a strenuous struggle: a hard, sustained contest against opposition, often carried on in public and pictured as an athletic match run toward a prize.
In everyday Greek this word named an athletic contest: the games at Olympia and the other great festivals, the footrace or the wrestling match, the crowd of spectators, the crown for the winner. From there it stretched to cover any strenuous struggle, a battle, a lawsuit, even the tension of a worried mind. By the time of the New Testament, Greek and Jewish writers had already turned the games into a picture of the moral and spiritual life, so a first-century reader heard the word against a rich background of the good person as an athlete of virtue.
The New Testament writers inherited that ready-made picture and used it flexibly. The athletic coloring is turned up in some places and down in others:
- Where the image is fully alive, the word pictures a race or a contest run to the finish, with a crown at the end.
- Where it fades, the word means little more than a hard, public fight for the gospel against real opposition.
- Where it fades furthest, it points to intense inward effort and concern, such as wrestling in prayer for people the writer has never even met.
What holds all of these together is not the stadium but the strain: a demanding, costly effort sustained against resistance. The contest is almost always public, almost always undertaken for the sake of others, and looks toward a reward given only at the end. It is the same picture the verb ἀγωνίζομαι carries, and it stands close to the running image of δρόμος, the course Paul says he has finished.
Nuances
Whether this verse describes inward anxiety or strenuous apostolic labor and concern.
- majorityStrenuous inward exertion and pastoral concern, especially the labor of prayer for churches the writer has not personally visited.; James D. G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 1996), 128-130; Douglas J. Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon, Pillar (Eerdmans, 2008), 168-171
- minorityMental struggle or anxiety, taking the verse in the classical anxiety sense of the word.; LSJ, s.v. ἀγών III.6