Here is some more of the targum from Walsh and Keesmaat’s work on Colossians (Colossians Remixed). Here they continue to find dynamic equivalence as they seek to guide us in the way of creatively imagining our way into the world of Colossians then back into our world.
What are your thoughts?
TNIV: Col. 2:13 When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature,d God made youe alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, 14 having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. 15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
Don’t forget that you were once dead too-dead in the dead-end way of life that characterizes our cannibalistic and predatory culture. But now you are dead to that way of life, and God has made you alive with Christ by dealing with the real problem through radical forgiveness. You see, when the idolatrous power structures that bolster this oppressive regime of truth nailed Jesus to the cross and poured out all their fury on him, all of your debts were nailed there too. All of the ways the empire of death held you captive and robbed you of your life-the exhausting and insatiable imperative to consume, the bewildering cacophony of voices calling out to us in the postmodem carnival, the disorientation and moral paralysis of radical pluralism, the loss of self in a multiphrenic culture, the masturbatory self-indulgence of linguistic and societal games, the struggle to not become roadkill on the information highway-all of this is nailed to the cross, and you are set free.
Col. 2:16 Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. 17 These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. 18 Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such people also go into great detail about what they have seen, and their unspiritual minds puff them up with idle notions. 19 They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.
W-K Targum: Let’s not beat around the bush here. What is at stake in this conflict at the cross is indeed a power struggle. And Jesus takes precisely the principalities and powers that placed him on the cross – the idols of militarism, nationalism, racism, technicism, economism-and on that very cross disarms, dethrones, conquers and makes public example of them. In this power struggle, sacrificial low is victorious precisely by being poured out on a cross, a symbol of imperial violence and control. If all of this is true, then don’t allow the front-men of these vanquished powers to tell you what to eat and drink. Don’t buy into the simulated grocery stores made to remind shoppers of an era in which shopping was more integral to community life. Don’t be duped by advertising that tells you that various products are indispensable to constructing certain images and personas. This is all crap. They are still trying to captivate your imagination, to suck you into a globalistic regime of homogeneous consumption. Resist this McWorld nightmare with all the strength you have! Avoid the Disneyizatlon of your consciousness! This stuff has no substance to it, no depth. It suffers from the unbearable lightness of being.
But in Christ we find substance, something of weight and power. And don’t get sucked into consumerist ideology when it comes dressed up in the clothes of Christian faith. A “new manly piety” just might be more of the same old patriarchal power-grabbing, capitalist legitimating stuff that we have seen being pimped both at the mall and in the consumer-friendly church. And all the charismatic enthusiasm in the world, rolling the aisles with holy joy, amounts to little more than puffed-up humanism if it is devoid of a radical transformation of entire human lives. 50 much religious renewal seems so attractive, so comfortable, so safe. But it is fundamentally secular. Its cultural imagination remains in captivity to an idolatrous worldview, and it has lost contact with the real source of life. It cannot sustain deep and radical growth that is subversive of the regimes of truth because it is not nourished from the source of all things-it does not grow with a growth that comes from God.