Its all about Jesus

Written by Marv Thiessen

Pastor Marv Thiessen

Calgary First Mennonite Church

January 24, 2010

 

IT’S ALL ABOUT JESUS

Colossians 1:15-23

To begin this sermon, I want to tell a few stories in order to set out the contemporary issues that I think we want to address in our study of the text for this morning from Paul’s letter to the Colossians. I’ll tell you about two encounters that Yertle van Zanten experienced. There’s much similarity between these fictitious encounters and conversations I’ve had in recent years so I don’t think the issues raised in these encounters are at all unlikely.

The first encounter was a conversation between Yertle van Zanten and his twin sister, Myrtle. I told you once about the way that Yertle, shortly after his graduation from high school, refused to take up arms and fight in Canada’s war against Yemen when he was drafted into the army. He ended up in military prison until the war ended. In that time period, Myrtle had given birth to twins and had become sick of the motherly routine of constantly feeding her complaining children and changing dirty diapers. In what most thought was a crazy, spontaneous act, she enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy. When the war against Yemen ended, she ended up spending some time in India when her ship was in port in Mumbai. Somehow, she was impressed with the religious viewpoint of the people there and she began to pursue conversations with people who were interested in a variety of religious expressions. She came to believe that the Sunday School stories she had heard growing up and the sermons she had listened to in church had served to restrict how she would live in ways that she could no longer agree with. She still had great respect for the teachings that Jesus had imparted and considered him an excellent moral teacher and guide but did not believe that she needed to somehow identify with Jesus for eternal life as she had been taught or that Jesus existed as one of three in the Trinity, the one true God.

She came home for a visit at one point while she was on leave from her duty in the Navy. One afternoon as Myrtle sat on the porch with her mother, her mother asked her about what was happening in her life on the spiritual side. She was certainly hoping that she would hear that Myrtle was considering Christian faith more seriously. What she got was something quite different. Myrtle told her about her new spiritual understandings that were not at all limited by Christian understandings quite enthusiastically, seemingly without recognizing the distress this would cause her mother. She believed that the world itself was a spiritual force and that if she could live in harmony with the spiritual forces of the world, she would create a great life for herself.

Well, this sounded like a bunch of gobbledy-gook to Myrtle’s mother and she felt that she had no ability to challenge this strange-sounding thinking. So she turned to her son, Yertle. He was attending Bible College, after all. She asked him to have a conversation with his sister about her new spiritual beliefs. He did and he heard the same kind of stuff his mother had. His first instinct was to roll his eyes, indicating the way he felt about her thinking but he restrained himself from that act, remembering the wrath of his sister from events earlier in life. Like his mother, he, too, felt somewhat alarmed but was less anxious than his mother. As he conversed with Myrtle, it struck him that she did not consider Jesus as very unique. Jesus had offered something useful to human society similar to the way Mohammed had offered something useful and more recently, Ghandi had offered something to humanity. All were great teachers who had given humanity good ideas about how to live. Humans could pick and choose the ideas that they thought were useful but there was nothing any more divine about Jesus than other teachers and, in fact, divinity existed in all humans and, indeed, in the world itself. At the end of the conversation, Yertle gently suggested to his sister that she was not taking seriously what Jesus said about himself and what the Bible went on to claim for Jesus.

A few years later, Yertle met an old friend with whom he had previously lost contact. This friend knew of Christianity but had not been raised by parents who attended church regularly. This friend loved to converse about religion and the meaning of life in philosophical ways and quickly engaged Yertle in that kind of conversation. He told Yertle that he respected Yertle’s direction in life but that he actually believed that Yertle, who had by then taken on pastoral ministry in a church, was involved in teaching a system of belief that could not be proven as true.

He said he had no problem with the teachings of Christianity in one sense. He considered Christianity to be one of the world’s great metanarratives. (That term describes an overarching system of belief or a broad way of understanding human existence) He recognized that perhaps billions of people believed it to be true so he respected it. But he didn’t believe that Christians could say it was true. It was something they believed and he respected it because it helped them to live good, moral lives. But it wasn’t verifiably true and it wasn’t necessary to help people live good, moral lives. It worked to help Christians explain reasons for life and to live well but it was neither true nor necessary.

Well, Yertle realized that this friend was not truly interested in considering alternate ways of thinking but he felt compelled to offer some thought that would challenge his thinking. He told his friend that he could understand how he would come to the conclusions that he had. He wondered, though, if Jesus was a stumbling block to his way of thinking about the world and religious belief. His friend’s suggestion was essentially that Christians had created their own religion and had written their own holy book, the Bible. Yertle suggested in return that the historical existence of Jesus Christ challenged his friend’s thinking. There was sound historical evidence, demonstrating that Jesus Christ was historically authentic. In addition, Yertle suggested that the Christian church was clearly rooted in the life and teaching of the historical Jesus. While the Bible contained material written by human authors, it was rooted in what Jesus taught so it could not be seen simply as a fabrication of groups of Christians who set out to create a religion.

Those fictitious conversations of Yertle van Zanten are indicative of the way many people in Western society think. I think it’s significant that Yertle turned to a discussion of Jesus in both of those conversations. He perceived that the response to pervasive critiques of Christianity that existed in current society had to be rooted in Jesus. He would have said to his sister and to his friend that it’s all about Jesus.

That’s essentially what Paul told the Colossian church in the part of the letter we’re studying this morning. Let’s examine again the ideas to which Paul was responding with his "it’s all about Jesus" argument and observe the ways that Paul’s response challenged those ideas. I think we’ll find, when we do that, that Paul’s response has meaning to the critiques of Christianity that exist in our times as well.

I think Paul makes two big points in our text for this morning. The first is that Jesus Christ exists as one with supremacy and authority that rests in his divinity. Paul begins in verse 15 by saying that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. Later, in verse 19, Paul declares that all the fullness of God dwelt in Jesus. Those ideas indicate that Jesus is fully God. He is the way that God has revealed who He is to humanity. I think that this implication of Jesus’ divinity in those ideas is corroborated by Paul’s assertion that Jesus participated in creation. In verse 16, Paul states that Jesus was the creator of all things and in verse 17, he says that all of creation holds together because of Jesus. Both of those actions or powers were attributed to God in the Old Testament, so Paul is making an implied argument that Jesus is fully God.

I should probably add a brief side note here. When Paul argues that Jesus was involved in the creation of the world, we may find ourselves assuming a literal six-day creation idea because that is the most natural and first understanding of the creation story in Genesis. I think that we create unnecessary problems for ourselves and in our conversations with others if we insist on such an understanding of creation. I think we can leave the way that God created open to various understandings of how the world came to be. What I believe Paul affirms here is that God is the ultimate creator of the world. We don’t need to argue about what means or timeframe God employed in that creating process. He simply did it.

In addition to indicating the divinity of Jesus, Paul also stresses the authority and supremacy of Jesus in these verses. He calls Jesus the firstborn over all creation in verse 15. This expression has caused some people to think that this means that Jesus is not preexistent, that he was created or "born" as other created things. If that is what "firstborn" means, then Paul would have said two immediately contradicting things when he followed that description by saying that all things were created by Jesus. What Paul means rather is that Jesus has priority and preeminence in relation to creation. Similarly to how the firstborn son in a Jewish home had the right to the family property and had authority over it, so Jesus, as God, has the preeminent place.

Another way of emphasizing the authority and supremacy of Jesus comes in verse 18, where Paul says that Jesus is the head of the church. The body of people who have decided to follow Jesus in life is the church. Jesus stands supreme over that people. Nothing else holds absolute authority over them.

We find, then, that Paul has declared Jesus to be God and to be in a position of supremacy and authority in relation to the created world. What was the reason for this argument from Paul? Why did the Colossian and Laodicean churches need to hear this? If you were here last week, you heard some suggestions for the historical context in which this letter was written. We suggested that these churches were beginning to feel the pressure of subscribing to Roman emperor worship. Rome wanted its subjects to view the emperor as god, essentially. Rome considered itself to be the preeminent authority in the world. It brought peace and goodness to the subjects of its empire but the subjects had to be loyal and faithful. You can see how these words of Paul addressed that context. Jesus as God merited the worship of Christians. Those who considered themselves the Christian church saw Jesus as their head, not the Roman emperor.

My sense is that this argument also speaks to one of the great questions about Christianity as raised in our opening stories. Myrtle van Zanten wanted to argue that there was nothing special and unique about Jesus. He was a good moral teacher for human society. While his teachings hold no divine authority, she would have said, there is much good philosophy for life in his teachings. I think many people think like that in the western world. Paul doesn’t give his readers that option in these words. Jesus is divine and holds all authority in Paul’s belief. We subscribe to that belief. There is no room when we hold that belief to think that Christianity and other world religions are equal and provide equally good ideas for human society. Instead, we are compelled to declare that it’s all about Jesus.

Paul’s second big point relates to what Jesus came to earth to do. He concludes the first paragraph by moving on to that idea when he says that God reconciled all things to himself through Jesus’ blood shed on the cross. Paul continues on in the second paragraph of today’s text to speak of the human relationship to God. Humans were once alienated from God because of their evil behaviour. Paul doesn’t suggest that human beings are innately good. They have essentially all been guilty of evil behaviour. And that behaviour creates alienation from God. Relationship is in view here. God wants to have a relationship with the humans He has created but their sin causes alienation. God, through the death of Jesus, has brought reconciliation to the human-divine relationship. This, of course, is the gospel, the good news of the Bible. God has made a way for humans to live in relationship with him, the very thing for which he created humans in the first place. Paul says that the death of Jesus makes us without sin in the eyes of God so that there can be no accusations against us. This is good news. But Paul doesn’t leave it there. He goes on to say that this will occur if his listeners continue faithfully in their faith. Paul has declared why Jesus, who is supreme God, came to earth as a human. He came to make a way for the rift between God and humanity to be restored and to inspire humanity to live faithfully in obedience to God.

Again, we note how this message would have spoken to the life situation of the churches that received it. Because of what Jesus had done, they needed to respond to Jesus as one with full authority. Rome could not compete with what Jesus had done for them. That’s a message that remains relevant for all time. As we suggested last Sunday, there are always societal ideas that compete for our loyalty. They, however, cannot compete with what Jesus has done. It is Jesus who merits our loyalty.

I think that this segment of Paul’s argument also speaks to another of the great questions about Christianity that we raised in the opening stories. Yertle van Zanten’s friend suggested that the Christian story was something that had been fabricated by the Christian church. This is a fairly common idea in our times. Several years ago, there was a mini deluge of popular books written by atheist authors who argued against the existence of God. I read one of those, The God Delusion, written by Richard Dawkins. I can’t recite his arguments clearly to you because of the time gap since I read the book, but he did not believe in the existence of God and he thought that humans are rather stupid to hold onto such belief. As I read his book, I thought he placed too much emphasis on the misbehaviour of Christians as evidence against the Christian story. It is certainly true that humans who call themselves Christians have sometimes engaged in atrocious behaviour toward other humans. I would have responded that the truth of the Christian story hinged far more on what Jesus did than on what humans have done. Dawkins propounded his reasons for disbelieving in God without dealing very much with Jesus. It seems to me that the whole idea that the Christian story was fabricated by a group of religious leaders in order to exercise some control over humans and then has grown into the worldwide movement that it is fails to engage seriously with who Jesus was and what he did. If Jesus was God made human and came to earth to effect reconciliation between God and humans, then he is the answer to this great question about Christianity. While earthly life continues, there will likely always be people who conclude that Jesus was not what he said he was or who Paul says he was. I think they need to confront whether it’s reasonable to believe that Jesus existed, did and said what he did, and had people follow him then and continuously from that time on, but was not who he said he was. Again, we say that it’s all about Jesus.

We have seen how Paul’s two big points, Jesus’ divinity and supremacy and Jesus’ reconciling work, responded to the way the Colossian church found its faithfulness to God challenged. We recognize that the same message calls for our faithfulness in the face of competing loyalties. We have also seen how those two main points may respond effectively to the objections to the Christian story that come in our times. If we come to question the truth of the Christian story and its good news for us, may we remember that it’s all about Jesus.