Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Scripture
Colossians 1: 15 – 27
I feel that the letter to the Colossians is the most important book in the bible. In it, St Paul condenses and consolidates all his teaching about Christ into one short message, and there is a wonderful symmetry about the whole story in that Colosse is the least important city Paul ever wrote a letter to. Colosse was a small city in Phrygia, in what is now Turkey. There were three cities beside one another: Laodicea – we are familiar with it from Revelation, a very rich centre of commerce, Hierapolis, a spa – the Leamington of the ancient world, and Colosse. Colosse was very much the poor relation of the three cities. It wasn’t far from Ephesus where St Paul spent a lot of time, but he didn’t start the church in Colosse, although he would have been a very influential figure in it. It was a gentile church, but there were lots of Jews in the city and that would have been a very important factor in why he had to write the letter.
The church in Colosse was beginning to lose its way. It was falling into heresy. One of the big mysteries of the New Testament - and by mystery I mean human mystery, rather than divine mystery – is what was the Colossian Heresy? Nobody knows for certain but the educated guess is that it had to do with Gnosticism.
Gnosticism is a belief that spirit alone is good, and because all matter is evil, there is no way that God could have created the earth. It also meant that Jesus could not be the son of God and be flesh and blood, so how could he sacrifice his body on the cross for us?
It also gave rise to two opposite but equally wrong ideas that if the body is evil, it should be starved, beaten and denied, or oppositely, it should be indulged and its urges satisfied because it wasn’t going to make any difference in the long run.
So what came out of this was a very intellectual approach to life. Because man -as matter - was so far away from God - as spirit - he must fight his way up a long ladder to get to God. There were all kinds of secrets, rituals, hidden passwords, and you really needed to know the rules if you wanted salvation. So the people who would get to God were a select few –the leadership and the intelligentsia. Salvation would come from intellectual knowledge. This sat comfortably with the rigid laws of the Jews, so there was a strange alliance between Jew and Gnostic as they tried to turn belief in Christ into a philosophy. It is also a philosophy which is gaining a foothold in today’s culture.
In this letter, Paul sets out to refute these ideas, because they were hugely threatening to the church. We must remember that Christianity was a new religion, not well established, and if these ideas had taken hold, who knows? Well God knows…
So Paul starts the counter-attack. Firstly he states explicitly that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. The ordinary, unlearned people would hear in this the echo of the creation story, when God made man in his image. In Genesis 1:27 it says “So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” So Paul is reminding us that man is made to be nothing less than the image of God. Paul uses the Greek word “eikon” for image. This can have two interpretations: a representation, or a manifestation. So it’s a really strong declaration by Paul that flesh is not evil in itself, but rather that man did not achieve his destiny because of sin. So when Paul says that by looking at Jesus we can see a representation of God that we can understand, he is also saying that by looking at Jesus we can see what man was meant to be, before the fall – the separation of man from God through sin.
He describes Jesus as supreme over all creation and that “In him all things hold together”. I feel we need to take this to heart in the twenty first century, where our lives are increasingly challenged – usually for the better - by technology. The laws of the universe – gravity, thermodynamics, genetics, - chemical, physical and biological originate in the divine.
I am now skipping forward to verse 27. “To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Paul uses great language – “glorious, riches, mystery”. He conveys the sense of God providing an inexhaustible supply of goodness and grace, and that every time he goes there, he finds something new and unexpected. In the New Testament, the word mystery is used to describe something that would be beyond our ability to discover without divine revelation. So it is a gift from God. “The hope of glory” - hope as joyous expectation and glory as eternal salvation. What I believe he is saying is that if Christ lives in you, then that is the reason to be certain of complete salvation.
I have a friend – a wonderful man who works with drug addicts and alcoholics. He was a successful hotelier in South Africa. He is a Christian, and was very involved with his local church in Cape Town. They even let him speak - during the summer! But he is also an alcoholic and he slowly became alcohol dependent. And a little bit like a Greek tragedy, his life began to unravel. Like all alcoholics, it wasn’t a sudden fall from grace but rather a slow descent into Hell. He had to kick away all the props that supported him in his sin and addiction – his church tolerated his behaviour for a while, his colleagues at work covered for him, his wife and children suffered in silence and thought he would turn the corner and see the hurt he was causing. But in the end he managed to alienate all the people that loved him and many more besides, and he became homeless on the streets of Cape Town. He ended up sleeping, wrapped in a blanket, in a garden shed. He lay there one night shaking with delirium tremens – severe withdrawal from alcohol, sweating, shaking, hallucinating, - with nothing but a bible. He knew his bible and he was looking for some solace, something to hang on to, when his eyes fell on that verse: “To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
He had what he describes as a Eureka moment and he jumped up and ran down the street shouting “I have it! I have it!” He has never drank since and when I asked him what was different, he said it was when he realised that if the greatest power in the universe lived in him, how could he choose to live in the gutter. He also felt released from the need to judge and be judged. He realised he was equal: equal to the task of giving up the drink, equal to the task of living. He didn’t understand it in his head, but in his heart it made such simple sense. He knew nothing about heresies or where Colosse was, but he knew that Jesus lived in him and that he was a special beloved creation of God. I see this as proof that scripture is real and affects lives. Here is a promise from God, delivered when needed, to a gentile, and we see yet another life transformed by grace.
In the poem we read at the start, I used to imagine that Ozymandias died in agony, without friends or family, probably betrayed, like Julius Caesar. But now I have a different phantasy. I like to think that he may have had a Christian slave. He may have asked why this man is so patient and kind and full of grace. I imagine somebody telling him – with great trepidation - about God’s wonderful love for the human race. So perhaps there is a happy reason why the statue stood destroyed in the desert. Maybe Ozymandias asked God to give him the same gifts and he ended up leading his people to greener pastures to build a new life full of love for one another and love for Jesus.
Gravity didn’t make any sense to Isaac Newton until he saw the apple falling from the tree. Electricity doesn’t make any real sense until you turn on the light. The first phone didn’t make any sense until it rang the second phone. Likewise, Christ in you, the hope of glory, doesn’t make any sense until you see it. I see it here in the Bear all the time. I see it working with Brigitte every day. I see it in Paul and Iain and their passion for this church. I see it in Fiona and Emily’s passion for Bearcubs, Daniel’s worship, Tessa, Julie, Katherine, Silvia, Alice, Vickie, Layton, the people who cook every Sunday evening ….. I could go round this room…... I would love to name everybody here who has been that shining light for me at one time or another.
So my prayer is that all of you here continue to search out and be consumed by the spirit of God, that you wake up every morning secure in the fact that Christ – God, the creator – lives in you, and I pray that you will continue to shine – for me and for each other, and especially and for those of us who have not yet sought the revelation, those who have not yet taken it into their hearts, this knowledge of the indwelling of our saviour Jesus Christ and the hope of a glorious future for us all to choose to believe in.