Colossians 3: The List in Verse 11 Runs Out of Opposites

Verse 11 has a list in it that goes wrong near the end. Greek and Jew is a pair. Circumcision and uncircumcision is the same pair said a second way, and bond and free is another. Then comes "Barbarian, Scythian," which isn't a pair at all, because a Scythian was a kind of barbarian. As I understand it the Greeks used the name for the far end of the scale, the people you'd point to if someone asked who was furthest outside.

Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.
— Colossians 3:11

So Paul runs out of opposites and just keeps going down the ladder until he reaches the bottom rung, and then he names that too and puts it in the same sentence as everybody else. A man who was only listing pairs would have stopped at "bond nor free." This one kept going on purpose.

A few days ago I wrote that Colossians 1 doesn't end at verse 20, and chapter 3 has the same problem from the other side. People remember the lovely verses and skip the long stretch where the letter says what it looks like on a Tuesday.

Four things caught on me this time. What "above" is for, what "mortify" is asking, what Paul does with clothes and the last eight verses, which I have opinions about.

What does it mean to set your affection on things above?

In verse 1 Paul says seek the things above, verse 2 says set your affection on them, and then verse 3 hands over the reason before anything hard has been asked of anyone: "For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." The first instruction with any teeth in it is verse 5, and it opens with "therefore." Paul is arguing from who they are to what they do.

I've heard verse 2 taught as a dimmer switch. Turn the earth down, turn heaven up. The chapter won't hold still for that, because verse 17 says whatsoever you do in word or deed, and by verse 18 he's talking about marriages and children and the people who work for you. Eight verses of twenty-five, close to a third, go to homes and work, so whatever "things above" are, they get tested in a kitchen with a deadline.

There's a small thing in the King James English too, which is that verse 2 tells them to set their "affection" on things above, and verse 5 lists "inordinate affection" among the things to put to death. Same English word on both sides of the line. Whether the translators meant anything by that I can't say, since I don't have the Greek, but it reads right to me. The trouble was never having affection. It was where you pointed it, and how much.

Does "mortify your members" mean what it sounds like?

Verse 5 says mortify your members, and the word did mean make dead. What the verse hands you after it, though, is no list of body parts. It's a list of things people do: fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence and covetousness, which Paul calls idolatry.

By verse 8 the list has moved to anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy and filthy communication "out of your mouth," and verse 9 adds lying. So the members are the parts of you that carry these out, hands and mouth mostly. What gets killed is the doing. Nothing there says the body itself is the enemy.

Why does Paul talk about clothes?

Verse 8 says put off all these, verse 9 says you've put off the old man with his deeds, verse 10 says you've put on the new, and verse 12 says put on, therefore, as the elect of God. It's the same pair of verbs going back and forth, and I'm not going to untangle which parts are finished and which are still to do. A man who changed his shirt yesterday has to change it again today, and I suspect Paul knew that.

In verse 10 there's a detail about what the new man is made of. He is "renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him." Knowledge, of all things. Paul could have said renewed in feeling or in zeal, which is what most of us would reach for, and he picked the word for something you learn. That fits the rest of the chapter, where the instructions are small and checkable. Don't lie and don't go bitter. Forgive the man you have the quarrel with. A person can know whether he did any of that by suppertime.

Clothes are specific. Nobody wears an outfit in general. Somebody picked it out and put an arm through a sleeve, and the list in verse 12 is that specific: bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering. The first item is a little startling when you hold it up. "Bowels of mercies" is old English for a compassion you feel low in the stomach, where we'd say heart.

Then verse 14, which I'd call the verse of the chapter that stands best alone.

And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.
— Colossians 3:14

"Above all" is a funny phrase in a passage about layers. I read it as outermost, the last thing on and the thing that holds the rest in place. I picture a belt. That may be my own picture and not Paul's, but a belt is the part of an outfit that decides whether everything else stays where you put it.

Almost nothing in verses 12 through 17 can be done alone in a room. Forbearing one another and forgiving one another, then teaching and admonishing one another, and back in verse 9 the command to lie not one to another. Verse 13 assumes you'll have a quarrel, "if any man have a quarrel against any," and doesn't treat it as an emergency. It says what to do with it, which is forgive "even as Christ forgave you." Verse 16 has them singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs together, and verse 15 tells them to be thankful, so the whole stretch reads like a congregation in a room and not a man alone with his conscience. Paul does something like this in Philippians 3, where he lines up everything a person could be proud of and counts it as loss. Verse 11 here is the same refusal to rank, turned outward and pointed at a whole congregation.

What do the household verses ask of a husband and a father?

Verses 18 through 21 are four verses, one each to wives, husbands, children and fathers. They're short, and the two that address the people holding the power are the shortest and the most negative. "Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them." "Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged."

I'm a husband and a father, so I read those two with a pencil in my hand. Neither one says be in charge. Neither one tells me what a good home looks like from the top. They tell me what I'll actually do wrong, and they're accurate, since nobody in all my years of marriage has had to warn me off too much poetry. Bitterness shows up on its own.

Both verses with a reason attached are worth setting side by side. Children get theirs in verse 20, that obedience "is well pleasing unto the Lord." Fathers get a reason too, and it's about the child: "lest they be discouraged." Paul is looking at what the kid is going to feel like at the end of a year of being provoked, and that's a different kind of reason than the one the children were given.

Verse 18 is the one people argue about, so I'll stay with what the verse itself holds. It's a single verse. It carries a qualifier, "as it is fit in the Lord," and it sits seven verses after "Christ is all, and in all." Whatever it means, it can't mean something that verse 11 has already ruled out, and I'd start the argument from there and not from the way the verse tends to get quoted at weddings.

Then come the servants, and verses 22 through 25 are four verses, as many as the wives, husbands, children and fathers got put together, and they're the hardest reading in the chapter. Obey in all things, do it heartily, as to the Lord. Verse 25 closes the thought for everyone at once: "But he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath done: and there is no respect of persons." It doesn't say which person. It's said to the servant and it hangs over the master.

You'd expect the masters to be left out, and in chapter 3 they are. The chapter break comes one verse too early, and the first verse of Colossians 4 is addressed to them: "Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal," and the reason follows, "ye also have a Master in heaven." Anyone who stops at the end of chapter 3 has quit in the middle of the household code.

Further down chapter 4 there's a name, and Paul says he's sending Tychicus to the Colossians "with Onesimus, a faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you" (Colossians 4:9). Onesimus turns up again in a very short letter, the one to Philemon, where Paul asks a man to take back someone who was once "unprofitable" and is now "above a servant, a brother beloved" (Philemon 11, 16). Archippus turns up in both, told to take heed to his ministry in Colossians 4:17 and greeted in Philemon 2, which makes me think the two letters went to the same town together, with Onesimus walking in the door carrying one of them. I can't prove that. It's an inference, and a modest one.

Paul doesn't call for an end to slavery in Colossians 3 and I won't pretend he does. But reading verses 22 through 25 as Paul blessing the arrangement leaves out the man he sends back with a letter that says, in effect, treat him as you'd treat me. The chapter asks the servant to work as to the Lord. The letter that travels with it asks the master to see a brother.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Colossians 3 tell wives to obey their husbands?

The word is "submit," and the verse adds "as it is fit in the Lord." The next verse speaks to husbands, and it asks for two things: love her, and don't turn bitter against her. I'd read the two verses together and not try to lift the first out by itself.

Is putting off the old man something you do once?

Paul talks about it both ways, as finished in verse 9 and as something to do in verse 8. I take that at face value. You do it, and then you do it again tomorrow, the way you wash a shirt you're going to wear again.

What are "bowels of mercies"?

An old way of saying deep compassion. The King James translators put feeling in the gut where we'd put it in the heart, and they use the same word for Onesimus in Philemon 12, "mine own bowels." That's the best gloss I've found. It means the part of you that actually moves.

The north corner of the gutter over the garage has pulled away from the fascia again.

Caleb's game is at ten. After the game I'll get the ladder out, and I'll need a longer screw than the one I used last time.

— D.