The other virtues in the passage are named but once.
While forgiveness is therefore preeminent among the virtues, ‘love’ appears as a meta-virtue, “over” and “above” all the others. Love, in turn, produces harmony.
This text is filled with abstractions and has very few concrete nouns. Yet the reader learns that love “binds” things together in “perfect unity” (or “harmony”).
It is noteworthy that Paul does not write here about people being in unity. Readers commonly anticipate talk of unity among people in the New Testament, but often the text speaks of uniting things, indeed, “all things” (cf. Ephesians 1:10).
The scope of the New Testament is grander than the entire human race. The vision of the Gospel extends to “all things,” and Jesus is the Redeemer of all creation (cf. Colossians 1:20):
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
This unity of all things, including humans, is not a ‘uniformity’ or a ‘conformity,’ but rather a harmonious joining together, to form a complex whole, for a purpose. Jesus unites everything as He reconciles everything.
In a sort of return to Eden, the final Paradise will be a united creation. What kind of harmony existed, not only among humans, but among all things, prior to the Fall?
That harmony - that ‘unity’ - will be restored, and the structure of the text reveals that forgiveness is one of the key mechanisms whereby this restoration will take place.
To contemplate forgives is to contemplate sin, because without sin, there would be no need for forgiveness.
Jesus unites as He redirects: the Greek metanoia and the Hebrew shuv. He unites as He causes ‘all things’ to fall into their roles in His plan. The breadth of this common purpose includes inanimate physical objects.
As there are millions of different objects, different people, and different ideas, so there are millions of sins as each of them can take the wrong direction, and millions of virtues as Jesus redirects each of them into His will.
