Colossians 3:8 (NIV)

But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.


Leave aside for a moment the difficulty inherent in the idea that we must rid ourselves of these problems (I mean, isn't God supposed to liberate us from these evils?). What are we to make for the first three things on the list of undesirable qualities? "Anger, rage, mailce..." Are these not equals?

Well, no. They're not. There is a difference that might need a little thought to understand. The first two, anger and rage are different, and it is not just a difference of degre either. They are different in kind. The first, anger, is reasonable while the other foams at the mouth. And by "foams at the mouth" wish to suggest an irrationality as found with mad dogs. Anger may well be based on a very real cause. Someone may have done you harm; worse, they may have done you intentional harm. The natural response to that is anger. This is different from rage.

An angry man may sit at home with pen and paper and make a list of all the reasons for his anger. A person who is in a rage couldn't do that. I mean, they could sit with the pen and paper, but they wouldn't know what to write down. They wouldn't even have a reason for their feeling. Of the two, this might sound the worst one, but Paul is saying that both must go and a lcoser look shows that there isn't that qualitative difference between anger and rage that we might want there to be. (After all, reasonableness is a prized trait and anger possesses it.)

Think of this - if you don't put away anger, it consumes you - no explosion, just a simmer that kills you. If you don't put away rage, it also consumes you. Yes, an explosion this time, but either way, your consumed. Will it help to have a reason behind this self-consumption? Dead is dead. A reasonable death isn't really more desirable, is it?

Then malice. I think malice is what we call the feeling that motivates us as we act out either our anger or our rage. Anger or rage in action is malice. Does that make sense? It is thought that one way to rid ourselves of anger or rage might be to act upon those feelings - vent. We can give the person who had made us angry a good punch in the nose. This will release the anger and we will be healthy. This might seem reasonable, but maybe it isn't. Maybe malice is like practicing our anger or rage. We'll get better at it - practice makes perfect. Ridding ourselves of anger and rage may be good, but doing so by acting upon these feelings isn't the way. A little later int eh chapter, Paul points out several things we might want to try instead, and I will get to those next time.

Colossians 1:21 (NIV)

Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.

The verse appears to be another tricky one and (assuming the translation is good) needs to be picked apart a bit before it reveals its full (or rather, fuller) meaning. There is a nicety to be observed. There is alientation and then there is the standing of "enemy." The alientation is real. The enemy status is a figment of the human mind.

This is what goes through the heads of rebellious teens, no? (I was rather more bookish than rebellious...) The teen alienates himself from his parents. This is the painful part of individuation, I think. Painful for both parent and teen. But the teen believes that his parents have turned against them because of their behavior. That the parent is now an enemy and wishes them all hardships and evil. Usually, even among human parents with all the frailties and falleness that entails, there is no enemy status. The parent is ready to accept the child back, open arms, hugs and kisses.

This is the lesson of the Prodigal Son. The son may think the father wants to punish, that there is nothing higher on the parents list of things to do or wishlist. It simply isn't so. The parent loves. That is the normal way of things. They want the alientation to end. They want reconciliation. They'll do anything for it, sometimes even desperate things. Some parents, of course, go so far as to lower their standards to where a teenage boy will be comfortable. At the extreme, there are those parents who have been in the news for having keg parties at their homes or providing their children with drugs or arranging orgies.

Of course, this doesn't actually help their child. It doesn't prepare them for life, it does nothing to make them better. Desperate to reconcile, but not out of selfless love - I can only imagine that the parents who do this, sink to this level, are heartbroken at the rift they see between themselves and their child and will do anything - even illegal or unhealthy things - to seal the rift and stop the hurt in their own hearts whatever the cost to the child.

Not so with God. There is a repair for the break with humanity caused by sin, but it was at great personal cost to God Himself. If you think God is the enemy, notice that he has lain down his arms. The war started by "evil behavior" is over. In fact, it was always ever in the mind of the sinner and never in God's heart at all.

Romans 14:22 (NIV)

So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God.

This verse comes at the end of a section on not condemning your fellow Christians for doing things that the Scriptures are silent on. In particular, Paul is talking about eating meat from animals that have been sacrificed to pagan Gods. Not really a great concern in America today (though it might be elsewhere in the world). Since the Bible is silent, Paul says it would be up to the individual conscience. This is all well and good, but it presents the 21st century American Christian with something of a problem.

Unlike Paul's place and time, America is a democratically run nation. The vote of the people as well as the speeches or wriings of those people can be influential. This is very different from the system of government Paul and his readers were familiar with - by Paul's day the Athenian system of democracy had been dead for centuries. The Roman Empire was in full swing. The voice of the individual was neglected. Here and now, that same voice has a power it didn't then.

This said, Christians today may well be asked their opinions (backed by votes and donations to PACs. DO they still have PACs?) on a variety of topics that the Bible doesn't speak on or speaks on only tangentially - Bond issues or steriod use or whether to allow a Wal-Mart into the neighborhood. Paul's advice would seem to suggest that we shouldn't take an active part in resolving these issues - keep our opinions between ourselves and God. But that reading doesn't take into account the setting Paul was in when he wrote. We're not in the Roman Empire anymore. Good citizens speak their minds. It's the only way government works, we're told.