For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority.
Colossians 2:9-10 (NIV)
Head Over Every Authority
The long way around the building takes her past the loading dock and the empty truck bays, and she goes that way every morning before she goes in. For the length of that walk nobody needs an answer from her. By the time she comes around to the door she’s usually going over what she’d have to become for the job to stop feeling like a costume she wears well.
The people at Colossae were being given a longer list of things to keep in view: powers, practices, teachers who went into great detail about what they had seen. Paul says those teachers have lost connection with the head, and then he names the head. For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority.
Head over every power and authority takes in more than the powers they were worried about. It takes in the ones that set her calendar, take her sleep, and decide each spring whether she was good enough. Those are real, and they rank her. They are ranked in turn. They’ll email her after the kids are in bed.
She was brought to fullness in Christ, and it was finished before she ever walked around that building. The walk is good for her knees. It doesn’t move her one step nearer to what was settled about her.
Her bosses will decide again, and Paul says Christ is over them. He says nothing about Monday. Paul sets every one of them under one head.
Whatever they decide about her this week, Christ is head over every one of the people deciding.
A Prayer to Remember
Jesus, I’ve taken somebody’s opinion of me and put it where your word about me goes, and I did it without arguing. You’re the head over every power there is, and over the ones I let rank me. Say again what you settled about me, and say it before I believe the other thing twice.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
