Paul had two problems from the same place. Epaphras brought the first.
He had walked and sailed some 1,300 miles, from the Lycus Valley in Phrygia to Rome, where Paul lived under guard. The Colossians had learned the gospel from Epaphras (Colossians 1:7), and he labored for the believers in nearby Laodicea and Hierapolis too. Now something had gone wrong in Colossae, and probably in its neighbors. He needed his mentor’s counsel.
Two streams of teaching had flowed into the church from opposite directions.
Jewish legalism provided a steady stream of influence. Keep the rules, observe the days, watch what you eat and what you touch. Small things could make you unclean, cost you God’s favor, imperil your salvation. Paul quotes its slogans: “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (2:21).
We’ve all know the siren song of legalism. “If only you would do this, God would find you more acceptable.” You’ve heard that refrain. So have I.
The second stream flowed from Greek philosophy, and it sounded far more sophisticated. Paul warns against being taken “captive by philosophy and empty deceit” (2:8). Plato taught that every physical thing is a shadow of an ideal. The table in your kitchen is a poor copy of the perfect idea of a table. In the hands of his later followers, that became something darker. Matter is tainted. Bodies are tainted. We are tainted.
Now apply that to Jesus. In his perfection, he could not really have had a body. He only seemed human.
And it gets worse. If God is pure spirit and we are stuck in flesh, we can’t approach him directly. We need go-betweens, beings who are not God but are nearer to him than we are. Angels. So people began appealing to angels, then worshiping them (2:18).
These two streams should never have mixed. The legalist cared deeply about rules for the body. The Platonist thought the body hardly mattered. Put their teachers in a room and they’d argue.
But they didn’t need to agree. They only needed to push in the same direction.
The legalist puts a barrier between Jesus and the believer: keep all the rules, or Jesus can’t help you.
The Platonist builds a different one: Jesus is out of reach, and you’ll need angels to get to God anyway.
Different obstacles, same result. They push Jesus far away from us, and put the responsibility to reach him on our shoulders. Our behavior becomes a larger factor, his sacrifice grows smaller. The gospel agrees that we could not reach God on our own, but it tells us Jesus came to us.
The confluence of those two polluted streams drove Epaphras to Rome. Not a quarrel over a minor point. A slow shrinking of the center.
Paul’s reply is blunt: “You have been filled in him” (2:10). Filled. Nothing missing. How he makes that case is the rest of this series.
The same thing happens now. The errors change costumes every generation. Something gets added to Jesus, or something gets subtracted from him. Either way, our Savior ends up smaller.
But Epaphras was not the only man in Rome from Colossae. Paul calls him “one of you” (4:12). He uses the same words for someone else (4:9).
Believers there met in a particular house. The man who owned it had a runaway slave. Epaphras may well have recognized him.
Standing next to Paul.
