The beginning of this chapter, “When Christ, who is our life, appears”, refers to the second coming. This results in the fact that you too appear with him in glory after your resurrection from the dead. Glory is when the uncreated powers of God dwell in you, these eternal powers that shine from his essence. You shall not reach this glory except through “putting to death whatever belongs to your earthly nature”. This is an expression from Paul intending to say that sins are like a body inside your bodies. Paul compares sins as a whole to a strange self connected entity.
After these words, he mentions some sins; some related to the body or committed through the body and others found in the whole human entity like what we call “evil desires”. However, he gives a special place to greed for money or for any other thing that man can own such as the love for power, and he compares greediness to idolatry.
He mentions that God’s wrath descends on those that commit these sins, and he assures that after leaving idolatry, they also left the sins that idolatry lead to. Then he considers that the list of sins that he mentioned must be completed so he mentions anger and rage…etc. He ends by mentioning lying which is rarely mentioned in the Book after the Lord’s words: “But let your statement be, ‘Yes, yes ‘ or ‘No, no’”, because what is in the heart must be on the tongue, and we as Christians don’t have any duplicate or schizophrenic personalities. Therefore, honesty was a main basis for us.
If these sins and other sins hit a person, he shall remain in his old self as he was before Baptism. And on the opposite side of this old man there is the new man and the Apostle used this meaning by saying: “for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ”. This man is renewed in knowledge which is the knowledge of God, the intimate knowledge that creates an overlap between the creator and you through Christ.
Because of the confusion in Colossi between some Jewish influenced religious sects and because of what the Apostle called philosophy, he wanted to say to the Colossian believers: “Here there is no Gentile or Jew”; Jews used to hate the Greeks and gentiles in general and feel pride towards them. Also the expression “circumcised or uncircumcised” carries the same meaning. The thing that refers to the gentile in the Greek mind is the fact that he is uncircumcised, and in Christianity we are not attached to this anymore and we do not differentiate between the circumcised and uncircumcised. Also if the “Barbarian” believed, he shall have the same dignity that the Greek used to brag about. The “Scythian” comes from a people that lived in Eastern Europe, and he enters salvation as all nations do. Also there is no more difference between the “slave and free”. Although slavery in the times of Paul was still in the Roman community, it didn’t carry inferiority. The slave as the free participates in salvation. Before cancelling slavery from the Roman legislation, the slave had the same dignity that the free had in Church. The important thing is that “Christ is all and is in all”. He doesn’t differentiate between races, social statuses and ranks. Unity was given by the Lord through the Salvation that he fulfilled through his death and Resurrection.
Translated by Mark Najjar
Original Text: “الأخلاق عند بولس” –Raiati 03- 15.01.2012
