Readings
- Exodus 32:1–20
- Colossians 3:18–4:6 (7–18)
- Matthew 5:1–10
- Psalms: 41, 52; 44
Colossians 3:18–4:18
Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly.
Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not with a slavery performed merely for looks, to please people, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever task you must do, work as if your soul depends on it, as for the Lord and not for humans, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ. For the wrongdoer will be paid back for whatever wrong has been done, and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, for you know that you also have a Master in heaven.
Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray for us as well, that God will open to us a door for the word, that we may declare the mystery of Christ, for which I am in prison, so that I may reveal it clearly, as I should. Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone.
Tychicus will tell you all the news about me; he is a beloved brother, a faithful minister, and a fellow servant in the Lord. I have sent him to you for this very purpose, so that you may know how we are and that he may encourage your hearts; he is coming with Onesimus, the faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you. They will tell you about everything here. Aristarchus my fellow prisoner greets you, as does Mark the cousin of Barnabas, concerning whom you have received instructions; if he comes to you, welcome him. And Jesus who is called Justus greets you. These are the only ones of the circumcision among my coworkers for the kingdom of God, and they have been a comfort to me. Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ, greets you. He is always striving in his prayers on your behalf, so that you may stand mature and fully assured in everything that God wills. For I testify for him that he has worked hard for you and for those in Laodicea and in Hierapolis. Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas greet you. Give my greetings to the brothers and sisters in Laodicea and to Nympha and the church in her house. And when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans, and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea. And say to Archippus, "See that you complete the task that you have received in the Lord."
I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. Remember my chains. Grace be with you.
Notes
We come now to the household code — three pairs of relationships in a few short verses: wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters. A lot of damage has been done by these texts, much of it by readers who tore them out of context. Some context is non-negotiable.
Greco-Roman household codes assumed ontological hierarchy. Women were inherently inferior to men. Slaves were inherently inferior to free people. The codes did not extend agency to the lower-status party because, in that worldview, they did not possess agency in the first place. The New Testament's household codes do not assume that. Each party here is treated as a moral agent who is choosing.
That sounds like a small distinction. It is not. Verse 18 does not say "wives are subject"; it says "wives, be subject." That is an imperative addressed to a person presumed to be capable of choice. Wives are not inherently subject; they are being asked to do something. That difference is the thin end of a wedge that pries open the entire ancient hierarchy.
Verse 19. "Husbands, love your wives, and never treat them harshly." The verb is agapaō — the same agape Paul has been working with all letter long, the same agape the New Testament uses for Christ's love for the world. In a Greco-Roman culture that told husbands to manage and control their households, telling a husband his primary obligation is to love is a significant rewrite. The bar is no longer competence; it is self-giving love.
Verses 20–21. Children, obey your parents. And then a striking instruction back to fathers (or parents more broadly): do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart. The Greek for provoke carries the sense of irritate, embitter, exasperate. Paul knows that authority has a way of curdling into cruelty if it isn't watched, and he names the cost: a child whose spirit goes out.
Verses 22–25. Slaves obey — but obey for the Lord, not for people. Worth flagging that Greco-Roman slavery is not the antebellum chattel slavery of the United States. It allowed for some upward mobility and was not racially indexed (though that's not to deny it was brutal in its own ways). None of that makes it benign; it just means we should not collapse one history into the other when we read.
Colossians 4:1 is one of those places where the chapter break is clearly stupid; verse 1 belongs with what comes before. "Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly." The word behind "fairly" is isotēs, which can also be rendered equally. Treat your slaves with justice and equality.
What does it mean to treat someone you own with equality?
I take my cue here from Lisa M. Bowens, whose book African American Readings of Paul traces how Black readers from the 1700s onward have heard these verses. Bowens (with other scholars in this stream) argues that Paul could not reasonably have explicitly commanded slaveholders to free their slaves. Letters could be intercepted by Roman authorities, and an open call for abolition would have read as sedition. So Paul encoded it. If 3:11 is true — no longer enslaved and free, but Christ is all and in all — and if masters are commanded to treat their slaves with justice and isotēs, then a careful reader can do the math. The encoded message is the message. This is similar to the way enslaved people in the United States passed encoded messages to one another in plain sight; meaning travels under the surface of words.
When modern Christians read Colossians and conclude that Paul tolerated or even endorsed slavery, they are reading it the way the ignorant Roman censor would have. The first hearers—sitting in a house where a runaway slave (Onesimus) was about to walk back through the door—heard something entirely different.
Colossians 4:2. Paul shifts now to general instructions. "Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving." Prayer, vigilance, and gratitude—three habits in one sentence. Verse 3 asks for prayer specifically for open doors for the gospel. Paul, writing from prison, does not ask to be released. He asks to be effective.
Verses 5–6. "Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone." I wish more Christians paid attention to that first line. Wisely toward outsiders. Not combatively, not condescendingly, not evangelistically-as-target-acquisition—wisely. And the parallel with 1 Peter 3:15—be ready to give an account of the hope that is in you—is hard to miss. Speech that is gracious and salty: warm but not unctuous, kind but worthwhile. Christians should know how to talk to outsiders about their faith without being either obnoxious or vague.
Verses 7–9. Tychicus is the letter-courier, and with him comes Onesimus, "the faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you." Read that line slowly. Onesimus is the runaway slave at the center of Paul's letter to Philemon, and Paul names him here as a beloved brother and one of you. The Colossians are about to be told to receive him as such. The household codes a few verses earlier are not floating in the abstract. There is a real person walking back into a household that owns him, and Paul has just told the master to treat him with justice and equality.
Verses 10–11. Greetings from coworkers, including Mark the cousin of Barnabas. This is the same Mark Paul refused to take on the second missionary journey in Acts 15, the dispute that split him and Barnabas. By the time Paul writes Colossians, Mark is back in good standing. Reconciliation is possible, even with the people you once walked away from.
Verses 12–14. Epaphras is praying hard for them. Luke is named the beloved physician, almost certainly the same Luke who wrote Luke and Acts.
Verse 15. "Give my greetings to the brothers and sisters in Laodicea and to Nympha and the church in her house." Nympha hosts a house church. House-church hosts in the first century were not mere landlords; they exercised pastoral and administrative authority over the community that met in their home. She is, in any meaningful sense, a leader of a church.
Verse 16 mentions a letter from Laodicea. Paul's letters were circular, read in one church and then carried to the next. The New Testament we hold is the canonized residue of an exchange that was never meant to be a one-and-done piece of mail.
Verse 18. "I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand." Paul typically dictated his letters to a scribe — an amanuensis — and signed them personally at the close, the way a CEO's letterhead is typed by an assistant and then signed at the bottom. He closes: Remember my chains. Grace be with you.
That ends Colossians. A short letter that took us from the highest Christology in the New Testament (the hymn of 1:15–20), through an anti-imperial, Christus Victor reading of the cross, a takedown of legalism, an ethic in which union with Christ comes first and behavior comes second, and finally a household code that—if you read it the way the first hearers did—was already pointing past itself toward a community where there is "no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, enslaved and free, but Christ is all and in all."
Questions for reflection
Paul's household code quietly insists that even those treated as subordinate are moral agents with choices to make. Where in your life are you being asked to choose — and where have you been treating obedience as if it were inevitability?
"Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders." Where does your engagement with people outside the faith need more wisdom, less heat, and a little more salt?
