You Are the Body of Christ
First of a three part sermon series about being "in Christ," focusing on the book of Colossians. Text: Colossians 1:9-19
I was invited to preach again. I had the opportunity to preach over three Sundays in close succession and so did a series that builds out the idea of being “in Christ” through the book of Colossians. These are my pulpit notes, a kind of minimalist, stripped down text with all of the important phrasing and transitions worked out. What happens from the pulpit will bear a loose resemblance to what is here. It would take 14-16 minutes to read out loud as written, but the sermon will likely be 30 minutes in length when preached. Preaching is always a live event.
My reading of the text of Colossians from the NIV (1985):
What do we mean when we say that we are made in the image of God?
A lot of the time, when this is brought up, it is usually to emphasize the dignity of all human beings or that we are all essentially the same because we are all made in the image of God, to reinforce a general egalitarianism.
This morning, I would like to talk about this notion through the lens of Jesus and his relationship to God the Father and what this means for us as individuals, for the life of the church and the nature of the spiritual life.
One of the things that has defined the Reformed tradition has been its rejection of images within the church. There was a period after the Reformation when we were known for whitewashed churches, taking seriously the critique that much of the church art found in the Roman churches was idolatrous.
In verse 15 Paul tells us that Christ is the image of the invisible God. Elsewhere in the Gospel of John, for example when, in John 14, Phillip says to Jesus, “Show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” To which Jesus responds, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”
This enmeshes us right away into Trinitarian theology. God is three in one. One essence, three persons. In the Greek, when they were hashing out the language of the Trinity, they actually used two different words that were synonyms and largely interchangeable in everyday speech: ousia and homoousia. Both words mean “essence.” By using two words with basically the same meaning to convey the idea of Oneness and Threeness, they were saying that there is a oneness and a unity in God but yet an identifiable three-ness that in no way divides God.
So, when we see Jesus, we see in him the same essence as the Father. Yet they remain distinct but not separate. Part of the role of the Son, as seen in the Incarnation in Jesus Christ, is to make the Father known.
Paul emphasizes this role of Jesus as the Word of God. The Son, when the Father speaks, is the Word that comes out of him. He is the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together. The Son is the voice of God in creation; he is the Word by which all things were spoken into existence.
Just as God revealed himself in creation through Christ, so too he reveals himself in the person of Jesus.
Now if we circle back to verse nine where Paul talks about praying for the Colossians that God might fill them with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding, we can see it as the Word filling our minds, our hearts and our lives with the heart and mind of God. The role of the Spirit is to make Christ real to us who in turn makes the Father real to us.
This knowledge leads to a life that is pleasing to God and bears fruit in every good work and the knowledge of God.
There is a tying together here of knowledge and action. Knowing God is never a thing just of the mind. You cannot know God unless your actions conform to the will of God, and you are bearing fruit in good works.
You know God by doing. You cannot study your way to a knowledge of God. You must live into the intellectual knowledge of God in order to understand it. You cannot learn woodworking or the playing of the piano or speaking a foreign language without doing it. You have to make things out of wood. You have to actually play the piano. You have to communicate in a foreign language in order to know it.
It is the same with our actions as believers. This is why James says that faith and actions must be together. You can’t understand faith intellectually. It is not something that lives only in the mind. It must be practiced.
But here is the thing. This thing, this knowledge, of his will, through all spiritual wisdom and understanding, is not something that we don’t have that we are not. Rather we have been rescued from the kingdom of darkness and brought into the kingdom of light.
We already exist in the kingdom of light. It is like when he says at the beginning of chapter three that we have been raised with Christ. In Christ it has already happened.
What Paul is praying for is that we be filled with what and who we already are. When you live a life worthy of the Lord, you a living a life worthy of who you already are in Christ. All of this doing and practice is a way to come to know who we are “in Christ.”
In this way, “in Christ” you already know how to play the piano. The practice you are doing is your way to learn and interiorize who you already are in Christ. It is like Michelangelo saying that the sculpture was already there in the marble, he was just removing the unnecessary stone. The spiritual life is kind of like this.
This is why living a life worthy of Christ, bearing fruit and growing in the knowledge of God is so vital for the Christian. You are coming to know yourself, who you are in Christ.
So, what does this have to do with us being image bearers of God?
Christ is the head of the church which is the body. The church, as the body of Christ is the first born of the resurrection. We are Christ’s body.
And what is Christ? He is the image of the invisible God.
Does this mean that we are God? No. But our relationship with Christ mirrors the relationship of the Son to the Father. We are at once distinct from Christ, and yet at the same time united with him.
In 2 Peter 1:4, the apostle Peter talks in very similar terms as does Paul about the doing of our faith life. He talks about participating in the divine nature.
In the community of believers, we are the body of Christ and in Christ we participate in the divine nature.
As we discussed, the divine nature is triune, three-in-one. The church, being the body of Christ, mirrors who and what God is. We participate in the image of God. In this sense, we are meant, in our fellowships, to mirror the three-in-oneness of God.
Even going back to Genesis, God says, “Let us make man in our image.” We as human beings were meant to be communal creatures. We are not first of all individuals. We are made in the image God, three-in-one. And in Christ we are his body and participate in the divine nature.
This communal nature of who we are becomes more obvious the more we look at who we are, and how we are formed and shaped as human beings.
Even from a young age, how is it that we establish our own identity? We begin through the process of separating from our parents. What is the hallmark of the “the terrible twos?” Your child begins to say, “No!” They say to you that they are not you and have a will of their own. How does a child establish his identity except in relationship to others? And as we grow up, we sometimes look around and try on different personalities to see if they fit us. Often it takes us well into our 40’s or 50’s to become truly comfortable with who we are relative to others, if it happens at all. We are not other people. We are our own person. But you cannot establish this identity without other people.
At the same time, there are part of ourselves that we are blind to. It has been demonstrated that our minds will filter and sort information and make choices for us what to see and what to pay attention to, what gets noticed. We have a subconscious that remains outside of our awareness. In this sense, we need others to tell us who we are, to act as a mirror to us.
We don’t and can’t become ourselves without others.
This idea that we must be true to ourselves and that being true to ourselves is the most honest form of identity is really just nonsense. You can’t know yourself without others. Someone else needs to help tell you who you are. We are formed in community. This is why the breakdown of community is such a problem.
The alienation which occurs because of sin and exacerbated by modernity is so devastating to us as human beings. We are cut off from God and we are cut off from each other.
But in Christ, this is all supposed to be reversed. In Christ we are reconciled to God and to each other. We are not God, but we participate in the divine nature. In the same way, we do not get lost or subsumed into community. We retain our identity, but we are now reconciled in Christ to our fellow believer, and we become one community, one body, with Christ as our head.
Like God who is three-in-one, we are many but one body, one community in Christ. In Christ, we participate in the divine nature. We are not God, but in Christ we are in union with him and participate in his nature.
When Paul prays here that God will fill us with his will, through all spiritual wisdom and understanding, that we may bear fruit growing in the knowledge of God, he sees this as happening in this reality of being in Christ, as persons-in-community, one body with many parts.
Together we are manifesting a very deep mystical reality by being a Christian community. We practice who we are. We practice being one body, Christ’s body, through actions that allow us to manifest his will, his spiritual wisdom and understanding. We help each other establish and grow confident in our unique sense of self, but we also mirror each other back to each other so that we can see ourselves through the eyes of others. In do doing we participate in each other’s deepest essence coming together as one.
What we do here is not about Sunday service or the programs we run or the building or the organization. It is about us as a body, the body of Christ, participating in the divine nature, together practicing and learning to reveal who we are in Christ.
Like the piano, each of us is a different note or chord that when brought together in an organized composition and we practice who we are, we can together become the musicians and the symphony all at once, making the most heavenly of music.
A lot of what was said here this morning is deep stuff and needs a lot of thought and meditation. You have to let this sit with you, and you have to do it. You have to practice being the body of Christ. Think about what that means. Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity and yet calls us his body. We are made in the image of God, three-in-one. And as Christ’s body, we help reveal the essence and nature of the invisible God.
To me it is just mind-blowing stuff the more you think about it.
I encourage you to go home and read and re-read this passage, mediate on it and start your journey living into and revealing these fundamental realities of what it means to not just be a Christian, but to be a Christian community.