Introduction to Colossians: Authorship, Date, Audience - Crain Home

Interpretation 1
24 Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my
flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the
sake of his body, that is, the church,
What is meant by "lacking in Christ's afflictions"?
http://crain.english.mwsc.edu/colossians/interpretation_1.htm (18 of 20)6/17/2003 8:17:40 AM
What, however, is the plain meaning of Paul's
cryptic phrase that his suffering fill[s] up . . .
what is still lacking in regard to Christ's
afflictions? In what sense does the suffering of
Christ "lack" anything? And in what sense does
Paul's suffering "fill up" what Christ's suffering
lacks, if anything? I have argued that here
Paul's emphasis is not on God's salvation, as
before, but on Christ's church. To the point,
Paul is surely not saying that the Lord Christ
lacks anything as the messianic agent of God's
salvation; nor does he mean that the redemptive
results of his death need to be supplemented by
Paul. His previous confession of Christ's
lordship (1:15-20) and his subsequent assertion
of God's forgiveness (2:13-14) testify to Paul's
confidence in the sufficiency of Christ's work.
Lohse is quite right, then, to object to any
interpretation that renders this phrase as a
reference to the community's "mystical union"
with a suffering Christ, whereby the
community is absorbed into and derives
spiritual benefit from Christ's passion
(1971:69). In fact, Paul rarely speaks in his
writings of Christ's suffering (as distinguished
from his death) and almost never of Christ's
suffering in terms of God's salvation (as the
writer of 1 Peter, for instance, does in 1 Pet
2:20-22). The images of a suffering Christ in
Paul's writings are usually employed to
illustrate and interpret his own suffering as a
missionary. Here suffering is exemplary of
servanthood, but not expiatory of sin. In this
way Christ's suffering is logically parallel to his
own; like Christ, Paul is God's "suffering
servant"; and like Christ's, his suffering
indicates obedience to God's commission.