occurred to you that he is the Lord of the university? Have you questioned how he might be Lord of the university? Or even if he might be Lord over a department, or even over some individual teacher or just even a student . . . like you?
Or is the university so powerful that Jesus Christ cannot be its Lord? If that is the case, it sounds like the university may be one of those “powers” that Scripture mentions. God has ordained the “powers” for our benefit. For instance, government is an institution that provides services, protection, assistance. But we know that government occasionally gets off track and fails to provide for the people. It can lose its vocation and do really bad things—the execution of Jesus, the Holocaust, apartheid.
The problem with philosophy is that it is limited by the ability and perspective of the people who do it. That is the problem with human tradition—it is, well, human.
There is no doubt that philosophy is a powerful tool, useful in thinking about deep matters. Justin Martyr, a second-century Christian, argued that Christianity was in fact the best philosophy. St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1300s used the philosophical system of Aristotle to organize and express what Christians believed they knew about God. For such serious and thoughtful Christians philosophy was an excellent tool. For Justin it was of great help in defending the faith in the face of hostile and powerful foes. For Aquinas it was of help in organizing the faith, always provided that the center and the supreme authority was God. So, philosophy? Just be sure that Christ is at the center of what you do with it.
Prayer: Free me from loving my own thoughts and let me love you so passionately that I can think clearly. Amen.
15 – When in Trouble, Check the Cross
Colossians 2:11–14 — (11) In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; (12) when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. (13) And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, (14) erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.
Have you ever been in trouble? Really BIG trouble? Do you remember how it feels to be “on the carpet” in front of your parents for a really big boo-boo? Or in front of the school principal? Or when you got a traffic ticket? Take all those scared, guilty, embarrassed feelings, multiply by a gazillion, and imagine yourself really guilty of every bad thing you ever did and imagine having done them to God who has called you into court on the charges.
Paul uses a legal metaphor to describe your pre-faith and post-belief situations. Then you were doomed—in huge trouble with little hope of escape. Now, after the baptism of faith in Christ, you are alive. The charges—whatever they were—are taken care of in Jesus’ death on the cross.
Another way to describe the same transformation of your life is to use another package of terminology and narrative. Before you were a member of the kingdom of darkness. Then you were cut off from the dominion of darkness, from untruth. This is in the Jewish language of “circumcision,” using the term metaphorically, with reference to the cutting off of Jesus’ life in his death on the cross. Your “baptism” follows the model of death and burial in Christ. The result of either way of describing things (circumcision or baptism) was that you had been in one condition (sin, or “estranged and hostile in mind”) and are now forgiven and no longer considered guilty of sin. All of that happened because of the critical event of Jesus’ crucifixion.
Prayer: Give me the gift of understanding Christian language and of speaking clearly about your grace. Amen.
16 – And the Winner Is . . .
Colossians 2:15 — (15) He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it [the cross].
The message of the cross is not simply that Jesus is alive; he is also not guilty as charged by the government and by the religious authorities. Oh yes, and he is the supreme ruler of every power anywhere in this or any other galaxy. And the cross has become a symbol of all that—even if it is often debauched as jewelry. (One writer sarcastically refers to this casual attitude as “Jesus on a bracelet.”) Minimally, what was dismantled by the resurrection was the power of Rome (which finally fell in 410 CE) and the reliability of the popular religious prejudices that supported the politicians’ actions against Jesus.
But there are still powers that oppose God. While God can take care of herself, those powers are sometimes effective in trapping you in seductive webs. It has been said that the task of the church is to be able to identify the principalities and powers that attempt to govern humans. In college there is a glut of claimants to the thrones of power. Some of these claimants—science, career, technology, history—derive much of their power from the fact that they are well presented, well argued, dressed in the finery of cultural or academic or financial acceptability. Then there are also those extracurricular claimants—sports, sex, alcohol, gambling . . . and the list goes on.
But above every principle, tradition, argument, system, ideology, religion, government, principality, and power is Christ who had been attacked by a coalition of the principalities of his day only to have his “sentence” reversed by God in the resurrection. You have been truly favored by a God who not only provides you with a forgiver and redeemer but also with the final and superior power over all other claimants. In a world of many competing powers it is comforting to know that there is one truly good power and that he is the most powerful one and he invites you to find your safety in him.
Prayer: Help me to recognize the principalities and powers and not be seduced by them. Amen.
17 – Don’t Be Ashamed!
Colossians 2:16–19 — (16) Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths. (17) These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. (18) Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, (19) and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.
There is nothing as entertaining as the sight of politicians caught out in some embarrassment and scrambling for cover—or at least for a cover story. For example Watergate, Monica Lewinski, vicuna coats, Iran Contra, Teapot Dome—you never know what the source of shame and embarrassment will be, even for a United States president. Victims try to minimize the shame, opponents gleefully attempt to maximize it. In America today, however, where virtually anything goes, shame is almost never fatal to a career.
In the time of Jesus, shame was much more powerful in its effects than it is in our day. A prime example of shame was a sentence to death on a cross. Persons whom the powers that be wanted to publicly humiliate in the most horrible public exposure of physical nakedness and lack of control of bodily functions, were sentenced to crucifixion. This was a means of execution applied to a broad spectrum of people the government wanted to punish and hold up as warning examples. Jesus—as a public threat to Rome and a religious annoyance to the Jews who wanted to keep on good terms with Rome—was only one of the cross’s innumerable victims.
Among the powers of the world are religious observances that have become absolutized in our lives. If we don’t do them, shame! Shame! Paul points out that religious practices are only shadow—not the real thing. They are not what God has given you for nourishment and growth: Jesus Christ is. So don’t get hung up on stuff like what to eat or pay undue attention to; what to avoid or with whom not to associate. Those are not deal-breakers. Only what has Jesus at the core is for real. His is the creation
