The power of Rome?

The point of the Colossian hymn is that through the blood of Jesus this long-awaited new era has now begun. The comprehensive picture of Christ through the hymn is thus eschatological in the sense that what God does in and through Christ is a revelation to the world of the renewing actions of God.

In the context of Roman claims to have initiated a new era of peace and prosperity——what Maier has called a kind of “realized eschatology”—the Colossian hymn paints a vivid portrait of reality in which the new age has arrived through Christ. The new age has been inaugurated through the most unlikely of means: the cross. The Roman tool of fear and control has become the means of the triumph of Christ (cf. Col 2:15).—Matthew Gordley, New Testament Christological Hymns, p. 141