I’m teaching a class on Colossians this term, and it’s just a few chapters long, so we’re taking our time going through them. One thing that is emerging from our lessons is how the thought of Christ must take centre place in our mind and life. Paul really was obsessed about this. Jesus was his preoccupation. No wonder he said that everything was rubbish to him compared to knowing Christ. Once you have him, you have everything that you yearn for; every translucent vision and hope of transcendence is met in this Person called Jesus.
Of course, I believe it. We all do, being good Christians. Until we live our lives, that is.
Then it becomes a struggle to understand that our significance and value lie purely in our relation with this Jesus. I used to think–and quite mistakenly, mind!–that in what is called Christian ministry and service, this was an obvious thing. Everything revolved around the Christ, to whom we owe our lives. But being human is fraught with paradoxes and contradictions. Our need for significance drives us very often not to the One who is the true Rewarder, but to other things or persons that we expect will validate us. So humans in general, whoever we may be, look for success in the things we do, and the people we want to please or impress, even to the detriment of our lives and the suppression of our unspoken convictions. In Colossians, Paul lambasted the external things that some early false teachers used as criteria of spiritual worth, like food and drink, or observing holy days and whatnot. These were social markers of success being touted by some, but the only social marker for Christians is our belief in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.
Today, we have probably just exchanged the food and feast days bit for a few pats on the back by important bosses, or climbing that well-worn ladder of success by getting ahead of others in the rat race. Believe me, the rat race occurs everywhere, even in the most religious and ‘sanctified’ of settings. So the obsession becomes a subtle veering away from our centre and true preoccupation, Christ alone, and takes on distortions which involve ‘giving the best to God’, fishing for the biggest numbers in anything we do (also ‘giving the best to God’), making sure that others don’t encroach on our territories (ie. ministries) … The old cliche is so true: It’s one thing to get the Hebrews out of Egypt, it’s really another to get Egypt out of the Hebrews!
Thinking about it exhausts me today. I was reading a friend’s blog post about simply sitting and conversing with a friend … the most ordinary of things … and reflecting on how life’s twists led them to where they were. Perhaps unexpectedly, even without deliberation, they found themselves happy with life and with time. Somehow, I envy that. I think that life is not meant to be an endless round of noisy goal setting, of restless and mindless activity, of frenzied programmes … I don’t feel I want to consider any enlargement of my tent, so to speak, in such circumscribed ways as, “What is your mission statement?” (er… ?), or “What are your goals for this year?” or “How many workshops did you attend last year?” Frankly, my only ‘goal’ for the next six months is just to chill out and hang loose!
We’re wrong in our emphases. I have had a little time to resuscitate some of these thoughts in myself. I’m afraid that for some (long) time, they had been suffocated, pressed flat in the layers underneath my consciousness, because of burdens laid, willingly or unwillingly, on myself. But you know, the most needful thoughts are the truest thoughts that express what we are or feel or think. We can’t always ignore them. We all need to come to this realisation and acceptance that the desire for transcendence and meaning can never be satisfied via the list of “Things I Have Done.” Life doesn’t work that way.
This ‘management’ approach to life is something I have never liked. It reduces life to a series of things to do, a list of goals and tasks to perform, a grading system that stifles all freedom and creativity in the Christian life. For a while though, that was how I had to function. That was abhorrent. But– it’s time to return to a kindlier view of what I will do for the rest of life. It has nothing to do with ladders of success, I can assure you, and most likely, even less to do with big and bigger. Reading Paul’s Colossians has been so instructive and positively uplifting. Returning to centre means operating from the point in myself where, in truth, Christ is the One who ”holds all things” together (Col 1: 17). It entails doing all things from the perspective of Christ and Christ alone, of acquiescing and agreeing only to things where knowing Christ surpasses every other pursuit (no matter what its spiritually superior disguise). Returning to centre insists that I must speak only the words of Christ, and do only the works he has approved. Returning to centre means living my life as if I were dead, and the life that I now live is Christ in me–the hope of glory.
I am truly significant only when all I am, and everything I do, resonates with the calling with which I have been called–to be imago Dei, the image of God in Jesus Christ. Everything else is leprous skin, and needs to fall away.
