paul does not refer here to salvation. What Christ has done for us on the cross, in his death and resurrection, is fully sufficient. He is referring to the ongoing suffering of God’s people as the new age emerges. However, the word the NRSV translates as ‘completing’ suggests that Paul believes he is suffering, not only alongside the Colossians, but for the Colossians; that his suffering will supply suffering that will reduce theirs.
There was a notion that the arrival of the Messianic age involved a fixed amount of suffering; that by taking on more than our share you were shouldering the suffering of others.
I am reminded of the work of Charles Williams, part of the Inklings literary group which also included J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S Lewis. Williams developed a concept he called co-inherence; that just as the Trinity is three persons living in one God, so our lives are intended to co-inhere Christ’s life and, in Christ, each other’s lives and all living things. Some of you may know that this concept was very powerful for C.S. Lewis when his wife, American poet Joy Davidman, was dying of cancer; that he believed that, through Christian love, he had been able to suffer in his body some of her pain.
Tom Wright says, “if…these ideas sound strange to modern ears, this may not be so much due to the distance between Paul and ourselves in time and culture as because the church has forgotten how to apply to itself that fact that it is the body of the crucified Messiah.”
We are Christ’s body. How this reality is worked out in our lives and in our community and our world is a mystery. Such a mystery that, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s phrase, “We shall not cease from exploration…” but we know its heart – Christ is in us and we are in Christ – and therefore, we, as a church, are seeking (verse 25) to be servants of one another; we are (verse 28) demonstrating the courage and love to correct one another, to teach one another; we are (chapter 2, verse 2) encouraging, uniting in love this community; and we are toiling and struggling, and struggling some more, and suffering, and rejoicing in that suffering because we are doing it for each other – because we are doing it for Christ’s body – for the church.
Thirdly, Paul says, we rejoice in suffering because we suffer for God’s new age.
There is a book called The Inextinguishable Symphony written by Martin Goldsmith about his parents, Jewish musicians, part of the Kulturbund of Jewish performers in Germany in the 1930’s. At one point he describes his parents risking the curfews, risking being arrested, and therefore risking being sent to a camp, to play music with others.
“As movie-goers cry out uselessly to the screen,” he writes, “to warn the celluloid hero and heroine of imminent danger, I beg my mother and father to be careful, please be careful, as they navigate their way through this sixty-year-old vision. And I am so proud of them and so grateful to them for showing me what is truly important, for showing me that you must love the people and things that are important to you and that you must risk everything for that love. There is no finer lesson for parents to teach their children.”
Paul speaks, in this passage, as I said earlier, very personally, from his own perspective, but he also speaks to them as a parent, “It is [Christ] whom we proclaim…so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil and struggle with all the energy that he powerfully inspires within me.” He wants them to know, as Martin Goldsmith says, that you must love the people and things that are important to you and you must risk everything, suffer everything and rejoice in everything for that love; that’s God new age – the thing we truly desire and long for and love – is worth all the toil and struggle and suffering.
This week in morning prayers we read Matthew 5:43-48, where Jesus says, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” and I directed the group to a sermon that Martin Luther King Jr preached in Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Alabama, in November 1957 on this passage. And there he too speaks about this love – love that requires us to love others – even our enemies, to risk everything, to suffer, and to rejoice in suffering because we are part of God’s new age.
In his words:
Love has within it a redemptive power…. That’s why Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption….Love is the only creative, redemptive, transforming power in the universe….
I am foolish enough to believe that through the power of this love somewhere, men of the most recalcitrant bent will be transformed. And then we will be in God’s kingdom. We will be able to matriculate into the university of eternal life because we had the power to love our enemies, to bless those persons that cursed us, to even decide to be good to those persons who hated us, and we even prayed for those persons who despitefully used us.
We are God’s new people and we suffer because we are God’s new people. This is cause for rejoicing! We are God’s new people, and we are able to care for God’s people, Christ’s body, the church. This is cause for rejoicing! We are God’s new people and through our toil and struggle and suffering we can be part of God’s new world. This is cause for rejoicing!
Our rejoicing, our thanksgiving, is our declaration that the new age has already begun.
Colossians 2:6-7: As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your livesin him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.