Holy Week and the Colossian Christ 2 The Image of the Invisble God, Riding on a Donkey….

Christian theology is irreducibly Christological, and Christology is Christian only insofar as it is Trinitarian. At least, so it is in my own understanding of what Paul means when he says 'in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell…", and "He is the image of the invisible God…"

I'm well aware that Paul offers only hints and glimpses of the  developed Trinitarian theology of later theological credal formulations. At best he throws out trajectories towards a theology in which the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit were conjoined in the confessional worship of the earliest Christian communities.

The rich tapestry of ideas and images that make up the Colossian hymn provide some of the most far reaching New Testament claims about the divinity and Lordship of Jesus. Early on I started working with light blue, a particular shade which is somewhere between sky blue and marine blue. The three emerging shapes at the centre more than hint at the fullness of the Godhead as the eternal loving communion of Father, Son and Spirit, and while this wasn't pre-planned, my own theological presuppositions made some such emergent Trintarian image inevitable. The central circle took on a threefold merging of clolours, but merging and overlapping. The result is a "perichoresis" of colour. One of the intriguing joys of stranded cotton is separating them and reconfiguring them into an endless variety of permutations, allowing for a kaleidoscopic effect of intermingling colours.

Today is Palm Sunday. I've just preached this morning on the question of the crowd, "Who is this?". The King who comes gently to Jerusalem is the One in whom "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell"; and the One who "though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped and possessively clung to, but emptied himself….", … and "came riding on a donkey".

No wonder the crowds cried "Hosanna", the Scribes demanded silence, and the mob later howled for blood, 'Crucify!'.