WE LIVE IN a global society. Our continuously updated news feeds tell us what’s happening around the world 24/7. We can go on YouTube and watch content from other countries, translated into a variety of languages. If we live in or near a major city, our neighbors and co-workers, or the people with whom we do business, hail from diverse backgrounds and cultures. All of this is made possible by technologies of travel, communication, and information that people of the first century would not have been able to imagine.

But that’s not to say that the apostle Paul or the Roman Empire knew nothing of cultural diversity. True, the empire demanded fealty of its citizens, sometimes by wielding an iron fist. But it also allowed room for people of vastly different traditions and even religions to live side by side.

And we can see that diversity, I think, even in the way Paul greets the Colossians and other churches around the empire.

AGAIN, THE WAY Paul begins his letter to the Colossians is in some ways typical of other letters of the time; it first identified the sender and recipient, then followed with a brief word of greeting. Here again are his opening words:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to God’s holy people in Colossae, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ: Grace and peace to you from God our Father. (Col 1:1-2, NIV)

This is the only direct mention of the city of Colossae in all of Scripture. We don’t know as much about the city as we would like, in part because, as of this writing, archaeologists have never excavated it. Some recent work has been done on the surface, though, and there are plans to begin digging in 2025. One of the questions for which they might literally dig up an answer is whether there was a synagogue there. At the moment, there’s no direct evidence that Colossae had a Jewish population.

But as we’ve seen, that doesn’t stop Paul from referring to Jesus as “Christ,” the Greek word for the Messiah of the Jews. Moreover, there are signs in the letter itself that the Colossians were familiar with at least some Jewish ideas and practices, such as circumcision and the observance of the Sabbath (Col 2:11, 16).

And a similar kind of cultural diversity can be seen even in Paul’s greeting. He doesn’t just say “hello”; as a pastor, missionary, and theologian, he takes the conventional greeting to the next level.

“GRACE AND PEACE to you from God our Father,” Paul writes. He uses a more complete form of this greeting in most of his other letters: “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” That’s his signature opening, a greeting I wrote out in calligraphy as a teenager on a piece of parchment that now hangs, framed, in the entry to our home. Why does he leave out the reference to Jesus? There’s no way to know for sure. But given that he’s about to emphasize the lordship of Christ in the letter, he may have wanted to keep the emphasis on the Father here, the God by whose will he was called to be an apostle.

It’s the words “grace and peace” that bring two cultures together in a way that creates something new. In the letters of Paul’s time, people would often greet each other by saying Chaire (pronounced KY-ray), a form of the Greek verb for being glad or cheerful. We can see this in the gospel of Luke when the angel Gabriel visits the virgin Mary. “Greetings, you who are highly favored,” Gabriel says. “The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). “Greetings”: that’s chaire.

And that’s what the Colossians, as well as the members of the other Gentile churches, would probably have expected Paul to say at the beginning of his letters. But instead, Paul uses the related noun, charis, the word he uses throughout his letters to refer to the grace and favor of God.

Paul’s adaptation of the traditional greeting moves in the opposite direction to what happened to the English word “goodbye,” which was originally a shortened form of “God be with you.” For that matter, think of the Spanish “adios” and the French “adieu”; at one time, these were prayers that the recipient would go with God. Paul takes the expected secular greeting and invests it with divine meaning and purpose: May the grace of God be with you.

Moreover, the word “peace” is an echo of his Jewish roots and worldview. Jews of his day, and even some today, would say shalom to each other where English speakers would say “hello” and “goodbye.” One could argue that much of the original meaning of shalom in Hebrew has been lost in practice, suffering a fate similar to that of “God be with you.” But for Paul, the word shalom would have evoked a rich vision of wholeness dating all the way back to the goodness with which God created the universe.

Naturally, in his letters, he used the Greek word for peace and not the Hebrew. But as a trained Pharisee and devout Jew, he could hardly have used that word without being reminded of the deeper meaning that permeated it. Today, for example, when we hear the word “peace,” we might think of the absence of conflict. But the biblical notion of shalom is so much richer. It’s not merely the absence of bad things; it’s the presence of what God would call good.

Thus, when Paul writes the words “Grace and peace” to the Colossians, he’s not just saying “Hi.” Nor should we hurry past his words to get to the “meat” of the letter. It’s worth stopping for a few moments to ponder: what goodness from God did Paul wish for the Colossians? What goodness would we wish for others? And how might we convey that in our interactions with each other?