Philemon and the Quiet Subversion

Today's Reading

Read the entire letter of Philemon — it is twenty-five verses, less than a page. Read it as a letter, not as proof-text. Notice the tone. Paul, an old man, in chains, writing to a wealthy Christian friend about a runaway slave who has become like a son to him.

Pay particular attention to verses 15-16: "For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother — especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord."

Read Galatians 3:26-29 ("There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus") and 1 Corinthians 7:20-24, where Paul tells believing slaves: "If you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity." Read Colossians 4:1: "Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven."

Reflection

Philemon is the most quietly revolutionary letter in the New Testament, and modern Christians have a hard time hearing it because it does not do what we want it to do. We want Paul to thunder. We want him to write, "Free your slaves, you fool, and shame on the church for ever tolerating this." That is the letter we wish he had written. The letter he actually wrote is more interesting — and, in the long run, more devastating.

Here is the situation. Philemon is a wealthy Christian, probably in Colossae, who hosts a house church (v. 2). Onesimus, his slave, has run away — and somehow, in the providence Paul reads as God's, has ended up with the apostle in prison. There Onesimus has become a Christian. Now Paul is sending him back. In the Roman world, returning a runaway slave to his master was a legal matter with potentially fatal consequences for the slave. Onesimus is going home with Paul's letter in his hand, and that letter is what stands between him and a flogging or worse.

Notice what Paul does. He does not invoke the institution of slavery and call it evil. He does not order Philemon to manumit. He could have. Roman law allowed manumission. Christian masters did, in fact, free Christian slaves in the early centuries. But Paul chooses a different strategy. He arranges the relationship so that Philemon cannot, with a clean conscience, not free him.

He calls Onesimus "my child" (v. 10). He says he is sending him back as if sending "my very heart" (v. 12). He tells Philemon that Onesimus is no longer to be received as a slave but as something more — "a beloved brother... in the flesh and in the Lord." He invokes Philemon's own debt to him: "to say nothing of your owing me even your own self" (v. 19). He says he is confident Philemon will do "even more than I say" (v. 21). And — crucially — he is having the letter read aloud in the gathered church (v. 2). The community is listening. Philemon's response will be public.

This is not weakness. This is Paul refusing to let the gospel be reduced to a political program while at the same time making a political program inevitable. He is changing the master from inside. The same relationship that was, an hour earlier, "owner and property" is now, before God, "brother and brother." If you really believe that — really believe Onesimus is your brother, that you will spend eternity worshiping at his side, that the body and blood of Christ are equally his — you cannot then, on Tuesday morning, treat him as a piece of furniture you happen to own.

Now here is where the church's history gets uncomfortable. The seed Paul planted in Philemon eventually grew. Christians, over centuries, were the most consistent voices for the abolition of slavery in the Western world. The early church bought slaves to free them. Gregory of Nyssa, in the fourth century, preached against slavery in terms that anticipate every modern abolitionist argument. By the medieval period, chattel slavery had largely disappeared from Europe — replaced by serfdom, which was its own evil but was at least bounded by certain mutual obligations slavery is not. The transatlantic slave trade was eventually abolished by movements led, in significant part, by Christians: Wilberforce in Britain, the Quakers, the Black church in America.

But — and this is the but the American church particularly has to feel — the seed planted in Philemon took eighteen hundred years to grow into abolition, and during those centuries Christians were also among the most committed defenders of slavery as an institution. The same letter that should have ended slavery in the first century was, by the eighteenth, being read in such a way as to defend it. We will get to those defenders later in this plan. For now, hold this: it is possible to read the very letter that subverts slavery in a way that lets it stand.

This is what Bonhoeffer meant by cheap grace — grace that forgives without changing anything, baptism without discipleship, communion without confession, theology without cost. Philemon was given costly grace. He had to look at the man in his courtyard, the man whose papers said "property," and call him brother in the hearing of his neighbors. He had to give up something — the legal right, the social position, the financial asset that Onesimus represented — because the gospel had reordered the categories of his life. We do not know what Philemon did. The letter is in our Bibles, which means he did not destroy it, and the early tradition (admittedly uncertain) says Onesimus later became a bishop. We do know what Paul expected him to do. "Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say."

Augustine, three centuries later, lived in a slave-owning society and was a slave-owner himself, by the convention of his time. He also preached, with growing intensity, against the slave trade — particularly when he saw kidnappers operating off the coast of North Africa. Augustine's writings on slavery are uncomfortable for modern readers because he did not abolish the institution, but they are also unsparing about its origin: slavery, he insisted, is not part of the original creation. It is a wound of the Fall. It belongs to the world that is passing away, not to the world that is being made new.

Philemon stands as both encouragement and indictment. Encouragement, because the gospel really does work — it really did, eventually, dismantle one of the most ancient institutions of human life. Indictment, because it should have happened sooner, and the fact that it did not is on the church's account.

The question is whether we are willing, today, to let the gospel reorder the relationships in which we hold disproportionate power — and whether we are willing for that reordering to cost us anything.

Going Deeper

Identify one relationship in your life — at work, in your church, in your neighborhood — in which the legal and social arrangement gives you more power than the other person. Now ask: would the apostle Paul, writing a letter on their behalf, find anything to say to me? Would my conduct toward them already be that of a brother — or would there be, between what Scripture asks of me and what I am actually doing, a gap?

If there is a gap, the gap is what Bonhoeffer would call the place where cheap grace ends and costly grace begins. Philemon's faith was tested at exactly that gap. So is yours.