Colossians

Colossians is a letter to a church Paul had never visited. He says so himself: he is struggling for them and for the people at Laodicea and for everyone who has not met him face to face. Somebody else did the work. A man named Epaphras, who came from Colossae, took the message home and taught it there, and he is the reason Paul knows these people well enough to struggle for them from prison.

What he is worried about is hard to pin down, which is part of what makes the letter interesting. He warns them about people judging their food and their festivals, about somebody insisting on visions and the worship of angels, about rules that sound impressive and are really just hard on the body. Whatever exactly was going around Colossae, it worked the way most things that go around churches work: Christ, and then something extra you need on top.

Near the start of the letter comes a passage about Christ as the image of the invisible God, the one through whom everything was made and in whom everything holds together, and it is the high point of the book.

The back half turns practical fast. Put to death what belongs to your old life, put on compassion and patience and forgiveness, let the peace of Christ decide things, do your work as though for the Lord. Then a page of names and a request to swap letters with the church at Laodicea.

Several of those names matter beyond this letter. Onesimus, whom Paul calls one of you, and Archippus, told to complete the ministry he received, turn up again in the letter to Philemon, and so do Epaphras, Mark, Aristarchus, Demas and Luke. Reading Colossians and Philemon together is reading one household from two directions.