Catholic Commentary
Apostolic Salutation
1Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God, and Timothy our brother,2to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Colossians 1:1–2 presents Paul's greeting to the Colossian church, emphasizing that his apostolic authority derives from God's will rather than personal relationship, and identifying the recipients as saints and faithful believers united in Christ. Paul's coordinate placement of Jesus Christ alongside God as a source of grace and peace implicitly affirms Christ's divine status within the letter's opening salutation.
Paul opens not with credentials but with obedience — his apostoleship flows from God's will, not human politics, establishing the pattern every Christian should follow.
Colossians 1:1 — "Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God"
Paul's self-identification is deliberate and loaded. The Greek apostolos (ἀπόστολος) carries the force of a commissioned envoy — one sent with the full authority of the sender behind him. Paul does not claim apostleship through personal ambition, ecclesial politics, or even the direct recommendation of the Jerusalem community; he grounds it in dia thelēmatos theou — "through the will of God." This precise phrase appears identically in 2 Corinthians 1:1 and Ephesians 1:1, and in a variant form in 1 Corinthians 1:1, suggesting that Paul considers the divine origin of his commission a non-negotiable theological datum — especially significant in letters where his authority is implicitly or explicitly at stake.
Colossae was a community Paul had not personally founded (Col 2:1 implies he had not met most of them face-to-face); it was evangelized by Epaphras (Col 1:7). Yet Paul writes with full apostolic authority because that authority derives not from personal pastoral relationship but from Christ himself, mediated through God's will. This is a subtle but important point for the Colossian context, where false teachers were apparently promoting alternative "philosophies" (Col 2:8) that undermined the sufficiency of Christ.
"and Timothy our brother"
Timothy is named not as a co-apostle but as ho adelphos — "the brother," a term of affectionate equality within the body of Christ. The definite article in the Greek is significant: Timothy is the brother, well known to the recipients. His inclusion signals the communal, collaborative dimension of apostolic ministry. The letter issues from Paul's apostolic authority, but it is delivered in a spirit of shared brotherhood — a pattern that anticipates the collegial structure of episcopal ministry the Church will later articulate.
Colossians 1:2 — "to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae"
Paul addresses the community as hagiois (saints) and pistois adelphois (faithful brothers) — two titles that are not honorific exaggerations but theological descriptions of their actual identity by virtue of baptism. The Greek construction (tois hagiois kai pistois adelphois) most naturally reads as a single group described by two complementary qualities: holiness and faithfulness. "Saints" speaks to their consecrated status — they have been set apart for God. "Faithful" (pistos) describes their active, ongoing response of faith and fidelity to that calling.
Crucially, both titles are qualified by the phrase en Christō — "in Christ." This locative phrase is among the most theologically dense in the Pauline corpus. The Colossian believers are holy and faithful not by their own achievement but by virtue of their incorporation into Christ — the mystical union that is initiated in baptism and sustained in the sacramental life of the Church.
"Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ"
The salutation charis kai eirēnē (grace and peace) is a Pauline signature transformation of the standard Greek letter opening (chairein — greetings) and the Hebrew shalom. By fusing and elevating both, Paul encodes the entire gospel in his greeting. "Grace" (charis) names the unmerited, divine initiative by which God draws humanity to himself; "peace" (eirēnē) is not mere tranquility but the Hebrew shalom — the state of right relationship with God, neighbor, and creation that the Messiah inaugurates.
The dual source — "God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" — is a quiet but powerful Christological affirmation. In Jewish epistolary convention, peace comes from God alone. By placing Jesus Christ in coordinate grammatical position as the co-source of divine grace and peace, Paul implicitly affirms Christ's divine status — a theme he will develop magnificently in the Christ-hymn of Col 1:15–20.
Catholic tradition reads the opening of Colossians as a window into the nature of apostolic authority and its transmission in the Church. The Catechism teaches that Christ himself is the source of all apostolic mission: "The whole Church is apostolic, in that she remains, through the successors of St. Peter and the other apostles, in communion of faith and life with her origin" (CCC 863). Paul's insistence that his apostleship flows from "the will of God" is precisely the logic that undergirds the Catholic understanding of Holy Orders: no one takes this honor upon himself (cf. Heb 5:4), but is called by God through the Church.
St. John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on Colossians, draws attention to Paul's pairing with Timothy as a mark of humility: though Paul alone bears the title apostle, he does not lord it over his brother but writes with him, modeling the servant-leadership Christ demands of those in authority.
The address "saints and faithful" illuminates the Catholic teaching on the universal call to holiness articulated in Lumen Gentium §40: "all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity." Being a "saint" is not the title of the canonized few but the baptismal identity of every Christian — a dignity demanding a living, faithful response.
The Trinitarian structure of the salutation — grace and peace flowing from "God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" — anticipates the fully developed Trinitarian theology of Nicaea. The Council of Nicaea (325 AD) and the Catechism (CCC 253) affirm that the divine persons are truly distinct yet share one divine nature and operation, a mystery encoded in embryonic form in Paul's coordinate attribution of saving grace to Father and Son alike.
Catholics today can easily treat their baptismal identity as a biographical footnote rather than a living commission. Paul's greeting challenges this. He does not write "to the residents of Colossae who happen to be Christian" — he writes to people whose primary identity is now in Christ: holy, called, and faithful. This invites a concrete examination: Do I understand my Christian identity as something received from God's will — like Paul's apostleship — or as something I constructed for myself and can therefore revise at will?
The phrase "through the will of God" is equally searching for laypeople. The Second Vatican Council's Apostolicam Actuositatem (§2–3) insists that every baptized Catholic shares in the apostolic mission of the Church. Your vocation — as parent, teacher, doctor, artist — is not a lesser calling but a participation in the same divine will that sent Paul. The practical challenge is to treat your daily work, relationships, and witness not as interruptions to your spiritual life but as the very arena in which God's apostolic will for you is exercised. "Grace and peace" are not just liturgical pleasantries — they are what you are called to bring wherever God's will has placed you.
Commentary