… The spectacular passage we heard from Colossians, one of the very first and still one of the greatest Christian poems ever written. Colossians 1 encapsulates beautifully and movingly this vision of integrated wisdom, and gives it, breathtakingly, a human face: He is the image of God, the invisible one, firstborn of all creation. For in him all things were created, in the heavens and here on the earth. Things we can see and things we cannot, – thrones and lordships and rulers and powers – All were created both through him and for him.

And he is ahead, prior to all else and in him all things hold together; And he himself is supreme, the head over the body, the church.

He is the start of it all, firstborn from realms of the dead; so in all things he might be the chief. For in him all the Fullness was glad to dwell and through him to reconcile all to himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, through him – yes, things on the earth, and also the things in the heavens.

The balance of the poem (very clear in both the rhythm and the words of the original), and its deep roots in the ancient traditions of Jewish wisdom, both highlight the stupendous claim that the God who made the world, with all its parts and pieces, is now active in remaking it, restoring it, healing it, and renewing it; and that the means by which he has done the first and is doing the second is the person, the man, we know as Jesus Christ. He is the mirror in which we discover who the creator really is; he is the one through whom all things were made, and through whom, by his death and resurrection, all things are now being remade. St Paul, in writing or quoting this astonishing and very early piece of poetic theology, is claiming for Jesus Christ what the ancient Jewish wisdom writers claimed for the figure of Wisdom – the wisdom by which the world was made, the wisdom you need to be a fully alive human being, the wisdom by which the living God inhabits his world, breathes into it his own warm life, and brings about within it the fulfilment of his strange and beautiful purposes.

More – http://www.ntwrightpage.com/sermons/City_On_A_Hill.htm

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