It Was Only Ever A Surname

In his grandmother's kitchen the word was a surname.

Not an idea and not a claim about anything. It was simply what they were, the way another family was tall or came from the north. It sat alongside the other family words: the saint's day they kept, the dish nobody else made, the way you were expected to answer the door.

He is forty-eight and he has never once heard that word used as anything else.

He has heard it in arguments, and he has heard it on the news, and he has heard it in the mouths of people who plainly meant something unkind by it, and in every single one of those cases it was still a surname. A group. Those people. Us, or them, depending who was talking.

And he would have told you, without hesitating, that he knew exactly what it meant.

Then his daughter came home from somewhere with a Greek word in her mouth, and told him at the table, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, that the word does not mean a family at all.

It means the whole. Throughout the whole. Everything, everywhere, the entire extent of a thing.

He sat there with a cup going cold.

So let me ask you, my friend.

Whose family name have you mistaken for the whole of a word?

He wrote it to people who had never left their province

There is a line near the start of Colossians that is easy to walk past, and the thing that makes it remarkable is who received it.

That was a small church in a small town in a small valley. Most of the people reading that letter would live their whole lives inside a few days' walk of where they were born. They had no way of checking anything Paul said about anywhere else.

And this is what he tells them.

In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it.Colossians 1:6

Read the second half, because that is where it lands.

Just as it has been doing among you.

He is not telling them about a large thing happening elsewhere and inviting them to feel encouraged. He is telling them that the thing in their kitchen is the same thing, the identical thing, that is going on in every direction beyond the hills.

You are holding the local end of something enormous that Colossians 1 describes as bearing fruit and growing in all the world, and the Spirit at work in your grandmother's kitchen was never a household spirit, He was the same Spirit at work across the whole extent of it.

Now I want to be very careful, and you will understand why in a moment.

I am not going to say a word about your family's tradition, or anybody's, and I am not going to tell you what to think about any argument you have heard that word used in. That is not my business and it is not what this is. Nothing here asks you to move an inch from where you stand.

I want to give you back a word your grandmother used without knowing its size.

Because she was right about it. That is the part I love. She used it as the name for something she belonged to, and the word she was using happens to mean everything, everywhere, and she was more correct than she knew every time she said it over a pan.

The word says the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world, just as among you, and the Spirit does not run one thing in a valley and a different thing beyond it.