This is the second in a series in a collaborative reading of Colossians Remixed by Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat. You can read the first part here.

Certain words have developed a certain cache in culture, used well they convey something worthy of respect and honour. Ancient, when not applied to a relative, is one of them. Ancient wisdom, ancient traditions, ancient knowledge and insight. We’re saying there is something here that is time-tested, battle-worn, it has been through the fire generation after generation and it has survived, therefore you, you young whippersnapper, should listen up.

It’s almost impossible for us not to approach the reading of scripture without some awareness of the sheer ancientness of what we are reading. Everything in the New Testament is nearly two-millennia old and you can add a couple more millennia on for some of the Old Testament. With ancientness comes familiarity. We’ve heard the words and phrases before. Lots of times. And along the way we forget a few things. We forget it wasn’t always this way. What is old was one day new.

This is the point Walsh & Keesmaat begin chapter two with. Paul’s letter wasn’t always ancient and when it was first received it was read in a certain context. The words with which we are over familiar with had a freshness to it and carried meanings that we might miss.

To make their point they go through the exercise of writing a targum on the letter. A targum is a translation of a text with added commentary and explanation. In other words, a targum is pretty much what we might call a sermon. We take a text and we expound, illustrate, explain and clarify a text.

What this does is help us catch some of the allusions and meaning that we might otherwise miss. What does Paul mean by ‘peace’ in his greeting to the church. Peace not from Rome but from heaven, not from Caesar but from God. Is Paul echoing Lady Wisdom from the opening section of Proverbs when he speaks in Col 1:5-6 of the ‘word of truth’? Does he have Isaiah 11:9 in mind when he prays that they might be ‘filled with the knowledge of his will’ in Col 1:9?

The point of all this, say Walsh & Keesmaat is that the truth of it all, the truth of the Gospel, would not merely be statement affirmed or denied, a proposition or act of knowledge but a way of life. Truth lived and made manifestly so by the manner in which a community is faithful not just to the letter but to the spirit of the letter. Truth is not abstract, as if it could be divorced from the way we live and the structures we live in.

Having attempted to place ourselves in our world and understand where we are and how our world works, Walsh & Keesmaat have prepped the reader to be attuned to the idea that there is more going on here when we read Paul. Colossians had a time and context too and Paul was choosing his words carefully to bring to bear ancient wisdom (see what I did there?) to a contemporary problem. And if Paul did that, so should we.