Everything Holds Together in Him

Epaphras had come all the way to Rome to find Paul, from Colossae, a wool-making town in the hills of what is now Turkey. He was the one who had first told the people there about Jesus. Paul had never been there.

"How are they?" Paul asked.

"They love Jesus, and they love each other," said Epaphras. "But some new teachers have come. They say Jesus is a good start but not enough. They say you also need to pray to angels, and keep special rules about food and feast days, and have secret visions."

So Paul wrote them a letter. (A helper wrote it on papyrus, a paper made from pressed river reeds.)

"Jesus is the image of the invisible God," Paul said. Nobody can see God, but whoever looks at Jesus sees what God is like. "Everything was created in him, in heaven and on earth, things we can see and things we can't, thrones and rulers and powers. All of it was made through him and for him."

That meant the angels too. The teachers wanted the Colossians to pray to angels, but every angel had been made by Jesus. (Praying to an angel instead of to Jesus is like writing a thank-you note to the oven instead of to the person who baked the cake.)

"He was there before anything else," Paul went on, "and in him all things hold together."

The Colossians knew about things coming apart. Their valley had earthquakes. Around that time one shook the ground so hard that much of Laodicea, the big city just down the road, fell into rubble. But under every rattling wall, and behind every star in the sky, Jesus was holding the world in one piece.

"He is the head of the body, the church," Paul said. "He is the firstborn from the dead." Jesus had died, and then he came back to life, never to die again, the first of many who would follow him out of the grave. "All of God was glad to live in Jesus," Paul said, "and through him to make peace with everything, by the blood of his cross."

Then Paul turned to his readers. "Once you were far from God. In your minds you were his enemies, and the wrong things you did showed it. But now God has made you his friends again through Jesus' body, by his death. He will bring you before God holy, with no spot on you and nothing left to blame you for. Only keep trusting, steady and firm. Don't drift away from this hope."

At the bottom Paul took the pen himself. "I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand," he wrote. "Remember my chains."

Tychicus and Onesimus carried the letter back to Colossae, and Epaphras stayed behind to pray for them.

The valley went on shaking after the letter came. Laodicea built its walls back up, and the ground shook again in later years, and in the end Colossae itself emptied out, until the town was only a grassy hill. Paul's words lasted longer than the town did. Kings have fallen since then, and cities have cracked, and not one of them has slipped out of the hands that made them. He is still making peace and still bringing home people who were far from God, and one day he will set everything in heaven and on earth right. The world still shakes, and it holds, because it rests on the risen Jesus.