His Body, The Church (Colossians 1:18)

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.

Note that in Greek, the “he” at the start is emphatic, meaning he and no one else. We saw earlier that all the universe centers around Christ and, of course, so does the Church. In Greek philosophy it was not uncommon to compare the cosmos to a body. This was picked up by Hellenized Jews. Philo of Alexandria wrote of the body of the cosmos and argued that it needed the Logos to continue. Paul, in the letters everyone agrees were written by him, developed this image further with the Church presented as the Body of Christ.

However, in the Deutero-Pauline letters (Colossians and Ephesians), the image changes. To begin with, the author explicitly identifies the Body of Christ with the Church. Secondly, Christ is clearly presented as the head and his followers as the body. The Greek word for head can also serve as a metaphor for “primacy of place”, as well as meaning the origin of something. Christ is both the source of the Church and the prime figure within it. Christ leads the universe and the Church, which implies a kind of equivalence between the two. So the mission of the Church is universal. Furthermore, Christ’s body acts for him by facilitating the reconciliation of everything in the cosmos. We continue Christ’s mission.

Christ is called here “the beginning” which may refer to his preexistence, the Alpha. In Judaism, Wisdom is identified as the beginning. But it could also refer to the rest of the phrase and thus his role in salvation. His being firstborn from the dead obviously relates to the resurrection. His death and resurrection have brought salvation to humanity. And, of course, firstborn implies that there are others, so his sacrifice created a new community. We are promised eternal life and, like Jesus, will be raised from the dead. But Christ, of course, is not part of creation but its initiator. He chose the incarnation in order to unite with what he had created. All creation experiences death, and God chose to share that experience. And as God, he leads the way to resurrection for all.

In the previous verse we saw that Christ was and always will be the supreme power in the universe. His sacrifice reinforces his superiority, but in this case, there is a particular focus on the Church. There may also be an implied equivalence between the universe and the Church. The Church is Christ’s body, and Christ’s body fills the universe. As Marcus Maxwell has observed: this is “true to a deep-seated biblical tradition – that creation and salvation are not separate events, but part of the same work by the one God.” Genesis repeatedly tells us that God looked on his creation and saw that it was good. We must not mistreat this good world that God has given us.

Clearly there is much evil in this world. It needs to be saved and so it needs a savior. Of course, Christians believe this savior is also the one who created the world. One thing we need to keep in mind is that our spirituality must be focused on both the good of creation and the need for its salvation. We cannot overfocus on one to the detriment of the other.

Christianity is a sacramental religion, and I’m not just referring here to the seven sacraments. Our place is and always will be on this earth. We are physical creatures, and this will not change. To quote Marcus Maxwell again: “We meet God in the material world, through material things, because it is his world and he is working to remake it.”