Bible reading: Colossians 1:15-23.

Message.

There are times in life when we face difficult choices, both of which have consequences. For instance, one of my best friends has invited me to go to a football match, while another good friend wants me to accompany him to a party on the same day. How can I avoid offending at least one of them? Or, if I’m in a restaurant, do I choose food which I enjoy, but which I know will give me indigestion; or do I choose a bland dish which won’t give me either the same pain – or pleasure?

Those are day-to-day problems, but teachers of ethics like to suggest more complex scenarios. For instance, a bank has been robbed and I know who did it. However I also know that the robber hasn’t kept the money but has donated it to an orphanage which was in danger of closing for lack of funds. Should I tell the police about the robber, and risk the charity having to shut its doors, or do I stay silent and endorse criminality? And here’s one final example: your grandmother suffers from asthma. She has a cat and the doctor has told you that this is making her asthma worse, reducing her life expectancy and quality of life. Your granny, however, lives alone and doesn’t want to get rid of the cat as she says it keeps her company. What should you say to her?

Well, I hope you enjoyed getting your mind round those problems, which you may well remember after today’s service but actually have little to do with what I want to say! I’ve told you them because they are all “dilemmas”: moral or philosophical problems in which one must choose between two hard options. And they lead me into talking about a famous “trilemma”, which I do want you to remember, where the choice is between three options. This was made famous by C.S. Lewis in the radio talks he gave in the 1940s, which became his book “Mere Christianity” – although in fact his trilemma had been around for a century before that. This is what he said:

“I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God”. That is the one thing we must not say …. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to”.

Now it is possible to pick holes in that argument, which does depend on us believing that the Bible’s accounts of Jesus are accurate, and trusting that the early Church did not give Jesus a status which he never actually claimed for himself. Clearly I’m not going to do that this morning. For what I want to do is take us back to the passage we read earlier from Paul’s letter to the Colossians. It’s theological, it’s dense, it’s hard to get our heads around (even in modern translations of the Bible); yet it’s also a dazzling paean of praise, the most glorious, most complete exposition of who we believe Jesus is in the entire New Testament. That means it’s worth exploring.

It speaks in no uncertain terms of Jesus as God made visible in human form. It affirms that Jesus was active in creation (which is one of the reasons why I don’t like prayers which describe the Holy Trinity as “Creator, Redeemer and Spirit”) and then speaks of him sustaining that creation. It describes Jesus as the One who has power over every ruler on earth and in heaven, and also as the head of the Church. It tells us that Jesus is no second-class deity, but one in whom “all God’s fullness dwells”. It tells us, too, that through his death on the cross, Jesus “reconciled all things” – not just people but the entire created realm. This is a big, vast, huge picture of Jesus!

But why did Paul include this long description of Jesus – which, I have to admit, sounds rather like an academic lecture – in this letter? He clearly wanted to deepen the Colossian Christians’ understanding of our Lord; but I think he had other reasons, too. If you were here last Sunday, you may remember me mentioning the two challenges which this church was facing. I think that these give us the answer.

The first of these challenges (and I’m not going to spend too long on this) was that there were preachers presenting a different image of Christ; in particular, it seems, they weren’t willing to call him “God”. We’re not too sure who these teachers were, although they crop up in several of Paul’s letters and seem to have been popular. One suggestion is that they were basically combining the pagan beliefs of the Greek and Roman gods with Christianity; a better suggestion is that they were Jewish men (and perhaps women!) to whom the idea of Jesus being God was blasphemous and stuck in their throats. The first lot of teachers would have appealed to Gentile converts, the second would have appealed to Jewish ones. But both offered a watered-down version of Christianity which said that you could keep one foot in your past faith while also following Christ. That was anathema to Paul, who talks more than once about “dying to the past” and “rising with new life”: his Christianity was “all or nothing”.

Well, you’re probably not interested in the false teachers of twenty centuries ago – although it’s important to remember that the Church is always weakened when our picture of Christ is diminished. In the face of a world which may think that our faith is ridiculous, our belief in a big and almighty Christ both gives us strength and inspires us to do great things in his name. A feeble Jesus, reduced to a mere shadow, can never do that; we need to recapture a sense of his glory.

But I now want to move on to something which may grab our attention rather more: it’s the way in which our allegiance to Jesus as Lord challenges all our other loyalties. This was a real issue for Christians in the Roman Empire and, I believe, it’s still important for us today. As I said last week, this letter was probably written during the reign of the Emperor Nero – you know, the one who “fiddled while Rome burned”. We may laugh at that; but Nero was notoriously cruel and he made Christians scapegoats of that fire; many were killed in most horrific ways. This wasn’t just Nero being vindictive: every citizen had to swear allegiance to him as their “lord” or supreme master. Christians wouldn’t do this; instead they declared themselves to be subjects of a greater lord: Jesus Christ. This was seen as a subversive affront, a blatant challenge to the Roman rulers. That couldn’t be tolerated.

And there was more. Statues of the Caesars dotted the Empire’s landscape and reminded people, especially those who lived far from Rome, of just who was in charge of every part of their lives. Equally, as I said earlier, every coin bore Caesar’s image. At a time when there was a push to regard the Emperors not just as human rulers but as gods, Paul insisted that it’s Christ who is the image of the invisible God (and I don’t think the early Christians made statues or coins of him!). Once again his words challenged Rome’s authority; although Christians could of course be responsible citizens (and Paul tells them that in another letter), if Rome pulls them one way and Jesus pulls them in the other, it’s Jesus who they ought to follow. That’s hard.

I don’t think that many modern leaders claim to be divine. But people are still tempted to offer some of them god-like and unquestioning loyalty. That’s particularly true in politics, where some Christians – possibly more so in the USA than here in Britain – offer allegiance to a particular political party or figure in a way which becomes dangerously close to worship. (This picture comes from a different place and era). Alongside this there is loyalty to one’s nation or flag which can turn into a form of idolatry: our citizenship is ultimately in heaven where Jesus reigns unchallenged.

It wasn’t easy to be a Christian in the Roman Empire, as the new faith seemed to pose a direct threat and challenge to the status quo. That was true in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe; it was also true in Elizabethan England where nonconformist Christians were thought to be plotting a republican overthrow of the monarchy (a suspicion which did have some basis in truth). The temptations which confront us are more subtle, the pressures we face are harder to identify. But, even in a country like Britain, there will be times when we have to make hard choices, when faithfully following Jesus will be the more difficult option, when the depth and strength of our faith are tested. It’s at times like these that believing in a big, mighty, cosmic Jesus will help to carry us through.