Surrender

“One of the special things about knowing death is close is that is easier to re-centre life on things other than yourself, there is no planning to be done.”

Kathryn Mannix, ‘With the End in Mind’.

People’s lives often transform when they are nearing death; there can be no more pretense that our preoccupations are the centre of it all.

In the grand scheme of all of time, there is no great difference between decades and days. And yet, it is easy to live with the lie that says “life is a story about me“. It’s easy to spend time nurturing our own mini empire-building projects. It’s easy to see everything through the prism of how it helps or hinders our own hopes and dreams.

“Life is a story about me”. It’s a lie I’m very fond of.

But what is the alternative?

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15The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Colossians 1:15-20

The heading given to this passage in the Bible is the ‘Supremacy of Christ’. 5 sentences that contain the metaphysics of the universe. 5 sentences that lay claim to us: the true re-centring of our lives is to know Christ.

(1) “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation”

• Who is God? The Bible identifies God as:
  • the Triune God (Father-Son-Spirit)
  • the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
  • Revealed in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus
• Those bullet points probably just feel like yawn-y theological words. Between them though, they introduce God in a distinct way. In a knowable way.
• Want to know God? Jesus is God made visible to us. God made incarnate. A God who walks among us.
• Firstborn over all creation signifies Jesus as being pre-eminent, holding authority over creation.

(2) “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.“

• Jesus is the Creator, and is identified as the uncreated word of God by which all things were made.
• Thrones or powers or rulers or authorities is significant. Jesus’ power and authority is not uncontested, but all forms of powers and authorities have been created through Jesus.

(3) “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.“

• Jesus is the Redeemer, his life, death and resurrection is the singularity upon which the universe turns.
• In him all things ‘hold together’, because in the resurrection, God binds himself to all creation.
• In Christian belief, the term “Body of Christ” refers to the collective group of believers who follow Jesus. Jesus being head of the body emphasises that Jesus is the leader and authority over all in the church, symbolised by the metaphorical comparison of a body with its head. 
• By the resurrection, Jesus becomes the ‘firstborn among the dead’. Implicit here is the expectation that all who believe in Jesus will be saved from death and rise again. There is a promise of bodily resurrection, following Jesus’ resurrection in the New Creation.
• How can Jesus survive death? Jesus’s resurrection is directly connected with Jesus’ claims to be the Son of God. The resurrection is part of the sheer impossibility of defeating and extinguishing the divine presence in Jesus. The Uncreated, the Infinite Word, cannot be rendered finite.
  • (Incidentally, this is why we shouldn’t think about ‘God cruelly sacrificing his Son’ – this view envisions God as the object, where in the Scriptures, God is the acting subject. Jesus is God. God is on the cross.)

(4) “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.“

• Why is ‘making peace’ necessary? Because the Supremacy of Christ is contested.
• The Scriptures of the Old Testament introduce the Law (what it means to live in obedience to God). To not abide by the Law is to oppose the purposes of God and to live under a curse (“Cursed is anyone who does not uphold the words of this law” – Deuteronomy 27:26).
• The Law, and the curse for breaking it, are part of the fabric of creation. There is a material reality of what is in accordance with God and what is not. By Jesus all is created and holds together. God brings life. There is no life besides Jesus, so to exist not in accordance with God is to reap death.
• All of us fail to fulfil the demands of the Law, which means we are condemned by it, separated from God and therefore claimed by the Enemy. The Enemy seeks to destroy, and is glad to see that outside of the life of God we are rendered subject to Death.
• God is just. In God’s goodness, God will not simply re-write or overlook or admit what causes destruction. So the Law stands, and God knows we cannot overcome the curse we are under.
• And so, Galatians 3:13 tells us “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.”” Quoting back to the Law in Deuteronomy, Galatians explains that Jesus takes on the curse that we are under.
• On the cross, Jesus exchanged God for Godlessness. He was God; he makes himself to become sin. Jesus gave himself up to be enslaved by Sin, condemned by the Law, and subject to Death. What we see happening on the cross is that Jesus, who dies the death of a slave, was made to be sin. Does this mean that Jesus became his own Enemy? It would seem so. By making himself ‘to be sin’ he allied himself with us in our farthest extremity, entering our desperate condition as separated from God and under the curse of death.
• All of this is to make a way for us to be reconciled to God. Romans 10:4 “Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.”

We cannot meet the Law, so God meets it for us. We can be free from the curse of Death and instead have “life in all its fullness” (John 10:10).

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Romans 10:13) It is by Jesus’ death and resurrection that we delivered from the Enemy and Death. Jesus’ identity as God must be true for the cross to have ‘made peace’ – which is why our deliverance requires us to acknowledge the Supremacy of Christ. Life can no longer be a story about us. It is the story of what God has done.

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God is love – 1 John 4:7

I find the phrase the ‘Supremacy of Christ’ daunting. Should we surrender our lives because we must recognise a power more significant than our own? On this basis we may as readily surrender to many other powers in this world.

Christ wants us to respond and surrender not to power, but to the love of God.

Jesus makes peace through his blood, shed on the cross, to make real and visible to us the purity, depth, generosity and mercy of the love of God for us.

Christ’s blood is a metaphor that stands primarily for the suffering love of God. It suggests that there is no sorrow God has not known, no grief he has not borne, no price he was unwilling to pay, in order to reconcile the world to himself in Christ… it is a love that has endured the bitterest realities of suffering and death in order that its purposes might prevail… the motif of Christ’s blood signifies primarily the depth of the divine commitment to rescue, protect, and sustain those who would otherwise be lost.

George Hunsinger’s ‘Meditation on the Blood of Christ’

We surrender our lives not in service of power, but in service of the greatest love ever known.

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Faith is complicated, messy, and strange. Faith is not certainty, because faith has plenty of room for doubt. Faith is not a hoop you have to jump through or a box you must contort yourself to fit into.

Faith is simply surrendering. Having assessed our own finitude and brokenness, faith is concluding that life, if it ever was, really shouldn’t be about us. Faith is a giving over of our lives to a Love that we’ve seen only ever partially, made visible in the life of Christ, and saying that it is Jesus that is the centre. Faith says “life can no longer be a story about me: let my life be the story of what God has done.”