Charles Ellicott Commentary Colossians 2:15

"having despoiled the principalities and the powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it." — Colossians 2:15 (ASV)

Having spoiled principalities and powers...—This verse is one of great difficulty. Not, indeed, in its main idea. The cross, as usual, is identified with the triumph it won over the powers of evil. The very phrase made a show, is cognate to the words put Him to open shame applied to the Crucifixion (Hebrews 6:6). The apparent triumph of the “power of darkness” over Him was His real and glorious triumph over them. The general idea is familiar to us, telling, as in the noble old hymn Vexilla Regis—

“How of the Cross He made a throne
On which He reigns, a glorious king.”

His forgiveness of the penitent thief was the first act of His all-saving royalty. Accordingly, taking (as in 2 Corinthians 2:14–16) his metaphor from a Roman triumph, St. Paul represents Him as passing in triumphal majesty up the sacred way to the eternal gates, with all the powers of evil bound as captives behind His chariot before the eyes of men and angels. It is to be noted that to this clause, so characteristic of the constant dwelling on the sole glory of Christ in this Epistle, there is nothing to correspond in the parallel passage of the Epistle to the Ephesians, which dwells simply on Christ as our peace, and as the head of the Church.

The difficulty lies in the word here translated “having spoiled.” Now this translation (as old as St. Jerome’s Vulgate), makes all simple and easy; but the original word certainly means “having stripped Himself”—as in Colossians 3:9, having put off (stripped off from ourselves) the old man. It is a word used by St. Paul alone in the New Testament, and by him only in these two passages, the latter of which makes the sense perfectly clear. Being forced, then, to adopt this translation, we see that the words admit of two renderings.

1. First, “having stripped from Himself the principalities and powers,” that is, having stripped off that condition of the earthly life which gave them a grasp or occasion against Him. But this, though adopted by many old Greek commentators (Chrysostom among the rest), seems singularly harsh in expression and far-fetched in idea, needing too much explanation to make it in any sense clear.
2. Next, “having unclothed Himself, He made a show of principalities and powers.” On the whole this rendering, although not free from difficulty, on account of the apparent want of connection of the phrase “having stripped Himself” with the context, seems the easiest. For we note that a cognate word, strictly analogous, is used thus (without an object following) in 2 Corinthians 5:4, Not that we desire to unclothe ourselves, but to clothe ourselves over our earthly vesture. The context shows that the meaning there is “to put off the flesh.”

This is suggested still more naturally in the passage before us by the preceding phrase, in the putting off of the body of the flesh—a phrase there used of the flesh as evil, but found in Colossians 1:22 of the natural body of Christ. Accordingly many Latin fathers (among others Augustine) rendered “stripping Himself of the flesh,” and there is some trace of this as a reading or a gloss in the Greek of this passage. Perhaps, however, St. Paul purposely omitted the object after the verb, in order to show that it was by “stripping Himself of all” that He conquered: by becoming a show in absolute humiliation, He made the powers of evil a show in His triumph.