Christ is all, and in all.

A Sermon for Easter Day

April 20, 2025 at Holy Communion

Colossians 3:1–11

“Christ is all, and in all” (Colossains 3:11). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

In ancient times Christians were baptized in the dark. Of course there were daylight baptisms, but the paradigmatic baptismal occasion was the Easter Vigil, in the middle of the night, before the lamps were lit for the Communion service. At their baptism, the candidates became bearers of the light in world still waiting for dawn. They are created in Christ by union with his death. As we discussed on Friday, the death of Christ is the origin-point of all creation and the first evening which precedes the first morning.

In Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, he says that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, … [because] in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:17, 19). The word “reconciling” gives us so much here. “Reconciliation” implies a union in the past, which was lost, and is now re-united. When Paul associates reconciliation with God and being a “new creation,” the implication is this: real creation is to be united to God. We are not fully real until we live in union with God. God is reality, and when we wandered far from him we were living in unreality.

This is, then, just what we said on Good Friday: the moment of creation is the one where God descends to fill all things, revealing his glory at the maximum distance of alienation—at the cross—so that the alienation is overcome and replaced with union. The cross is reconciliation, and therefore creation. The creation of a new and real world is achieved when God embraces the world which was unreal and perishing when it was far from him.

If we descend to the furthest possible distance from God and still find union with God there, clearly there is nowhere we can go which will not be for us just more God. St Paul put it this way, speaking about baptism: “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death. … For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:4–5). Baptism is a death voluntarily undertaken. Meeting Christ in his death, we are reconciled to God and created anew.

Having passed under the baptismal flood, we both are and are not the same people we were before. We continue to have strengths and weaknesses, temptations and virtues, personalities and histories. And that remains—although God also begins to work in us for change. But all of that uniqueness, everything that sets us apart from one another, is what our Epistle reading calls the “old man” (Colossians 3:10). More important is the way that baptism does change us: we “put on the new man, which is being renewed … after the image of its creator” (v 10). We “put on the new man”: a new self is superimposed upon our old self, and this new self is in the image of the creator—that is, the new self is Christ, the image of the Father (Colossians 1:15).

What is created at the cross and at the baptismal font is Christ: Christ as the true reality of every person, the Son of the heavenly Father, showing himself through a thousand faces.

As it continues, our Epistle uses a phrase to describe our common identity in Christ which warrants some explanation. “Here,” he says—that is, in Christ—”there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.” This warrants some explanation because we don’t pick up the baptismal resonance it would have had for Paul’s audience.

Paul uses almost the same phrase in two other places in the New Testament, and in both of those other places he associates it with baptism. In 1 Corinthians 12, he tells us that “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free” (v 13). In Galatians 3, he says that “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (v 27–28). There is every reason to think that this formula reappears when baptism is discussed because it was used in baptisms in the areas Paul served.

This means that at the first baptisms, new Christians heard that they are no longer this or that sort of person, no longer an outsider or an insider, no longer high or low. They were re-created in the baptismal font, and they were re-created as Christ. It’s not just that they lose their social markers—they lose their old selves entirely. As Paul said about himself, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Yes of course the baptized retain their gender and their ethnicity, but that doesn’t matter. These particularities simply become a diversity of situations in which a common identity as Christ can be lived.

Our Epistle reading says it all, in its opening and final thoughts. It begins, “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3), and it ends, “Christ is all, and in all” (v 11).

I left you on Good Friday with a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I will do so again. This is “As kingfishers catch fire.”

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.