The Letter to the Colossians

108 Pages·1998·0.61 MB·English

by  Adrienne Von Speyr

The Letter to the Colossians
ADRIENNE VON SPEYR
The Letter to
the Colossians
Translated
by Michael J. Miller
IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO
Title of the German original:
Der Kolosserbrief
second edition
© 1993 Johannesveriag, Einsiedeln
With ecclesiastical approval
Scripture quotations in the English edition are from
the Revised Standard Version, © 1946
Catholic Edition, © 1965
Copyright 1946, 1952, and 1971 by the
Division of Christian Education of the
National Council of the Churches of Christ
in the United States of America
Used by permission
Cover by Roxanne Mei Lum
© 1998 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-0-89870-661-1
Library of Congress catalogue number 97-76851
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
The Apostle and His Community
The Primacy of Christ
The Service of the Apostle
Genuine and False Knowledge
Life from Christ
Exhortations and Greetings
Notes
THE APOSTLE AND HIS COMMUNITY
1:1-2. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our
brother, to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ at Colossi: Grace to you
and peace from God our Father.1
Paul presents himself and Timothy his brother as the joint senders of the letter.
He sets limits from the start, though—distances that indicate the varying
interrelationships between God and believers: there is the difference between
himself and Timothy and the one between those two and the faithful in Colossæ.
By the will of God Paul is an apostle and sends the letter with Timothy; that
delineates their position. Paul is not to be thought of without this will, which has
made him into an apostle of Christ Jesus. That is his whole life, the form and
content of his existence.
Everything Paul will say will be dependent upon the fact that he is the apostle
of the Lord and that he holds this office by the Father’s will and at his good
pleasure, which also determined the life of the Son.
Timothy our brother is his co-worker and as such shares in the office. He is
Paul’s brother and stands by his side; then again he is a brother like the brethren
in Colossæ and so maintains an intermediate position between the apostle who
has been sent and the community that receives. The letter is directed to the saints
and faithful brethren in Christ. In Christ they are brothers, just as Paul is Christ’s
apostle. The unity of brotherhood is established in the Lord, just as the union
between the community and the apostle is established in the Lord: there is a
place, within the Lord, from which both faith and mission pour forth. Apostle
and community members are made brethren in the Lord; but this brotherhood is
not external, not something that would bind them only on earth; it is something
essential, a participation in the life of the Lord, an exercise of obedience to him
in intimacy with him, which constitutes the entire life and being of the Christian
and of the Church.
This unity is illustrated again by the content of the greeting: Grace to you and
peace from God our Father. It is a wish—and at the same time a corroboration.
This grace and this peace live in God; there they are unceasingly real. The Son
continually proclaimed both. The apostle, who lives by the truth of God, can not
merely beseech the Lord to send them down; he can demand them: from God,
who has sent him and provided him with what is necessary, so that the
community also can live according to the mind of the Lord. He can demand
them, though, from the brethren also, who have to respond to God with their
faith, that is, with their lives, in which they must give witness to the gift they
have received from the Father through the Son. And this unity, which binds Paul
and the brethren together in the Lord and makes them one, should be visible not
only in their daily lives through the grace of the Father. This unity is constantly
shown to them from heaven, through faith, in the life of the triune God by the
Spirit, who sends the gifts of grace and peace, by the Son, who lived on earth
and manifested them, and by the Father, who thereby reveals his will, so that
believers may know what their lives are to be based on and what they may hope
for. Paul’s greeting is so formulated as to renew and enliven this knowledge and
to increase in them effectively the grace and peace of God. The wish is also a
blessing, something reminiscent of a sacrament: what is perfectly real in heaven
becomes, through the apostle’s gesture, more fully realized on earth than before.
From the greeting a power goes out, which strengthens the relation of the apostle
to the brethren and corroborates it.
1:3. We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray
for you.
The unity among Father, Son and community is shown once again in the prayer
of the apostles. They thank God, the Father, and this thanksgiving is a prayer to
God, which, however, from the outset includes the Colossians. It is evident from
this that Paul’s prayer never stops at an object or at one fixed idea, but rather is
something comprehensive and dynamic, thanks and petition, worship and
instruction, like the course of a river that begins in faith and ends in God.
Moreover it is always a trinitarian prayer, addressed to God, in his capacity as
Father of the Son, in the Spirit; where it turns to one of the Divine Persons, all
three are intended thereby. A prayer meant for the Son can be accepted by the
Father, while the Spirit communicates it. Or Paul may on a certain occasion utter
a prayer of thanksgiving and without further ado expect God to receive it as an
act of pure worship. He can commend to him the community and its particular
petitions, knowing all the while that God retains the power to dispose freely of
any matter presented in prayer. This prayer is characterized by such faith in and
understanding of God that faith makes the prayer the act of its submission and
gives itself so unconditionally therein that God can form out of this surrender
vocations as well as conversions, or anything at all he wishes. From Paul’s
attitude of prayer flows the formation of his life, and the same should be true for
every Christian who prays. Prayer is movement: starting from a seemingly
arbitrary point on earth (it can be any one at all) onward to the triune God. It is a
grace, but also a deed, and it therefore possesses the visibility that characterizes
a deed; it is the earth’s question to heaven, to which the answer comes down
from heaven to earth. True prayer always works signs and wonders, for the one
who prays experiences the grace of God in the fact that the Holy Trinity
graciously accepts the prayer and applies it in the world when required. And if
the apostle at the beginning of the letter assures the brethren of his prayers, he is
showing to them in advance—even before he admonishes and instructs them and
allows them to share his insight—that they possess, through his prayers as well
as through those of his brother Timothy and through each and every prayer, their
own included, a place in heaven, a home with God.
1:4. Because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love which
you have for all the saints.
Paul has learned that they believe in the Lord and love the saints; which is again
a movement, a fruitfulness, a reciprocity between contemplation and action. A
movement, in that the faith in Christ Jesus extends to their relations with their
neighbors and transforms them. A fruitfulness, since faith gives birth to charity,
which then determines their entire outlook. And a reciprocity, since the
contemplative side, faith and prayer, requires deeds and charity, according to the
Lord’s commandment of love, for he wants a praying, loving, living community.
And if the Colossians love the saints, that is, the believers, and prove to be
charitable and helpful toward them, they thereby increase their faith in turn, their
power of prayer and contemplation, so that those loved may also learn to pray
better and become capable of loving more. Paul takes part in the prayer of the
brethren by praying to the Father; their faith in the Son strengthens Paul’s
relation to the Father. And their love for the brethren makes the Apostle view the
Colossians more vividly as his brethren. Thus everything presses constantly
onward toward the same unity, and the closeness and fullness of this unity, the
clinging to it, proves to be yet a new source from which everything pours out
again, allowing new fruitfulness to stream forth from within.
1:5. Because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before
in the word of the truth, the gospel.
The hope laid up in heaven is intimately connected with faith, which binds
mankind to heaven, but also with charity, since hope nourishes charity.
Christians possess faith, love and hope so as to be bonded to heaven always by
all three, in such a manner that their activity and their outlook and their prayer
on earth are definitively stamped by them. All of this, though, has its source in
the word of truth—that is, the message of the Son, who said of himself that he is
the Truth and that he is the Word—the gospel, since this constitutes the meaning
and the substance of the good news. It is a substance that cannot be heard
without being verified. It is a word of such power that in becoming flesh it
brings to earth not only a thought, a form of knowledge, but nothing less than a
life, one that strives toward God and submits itself to him and tries to do his will,
through which Paul became an apostle. And thus everything meshes again: the
three virtues into their unity. They work together in the community and give
witness to their common source, but their effectiveness derives from the
revelation of the Son, which is communicated through Paul and his
proclamation. It is a dynamic unity: in prayer, in love of neighbor, in deed and
word and good news. In this summary the character of the word of God becomes
clear: it becomes evident that the believer is endowed with a field of action as
wide as the word; on the other hand, that everything happens within the triune
substance of God and can be traced back to it, since the love of the Son
expresses itself in obedience to the Father, and the freedom of the Spirit
manifests itself in the fact that he allows himself to be sent. To live in the word
of God means the austerity of personal prayer devoted to worship and
intercession—and then, too, it means an apostolate and missionary task of
worldwide scope, so that responsibility for others and responsibility before God
merge into one another. This word of the truth, the gospel, embraces God’s
Word in his totality: his life on earth in the flesh, but also his entire teaching,
immediate knowledge of the triune God in eternity and a share in the fullness of
divine life.
1:6. Which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and
growing—so among yourselves, from the day you heard and understood the
grace of God in truth.
The gospel is both in Colossas and in the whole world, and this characteristic—