Week 22 Friday (Year 1)

Readings: Colossians 1.15-20; Psalm 99/100; Luke 5.33-39

Sometimes people speak of being converted to faith in Christ through some kind of spiritual or psychological experience, a moment of realisation or of presence which is sufficient of itself for them to be convinced of its authenticity. Our personal experience is undeniable, even if we cannot share it with others or convince them of its truth. It remains private and personal no matter how strong our conviction, and there is no point in beating other people up because they have not experienced what we have. We can speak to them of it, even if it remains ours and cannot easily, if at all, become theirs also.

The magnificent poem or hymn which is today's first reading takes a different path. It speaks of cosmology and ecclesiology, of the world and of the Church. These are the traditional, public, ways by which the credibility of the Christian faith was presented. Look at the world, look at the Church: what do you see, and to whom do they point you?

Granted the hymn belongs to the concluding moment of this path, its culmination or climax, in which a meditation on creation and a reflection on the Church has led the searcher to see that standing within and beneath both is the same person: Christ Jesus. The claims made for him in this poem are extraordinary, beyond anything ever claimed for any other human being.

He is presented to us not just as a great religious teacher, a wise and good man, a holy guide, a spiritual genius, and anything else along those lines that we care to add. He is presented as the 'head', the first-born, of creation, and as the 'head', the first-born, of the Church, which is the creation in history or the new creation.

It is not just that he has the highest place in creation but that he is the principle of all creation. Everything is made in him, through him and for him. Everything? Yes, everything, in heaven and on earth, all things visible and invisible, every throne, domination, sovereignty and power. He is the principle that gives unity to the cosmos, holding all things in unity, making it to be a cosmos therefore rather than a chaos. So this individual human being is presented as a cosmic principle, a first cause, a power beyond anything we can imagine, because he sustains all we know and experience, keeping it all in existence.

He is also the head of the history of the cosmos, the Church which is his 'body'. It means the presence, within our conditions of time and space, of this principle of all things. And this is linked particularly with the fact that he has conquered death, the power that corrupts and destroys, that moves all things towards chaos. As head of the cosmos and head of its history Christ Jesus is first in every way. The perfection and reconciliation of all that grows, develops and unfolds is, once again, in him, through him and for him. All conflict and loss, all failure and partial achievement, all unfinished business and interrupted living: every historical loose end is tied up, healed, reconciled, brought into a new kind of peace, shalom, a cosmic harmony, through his death on the cross and his birth from the dead.

To re-state the poem in this way may be helpful, or perhaps it leaves us where we were before. It may all seem like too much. But a direction has been indicated, a path we can follow in philosophical searching and in our meditations. Immersed as we are now in virtual reality, in a universe of images, fantasies, conspiracies and flickering shadows, of superficial enchantment, it is perhaps more difficult for us today to enter into these realities of the world and its history, of creation and the Church. More difficult then to see the One to whom meditating on these realities will lead us, Christ Jesus, the first and the last, the old and the new, the beginning of all things and their glorious end.