All Things Hold Together

Paul wrote this under guard, his hand very likely chained to the wrist of a Roman soldier, and from there he reached for the largest subject there is. Not his release. Not even his comfort. The whole universe, and the One who holds it. I have never understood how a man with iron on his wrist writes a sentence this large — what had he seen?

The song climbs. It says that Jesus of Nazareth is the image of the invisible God, “the firstborn of all creation (Colossians 1:15).” It says that everything there is, seen and unseen, was made through him and for him. Prōtotokos is rank, not chronology — the heir’s standing, the same word the hymn will use of him risen; and since all things were made through him, he stands outside the list he heads. A person of whom such things are said cannot be quietly filed among history’s admirable teachers; he is worshiped, or he is refused, but he is never merely liked.¹

Then comes the line the whole hymn leans its weight on: “in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17).”

Nobody reasons his way to that from the sky. The hymn is working backward from a Sunday morning: it calls him “the firstborn from the dead (Colossians 1:18),” and if death could not hold him, he is not an item inside the system — he is what the system hangs on.

Hold together.

The comfortable thing to do with a line like that is to feel small and reassured, and that is a fine thing to feel. But I do not think it is what the hymn is doing; it is naming the powers one by one so that they can be counted as property. The reason anything keeps its shape—the reason the floor bears us, and the atoms of a hand do not simply scatter—has a face. What keeps the universe from flying apart is not an it but a him, and he is the same One who once needed his mother to steady his head.

“Thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities (Colossians 1:16)”—the whole apparatus of power we are tempted to fear—belongs to the roll of things he made, and made for himself. Whatever keeps us awake at night is already in his hands.

The One who holds the galaxies on their courses is the One who was held — wrapped, carried, handed from arm to arm. The sentence that spans heaven and earth comes to rest on a hill outside a city wall: God was pleased, through him, “to reconcile to himself all things … making peace by the blood of his cross (Colossians 1:20).” He held everything together by being torn apart.

The reconciliation the whole world needs is bought in blood. “All things” there takes in the thrones and dominions brought to heel; two verses on, Paul says it again to his readers in person — “and you … he has now reconciled (Colossians 1:21–22)” — with a condition attached: if indeed we continue in the faith (Colossians 1:23). The peace is made; it is made ours by faith, not by osmosis.

Which changes what it means to say that we are held. There was a morning I sat at the kitchen table at ten past five with a cold mug and a list going: who to call first, what not to say yet. I was holding a list; what I thought I was holding together with it was a family.

Two answers are usually on offer on a morning like that: my grip, or an indifferent universe. The pierced hand is a third thing neither of them has.

He holds us — not our circumstances. Paul’s chains never came off; the man held was not the man rescued. And the holding reaches us in an ordinary form, a people: “the head of the body, the church (Colossians 1:18).” He holds us together by holding us together.

We do not have to be strong enough to hold ourselves together; we were never the thing that was holding us. We are not the glue. He is.