Our pastor has been preaching through the book of Colossians for some time now and he's done a great job. Most recently he has been preaching on the family (chapter 3), which involves some pretty significant challenges to our culture. Naturally enough, there have been many questions and much discussion about counter-cultural picture of the home described there. Last night, Daniel (the pastor) wanted to pause from the verse by verse exposition in order to read the book as a whole, thus giving us an opportunity to step back and see the letter as a whole, and how this teaching fits into the bigger picture.
It occurred to me when Daniel read Colossians, and was reinforced in my own reading of the text this morning, that the linchpin to the whole discussion seems to be 3:1-4. The whole book is a call to change our perspective, our way of thinking, our worldview, from the sinful pattern of this world to the eternal pattern of Christ. We have changed our primary citizenship from the City of Man to the Kingdom of God, which has broken upon this world in a preliminary way in the Church and awaits full realization at the end. I think this is signaled in 1:13: "For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves..."
So all the discussion about marriage, the roles of men and women, the ideals of parenting, etc. are aspects of this more general call to change our perspective, to put off old patterns and put on new ones. I think that's the bigger picture, of which this is a smaller part - though a difficult one for many. It seems to me that one result is that is that we are defining our terms or thinking in a conceptual framework that is still anchored in the Old Way. So words like submission necessarily imply inferiority and headship implies arrogance and misuse of power. We have to re-orient our minds on the pattern of Christ in order to understand to really get this kingdom teaching.
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