Colossians 1:15 – Practical Theology Today

The Leper Story

Recently my wife, Barb, had the privilege of giving a talk to the middle schoolers at our Church. As she prepped for the talk, she read it to me. My immediate thought: “I need to include it in a blog post.” So, here it is…

When I got engaged to my husband, Curt, he was hanging out with high school-age kids from our church and kids who didn’t go to church. He loved them so much that he eventually went on to get a job in youth ministry. Most of my married life has been spent around a lot of teenagers!

I grew to love the kids too and eventually took some girls to camp. When we got back, we started a weekly Bible study in my home. Some of the girls had started a relationship with Jesus at camp and a couple others weren’t sure what they thought of him.

Colossians 1:15 says Jesus is the visible expression of the invisible God. So if we want to know what God is like we need to take a good look at Jesus. What made him mad, what made him sad, and even happy? How did he treat people? What kind of people did he spend his time with? How can anyone really know if they can trust God unless they spend time getting to know him first?

With my group of girls, we started by looking into the Gospels to get to know Jesus. There are four books in the New Testament called the Gospels. Two of the Gospels were written by men who spent a lot of time with Jesus; one was written by someone who lived during Jesus’ life and later became a follower; and one was written by a doctor who also became a follower, talking to all sorts of people who had spent time with Jesus, gathering information so he too could write an account of Jesus’ life.

So I’d like us to take a look at one story about Jesus told in three of the Gospels. I think it might be an important story since it is in three of them.

This story is about a leper. You’ve maybe heard the term ‘leper’ before but unless we know what it was like to be a leper in Jesus’ day we can’t possibly understand what a big deal it was for Jesus to heal him.

Leprosy was considered to be a curse from God. So lepers would have believed that God was angry at them and punishing them for something they did.

Lepers were shunned by others, meaning they weren’t allowed to live with their family or friends. They had to live outside their community with other lepers. They couldn’t go to school or work. Now you might think that doesn’t sound so bad until you understand that the reason they couldn’t work or go to school was because the disease caused them to have extremely ugly, and very painful sores on their skin. It affected their nervous system and eventually caused them to lose their fingers or limbs. It was a horrific disease.

Now the townspeople cared for lepers by bringing them food but they didn’t go near them and they never touched them. Someone who had leprosy would have to keep their distance from everyone else and if they did approach someone, they would have to ring a bell and call out “Unclean, unclean.”

Will you please close your eyes for a minute and imagine having painful sores all over your body? Now, imagine that you are going through that pain alone. You are living with others who are in pain as well, but you are not with your loved ones. And now lastly, think about what it would be like if you had to ring a bell to announce yourself and let others know you are unclean. I can’t think of many things that would make me feel more self-conscience.

In the story, the leper has heard that Jesus can heal people. He must have been feeling desperate because he took a chance on Jesus. Remember Jesus represented God and lepers believed God was punishing them for some sin. But he took a chance. Listen to the brief story as told in Matthew, Chapter 8…

¹ When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. ²A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” ³Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy.

Isn’t that a nice story? The leper is healed, and all is well. Except if you were the leper, you have a much deeper wound than even the horrible disease of leprosy. No one would have come close to you let alone hugged you for as long as you had the disease.

When the leper approached Jesus, he no doubt kept his distance, and we know he took a position of humility by kneeling. Some translations say he begged Jesus to heal him. Jesus could have healed him from exactly where he was standing but that isn’t what he did.

This is the part I love – Jesus touched the leper. He healed the man in the place he was the most wounded, his heart. After years of being shunned, keeping his distance from people, and being fed like a dog but not loved like one, he was healed of the physical and emotional pain he had experienced all those years.

He was fed like a dog but not loved like one.

Jesus not only healed him and treated him with dignity, but he also contradicted what society thought about lepers. Jesus communicated that God was not angry at him.

Whom do you relate to most in this story? The leper or someone who kept their distance. How might this change the way you see Jesus? Or yourself?

WYSIWYG

I have seen a lot of technological advances throughout my 50+ years of work experience, which started in the drafting department of the Cretex Companies between my junior and senior years of high school. One of the roles I played was the drafting of preliminary drawings of concrete manholes so we could mail blueprint copies (not Xerox) to the customer for approval prior to releasing the drawing to the factory for fabrication. The process added a week or two to the lead-time of delivering product – a BIG deal in the world of construction.

Then an amazing piece of technology showed up in our drafting department. It was a cylindrical fax machine. An 8-1/2 x 11 drawing was wrapped on the cylinder, a phone number dialed, and the phone headset placed in a rubber modem. Pressing “start,” the cylinder rotated with a needle slowly scanning across the drawing and voila, a copy emerged on the other end. The transfer took about 20 minutes, cutting days off the approval process. We were all amazed.

About 20 years later, I was introduced to (now discontinued) Lotus 1-2-3, IBM’s precursor to Microsoft’s Excel. It ran on the IBM System/34 that the company I worked for used to support engineering and manufacturing. I was amazed. I could set up repeat calculations on the green on black monitor. What a time-saver. The output wasn’t very pretty, though. There was no formatting available, just standard IBM Green Bar print-outs. In time the System/34 monitors were replaced by IBM PCs which opened up a whole new world with the potential of software add-ons.

One of the first add-ons that I got to experience was WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). We, for the first time, were able to format our spreadsheets into formatted documents, impressing ourselves and our customers. We would complete the technical part of the spreadsheet then hit the F2 key to for a format-able view. We couldn’t calculate inside the WYSIWYG view, we could only format and get a glimpse of the final printout. The official definition of WYSIWYG: denoting the representation of text on screen in a form exactly corresponding to its appearance on a printout. By pressing the F2 key, what we saw on the screen, was a visible expression of the (now invisible).

In the last couple posts (Andy “Goldbrick” Delaney and The Rest of the Story), I alluded to the fact that involvement with Young Life in the early days of my faith development has had a most significant affect on my theology and my journey to becoming a “practical theologian.” Immersed in an outreach ministry such as Young Life not only helped the development of my theology, it helped me develop a working philosophy of ministry, nay a philosophy of life (for which I will be forever grateful!).

Much of my early training in Young Life was “on the job.” Young Life had developed effective methods of ministering to high schoolers who were far from and disinterested in God. As I learned the “what and how” of the ministry, I was also taught the corresponding “why” (again, for which I will be forever grateful!). Early on I was pointed toward Colossians 1:15, which in the J.B. Phillips New Testament reads:

Now Christ is the visible expression of the invisible God.

Jesus – the Christ, the Messiah – is the visible expression, the exact representation of the invisible God. After discovering Colossians 1:15 and pondering its significance, I came to the realization that I didn’t know God. I knew about him and I knew how I was supposed to act. I knew what I was supposed to do (and more importantly) what I wasn’t supposed to do, but I didn’t really know God.

I remember thinking, “How can I possibly tell disinterested kids about a God that I don’t know very well?” This caused me to embark on a year-long, turned into a life-long journey of discovery. I wanted to know God so that I could help disinterested kids to know him as well. This why I am continuously immersed in the Gospels. This is why, as a start-point of my ministry training and development of others, I help them get immersed in the Gospels.

The timing of all this was absolutely perfect. At just the right time, God showed me a different way. Through Young Life, God caused me to rethink my understanding of the Christian faith. As an engineer I was ripe for a Christianity that focused on how one should live. I was ripe for deductive learning, focused on application and not discovery. In short, I was ripe for moralism.

At just the right time my focus began to shift away from simply figuring out how to live the Christian life to Jesus himself. I discovered why Jesus was absolutely central to our talks at Young Life. We wouldn’t tell kids about God. Instead we would show them Jesus – God in the flesh, the visible expression of God – allowing them to get a glimpse into the character of the true God.

In time I began to understand that it would be good to help ALL people see Jesus, not simply confront them with the tenets of the Christian faith. Jim Rayburn, the founder of Young Life, used to say that if kids could see the real Jesus, they would fall in love with him. If any person could see the real Jesus, wouldn’t they likely fall in love with him? Thus my philosophy of life: To know him and make him known. And it all started by taking 10 kids to Frontier Ranch in 1973.

Veritas

As you may know, I am a woodworker. I fell in love with woodworking at an early age when my parents gave me a Handy Andy tool chest of woodworking tools – saw, square, coping saw, block plane, hammer, ruler, etc. I remember finding scraps of 1×2 pine and cutting them into 2″ lengths to make play bales of hay. I think I may have maxed out at about 250 “bales,” enough to make a pretty good sized haystack. If my memory serves me right, that might be the era when my dad was continually frustrated when unable to locate a 1×2 when needed.

My love for woodworking intensified in 8th grade when I took wood-shop, taught by one of my all-time favorite teachers, Mr. Briggs. It further intensified when I married my wife, Barb. Her dad was a a really good woodworker so I learned from him. I ended up inheriting many of his power tools 15 years ago when he ‘retired’ from the hobby. Over the past 10-15 years (thanks to my son, Nate) I have complemented my power tool collection with a plethora of hand tools – some old (i.e. 100+ years), some new. Veritas Tools is one of my go-to manufacturers of quality hand tools. I have contributed a fair amount to Veritas’ bottom line as I’ve expanded my hand tool collection. Here are a couple examples…

Combination Plane, Left; Skew Rabbet Plane, Right

I learned a new word recently – verity. Verity, I discovered, is derived from veritas, the Latin word for truth. In the last posting (Hesed and Emet) we looked at hesed, the powerful, rich, and robust Hebrew word describing God’s steadfast love and mercy toward his people. We looked at an example from the Psalms: “Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other” (Psalm 85:10, ESV). The word faithfulness in this passage is emet, another rich and robust Hebrew word describing God’s character

The Theological Workbook of the Old Testament suggests that emet can be translated into English as faithfulness or verity (truth). Emet carries an underlying sense of certainty and dependability. As with the example above, emet is often coupled with hesed, creating a synergism of two of God’s strongest attributes. (Keep in mind the definition of synergy – the combined effect is greater than the sum of the individual attributes.)

I get the chills when I ponder this. Hesed, combined with emet, provides a powerful glimpse of who God is – love and faithfulness, mercy and truth. We can be certain of and depend on his steadfast love.

Then we remember that Jesus is the visible expression of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), the God of hesed and emet. Maybe John had hesed and emet in mind when he said that Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth (John 1:14). Ponder this for a while. Maybe you’ll get the chills, too.

The Visible Expression of the Invisible God…

Circa 1973. God had drawn me into youth ministry through Young Life, a non-denominational outreach to teenagers. I was serving teenagers in my hometown, working full-time, and pursuing an engineering degree taking classes a couple nights a week. In the midst of it all, I tried to read scripture with some consistency and with some success. In the 70s, we didn’t have the availability of scripture translations and paraphrases as we do today, but we had a few – King James, Revised Standard, New American Standard, The Living Bible, The Good News Bible, and a favorite of Young Life staff, the J.B. Phillips New Testament.

Early into my Young Life experience, at a volunteer leader training, we were pointed to Colossians 1:15 – Now Christ is the visible expression of the invisible God (Phillips). The passage, it was explained, was a cornerstone to Young Life talks – we wanted kids to know the real God and the real God made himself visible through Jesus. Jesus revealed God’s character, compassion, and heart for people. In preparing Young Life talks, I diligently worked at helping kids see this Jesus, the visible expression of the God they could not see. A few months into the beginning of my Young Life tenure as a volunteer leader, a thought occurred to me: I didn’t know God or Jesus, save a few stories I learned in Sunday School*…..

In the midst of a fairly busy schedule, I embarked on a year-long quest to know God. It didn’t start as a year-long quest. It started as a one-time reading of the Gospels in my brand new J.B. Phillips New Testament, underlining and highlighting with a red colored pencil as I progressed. After an initial read, I decided to read them again – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – marking the pages with a different color. I was amazed to discover how much I didn’t observe in the first go-around. So I read them again. I soon realized that my eyes were drawn to passages that were already highlighted. So I bought a new bible with a different translation and repeated the process, highlighting new discoveries about Jesus (and thus about God).

Seven translations and a year later I felt I was ready to adequately venture into other parts of the New Testament as well as the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures. As I look back 45 years, I have to believe that year was one of the most transformative experiences of my faith journey. It’s what likely saved me from the tenets of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It set me up to know Jesus (not just about Jesus). It set me up to give decent Young Life talks. It set me up to be a better husband and father. It set me up to learn to read Scripture exegetically. IT SET ME UP FOR LIFE!

I am amazed how few people have actually read straight through the Gospels even one time, which is why I give everyone I mentor the exact same assignment – read through the Gospels.** When done, I usually have them repeat the process. Invariably, I get the same response – it was a transformative experience (a common ‘practical theology’ theme, you’ll notice). If you happen to be one that has never done a read-through of the Gospels, then you know what I would suggest. I sincerely hope you would heed the suggestion. My heart aches when I realize how few Christians spend time in the Gospels, and thus with Jesus. How else will we ever know Him?

* I had the privilege of joining a group of people to hear George Barna give a researcher’s perspective on what is needed to develop our young people in today’s culture. He said research shows that most church children and youth teachings tend to focus only on about 20 basic Bible stories. (In one of these posts we will need to discuss “kindergarten faith.”)

** ADDENDUM 1/31/2023: Annie F. Downs has created a podcast that will help the listener experience all four Gospels twelve times during the year 2023. It’s called Let’s Read the Gospels. Enjoy!