Colossians 3:4-11, Psalm 94/5
Advent, or the Fast of the Nativity, is a time of waiting: preparing for when we will joyfully celebrate, yet again, Christ’s nativity (His first Advent!) and waiting with patience for when He will come again in glory at his second promised Advent. Consider this stirring and demanding passage from Colossians 3:4-11, prescribed for Divine Liturgy this week, that captures the kind of “active waiting” to which we are called. Here the apostle speaks about five key matters—our hope, our mandate, our warning, our exchange, and our identity. When we read the passage alongside Psalm 94/5, we can see both continuity with our Hebrew forbears, and dimensions that are utterly new because Jesus has come among us.
When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you once walked, when you lived in them. But now put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old man with its practices and have put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all, and in all.
Our passage in Colossians begins with the hope of all hopes: “When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” We must stop to think about how staggering this is. This short sentence speaks of “Christ” as our life,” it assumes that this life is the source of all glory, and it promises that we will share in this. We are reminded of the elder’s words in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”
To see God the Son as He is means to be changed, for He is the very light that shall dawn upon us, and in us. This is the difference between our relationship with God and our meeting with anyone else: with another person, when I look at him or her, that person is the object, and I am the subject, the active one who is looking. Now it may occasionally happen that when I look at someone who is particularly loving, or searching, or wise, that I find myself in the position of the object, as that person searches me. This is as disconcerting as it was when Bastien realized that the heroine in The NeverEnding Story was talking about him! The book was reading him! But this rare event is always the case with God. He is ALWAYS the main actor, even when I feel I am studying him. As St. Evagrius reminds us “A theologian is one who truly prays.” That is, the real theologian does not study God as an object, but allows God to address him or her.
Indeed, it is amazing that God puts himself in the position to be known by us at all! And it is far more surprising that God is not content to be known about: The Almighty invites us to know Him. This is just as surprising as the invitation that God gives to us that we “bless” Him, when it is the role of the Greater to bless the lesser.
God is not another thing in creation to know in either our imperfect minds or according to our twisted hearts. But He consents to be truly (if not exhaustively) known, ever deeper and deeper, by the coming of Jesus among us, and by the indwelling profound presence of the Holy Spirit. And so, when Christ, our Life, appears in all glory, we will be changed. For God the Son cannot authentically reveal Himself, cannot be truly seen by us without changing us. And it is this grand transformation that remains our hope during the time of Advent.
Psalm 94/5 celebrates the wonder of that hope to know God: “Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it; for his hands formed the dry land. O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker!”
One of the beauties of the Psalter is that it does not simply enjoin our praises, but gives reasons, as scholar Walter Bruegemann tells us, so that we should worship with understanding. Whenever the Psalms tell us to worship, this is followed by the ki clause in Hebrew, the hoti clause in Greek: Praise him, because! We are invited into God’s presence, knowing that He is the great King, the one who formed the earth, the sea, and us. We can come knowing that this God is not capricious, but an all-powerful and wise ruler who has made us to have communion with Him. We can have confident hope that this Creator will admit us into his presence, because of how he has made us! He will not reject those who come with thanksgiving. As Fr. Alexander Schmemann puts it, God has made us, first and foremost, to be homo adorans, human beings who worship. And our worship is accompanied by thanksgiving for all He has given to us. Thankful joy gives birth to hope for an even closer connection with the One who issues the invitation.
And so the Psalmist pairs our hope with a mandate—that we should “sing to the LORD and make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!” The most important human action is to hymn the God of all, who has promised that we should be delivered. Of course, the Psalmist did not know everything that this entails. How do we give authentic praise, authentic worship? Colossians fills this question in for us, reminding us that worship is not a matter for the lips only, but of our lives:
“Put to death … what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” The Hebrews were called, because of their faith in the living God, to undergo circumcision. As Christians we are called to a deeper cutting—to a removal of all those things which take us away from God, whether in the body, in our minds, in our passions, in our lusts. It is a “circumcision of the heart,” as the prophet put it. The mandate may seem arduous, but it is possible because of who God is for our sake—He has come among us, to do something about our inability to worship Him in all that we think, say, or do.
After all, not to put to death these things is to miss out on life. As our passage says, we can either be in solidarity with the “old man,” the old prototype of Humanity, Adam who enacted the fall, or with the “new man,” the new and final prototype for the human being, who has changed everything. This is, of course, Jesus, the firstborn from the dead! Let me just say at this point that translations can be deceiving. I suspect many of us have the phrases “old self” and “new self” in our Bibles—but this is NOT what the text says. These two contrasting figures are not parts of us, inside of us, as though they are a faculty or a conscience. They are not “selves.” We are either connected with Adam, our first-father, who brought death into the world, or we are connected with the Lord of life.
Because of our attraction to death, and the fact that we find it easy to stay in that dark domain, a warning is given: “On account of these things (sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness) the wrath of God is coming. In these you once walked, when you lived among them. [There was] anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk from your mouth [as well as lies].” We do not like to think about the wrath of God, I know. It is important to remember that God’s wrath is NOT the opposite of God’s love. It is how God’s love and justice are experienced by those who do not love Him. To those whose treasure lies elsewhere, the light and warmth of God burns. To those who are governed by darkness and lies, the second Advent will not be welcome.
Our Psalm, of course, it mostly a psalm of warning. It is sobering, even disorienting, to hear the Psalmist exhorting us in strong words, and reminding us of the Hebrews who were consigned to the wilderness for a whole generation:
O that today you would hearken to his voice! Harden not your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. For forty years I loathed that generation and said, “They are a people who err in heart, and they do not regard my ways.” Therefore I swore in my anger that they should not enter my rest.
This warning begins with a plea (O that today you would hearken to his voice!), and ends with reference to the anger of God and the exclusion that comes to those who reject the One who is calling. It does not mince words. And, says St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:6, these passages do not simply recount the story of the Hebrews, but are told as warnings for us, upon whom the end of the ages has come. God’s yearning for us is continual, as we hear in the book of Revelation, where we are addressed by the divine voice, “Come out of Babylon, my people!” Warnings are not pleasant, but they express love, not hatred. When God speaks about His anger, it is to remind us of reality; He remains forever love embodied. But if we will not turn to life, we ourselves choose death. The Psalm ends with the warning. Yet our passage in Colossians gives the antidote—a great exchange! It is interesting that this exchange involves both something that has happened in the past, and something that continues in the present.
The New Man, Christ the last Adam, has come. There will be no newer model—it is not like a Microsoft 365 subscription. His first Advent was once and for all, in which he took on everything that it is to be human (though He did not himself sin) so that we could become what He is. He has assumed human nature to himself, and in our baptisms we “put off” the old man, and “put on” the new man who is being renewed in knowledge after the image of the One who is creating us. God has done all, and is continuing to work in us. Yet there is something for us to do now, as well—“put all these away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk. And do not lie to one another.” This has happened, so live like it! Let who you are match what God has done for you, and is continuing to do. Christ, in great humility, invites us to participate, for we are being made children, no longer slaves.
This exchange has been enacted for all of us, and for each of us.
The Psalmist spoke of God’s people—from a single ethnicity—as the “people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.” Jesus, in his last supper discourse, reminded the apostles that there were other flocks who would be joined to them. And so Colossians says: “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all, and in all.” This is our identity, how we will see ourselves if we hold on to this hope, this mandate, this warning, and this wonderful exchange in which we participate. We may be tempted to go back to tribalism, to make superficial distinctions, to forget that we are, together, a single people in Christ. But if we look to him as our “all in all,” and if we search with wonder the faces of those who love Christ—even by looking at little boxes today on Zoom, we will see the image of the One who is remaking us in knowledge. Knowledge of what we can hope for! Knowledge of how we should act! Knowledge of what we should beware! Knowledge of what He has done for us! Knowledge of who we truly are! And most wonderful, knowledge of this great Lover, this One who has searched and found, this One who has exchanged richness for poverty, and Whose face we shall, together, see, without any masks, up close, and personal! For this we wait actively, knowing that it is this One who will fulfill what has been promised.
Edith M. Humphrey 