Week 34—Sunday Colossians 1:24-29
Colossians 1:24-29
“IDEAS ARE POOR GHOSTS”
It is only as the Word becomes flesh that the Word becomes power. “What you are speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say.” For whatever is embodied has the final word in any life. George Eliot puts it this way: “Ideas are poor ghosts until they become incarnate. Then those ideas look out at us with compassionate eyes, touch us with warm, redemptive hands, then they shake us like a passion.”
The idea of freedom in India was a poor ghost until it took flesh in Mahatma Gandhi. It existed in resolutions drawn up by the Indian National Congress. They became stronger and stronger as the years came and went, but the British sat tight, for these resolutions were the word become word. Then something happened. The Word of freedom became flesh in a person—Mahatma Gandhi appeared. I have told in Christian Maturity the story of his being in a first-class compartment with a first-class ticket on a South African train when a white man got in and objected to riding with a man of color. The guard was called and Gandhi was ejected. This turned out to be the most expensive expulsion in modern history, for it meant the expulsion of the white man from the whole of the sovereignty of the East and of Africa. As he walked the station platform at midnight, he conceived the idea of nonviolent, non-cooperation. Reduced to its essence it was this: “I won’t hate you, but I won’t obey you. Do what you like. I will match my capacity to suffer against your capacity to inflict the suffering—my soul force against your physical force, and I’ll wear you down by good will.” That idea took flesh in the little man. Freedom became embodied in him—looked out at us with compassionate eyes, touched us with redemptive hands, and shook India and the world like a passion. He won the freedom of 400,000,000 people. A new power had been loosed in the world—the power of nonviolent soul force.
O Father, we thank you for this gentle power of love. We have seen it supremely in your Son and when reflected in human sons and daughters it grips us to our depths. Help us to embody this gentle power in all we do and say this day. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: All my ideas will remain poor ghosts until they become embodied in me.