We may reverse the order of the words as they stand here, and consider
the last clause first, inasmuch as it is the reason for the doing away
of all distinctions of race, or ceremony, or culture, or social
condition.
"Christ is all." Wherever that new nature is found, it lives by the life
of Christ. He dwells in all who possess it. The Spirit of life in Christ
is in them. His blood passes into their veins. The holy desires, the new
tastes, the kindling love, the clearer vision, the gentleness and the
strength, and whatsoever things beside are lovely and of good report,
are all His--nay, we may say, are all Himself.
And, of course, all who are His are partakers of that common gift, and
He is _in_ all. There is no privileged class in Christ's Church, as
these false teachers in Colossae had taught. Against every attempt to
limit the universality of the gospel, whether it came from Jewish
Pharisees or Eastern philosophers, Paul protested with his whole soul.
He has done so already in this Epistle, and does so here in his emphatic
assertion that Christ was not the possession of an aristocracy of
"intelligence," but belonged to every soul that trusted Him.
Necessarily, therefore, surface distinctions disappear. There is triumph
in the roll of his rapid enumeration of these clefts that have so long
kept brothers apart, and are now being filled up. He looks round on a
world, the antagonisms of which we can but faintly imagine, and his eye
kindles and his voice rises into vibrating emotion, as he thinks of the
mighty magnetism that is drawing enemies towards the one centre in
Christ. His catalogue here may profitably be compared with his other in
the Epistle to the Galatians (iii. 28). There he enumerates the three
great distinctions which parted the old world: race (Jew and Greek),
social condition (bond and free), and sex (male and female.) These, he
says, as separating powers, are done away in Christ. Here the list is
modified, probably with reference to the errors in the Colossian Church.
"There cannot be Greek and Jew." The cleft of national distinctions,
which certainly never yawned more widely than between the Jew and every
other people, ceases to separate, and the teachers who had been trying
to perpetuate that distinction in the Church were blind to the very
meaning of the gospel. "Circumcision and uncircumcision" separated.
Nothing makes deeper and bitterer antagonisms than differences in
religious forms, and people who have not been born into them are
usually the most passionate in adherence to them, so that cleft did not
entirely coincide with the former. "Barbarian, Scythian," is not an
antithesis, but a climax--the Scythians were looked upon as the most
savage of barbarians. The Greek contempt for the outside races, which is
reflected in this clause, was largely the contempt for a supposed lower
stage of culture. As we have seen, Colossae especially needed the lesson
that differences in culture disappeared in the unity of Christ, for the
heretical teachers attached great importance to the wisdom which they
professed to impart. A cultivated class is always tempted to
superciliousness, and a half cultivated class is even more so. There is
abundance of that arrogance born of education among us to-day, and
sorely needing and quite disbelieving the teaching that there are things
which can make up for the want of what it possesses. It is in the
interest of the humble virtues of the uneducated godly as well as of the
nations called uncivilized, that Christianity wars against that most
heartless and ruinous of all prides, the pride of culture, by its
proclamation that in Christ, barbarian, Scythian and the most polished
thinker or scholar are one.
"Bondman, freeman" is again an antithesis. That gulf between master and
slave was indeed wide and deep; too wide for compassion to cross, though
not for hatred to stride over. The untold miseries of slavery in the old
world are but dimly known; but it and war and the degradation of women
made an infernal trio which crushed more than half the race into a hell
of horrors. Perhaps Paul may have been the more ready to add this clause
to his catalogue because his thoughts had been occupied with the
relation of master and slave on the occasion of the letter to Philemon
which was sent along with this to Colossae.
Christianity waged no direct war against these social evils of
antiquity, but it killed them much more effectually by breathing into
the conscience of the world truths which made their continuance
impossible. It girdled the tree, and left it to die--a much better and
more thorough plan than dragging it out of the ground by main force.
Revolution cures nothing. The only way to get rid of evils engrained in
the constitution of society is to elevate and change the tone of thought
and feeling, and then they die of atrophy. Change the climate, and you
change the vegetation. Until you do, neither mowing nor uprooting will
get rid of the foul growths.
So the gospel does with all these lines of demarcation between men. What
becomes of them? What becomes of the ridges of sand that separate pool
from pool at low water? The tide comes up over them and makes them all
one, gathered into the oneness of the great sea. They may remain, but
they are seen no more, and the roll of the wave is not interrupted by
them. The powers and blessings of the Christ pass freely from heart to
heart, hindered by no barriers. Christ founds a deeper unity independent
of all these superficial distinctions, for the very conception of
humanity is the product of Christianity, and the true foundation for the
brotherhood of mankind is the revelation in Christ of the fatherhood of
God. Christ is the brother of us all; His death is for every man; the
blessing of His gospel is offered to each; He will dwell in the heart
of any. Therefore all distinctions, national, ceremonial, intellectual
or social, fade into nothingness. Love is of no nation, and Christ is
the property of no aristocracy in the Church. That great truth was a
miraculous new thing in that old world, all torn apart by deep clefts
like the grim canyons of American rivers. Strange it must have seemed to
find slaves and their masters, Jew and Greek, sitting at one table and
bound in fraternal ties. The world has not yet fully grasped that truth,
and the Church has woefully failed in showing it to be a reality. But it
arches above all our wars, and schisms, and wretched class distinctions,
like a rainbow of promise, beneath whose open portal the world shall one
day pass into that bright land where the wandering peoples shall gather
together in peace round the feet of Jesus, and there shall be one fold
because there is one Shepherd.