Redemptive Reading
March 2, 2014 | Edna Froese

“Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ”—Paul opens Philemon with this - his trademark greeting.

Beautiful as that blessing is, I doubt that Paul’s listeners, whether then or now, have ever imagined “grace” and “peace” as states of being that could be completely achieved. Can we possibly know, really, all there is of grace? or peace? But we experience enough to have some conception of ideal grace and peace for which we continually yearn. The Pauline epistles are full of this longing for more. In Ephesians, for example, Paul prays that his listeners might grasp how high and wide and deep and long is the love of Christ. Will they ever grasp that completely? No. The very point of using such limited and limiting adjectives of measurement is to emphasize that love cannot be so measured. We will never know how deep Christ’s love is because it will always be deeper still. Any experience we have of grace could always have been more gracious still, and peace is not yet utter peacefulness. It is the direction of our movement that matters.

I begin with such impossible philosophizing because it will, I hope, show us a way past the usual problems of interpreting Philemon.

Philemon is an odd little letter in the canon of Paul’s epistles. It’s so personal, so focused that one wonders how it got into the Bible in the first place. It is not Paul’s usual combination of praise and admonishment for a young church coping with problems of practical discipline or doctrinal purity. Instead, Philemon is a short note from Paul to a dear friend. A few others are also included: Apphia (who might have been Philemon’s wife), Archippus (who is mentioned in another letter as well) and “the church that meets in your home.” Philemon is evidently a leader of a small group of believers who are about to overhear one piece of his personal mail. Some commentators have speculated that Paul included the house church in his greeting to make sure that Philemon carried out Paul’s request. What with additional witnesses, Philemon would not be able to evade his duty. For the crux of the letter is a plea for a third party, Onesimus, on whose behalf Philemon is strongly encouraged to act.

Typically, the letter has been read with certain assumptions: Philemon must have been a businessman perhaps, or estate owner. He has enough where-withal to own slaves and a house large enough to accommodate a group of believers and to have a designated guest room.

In the recent past, one of Philemon’s slaves has run away—Onesimus (whose very name means “useful,” a nice irony that Paul can’t resist using). We do not have enough information to decide whether he really was a useless slave who likely stole from Philemon on his way out the door, or whether he fled for other reasons, such as possible abuse. Paul is remarkably discreet here. One charitable interpreter has suggested that Onesimus might have been an indentured slave, sold as payment for debt, and that Philemon had failed to free him according to the terms of agreement. In such a case, Onesimus might have felt justified in claiming freedom without permission.

Somehow Onesimus finds his way to Paul who is in prison, most likely in Rome. Did Onesimus seek out Paul because he knew Paul was a friend of Philemon’s and could thus speak for him? Roman law allowed for such advocacy and Paul was a Roman citizen. We don’t know. What is clear is that Onesimus became a Christian under Paul’s teaching. The runaway slave becomes Paul’s “child in Christ” and thus, continuing the familial language, a “brother in Christ” to his old master Philemon. That’s a tricky situation. So much for the backstory.

At issue here is the nasty business of slavery. We, of course, know that slavery is evil. It’s been outlawed for well over 200 years, and its former toleration by and active participation in by Christian slave masters has become a blot on our history, along with the Crusades, the Inquisition, and various persecutions. Paul’s seeming acquiescence to slavery is definitely troublesome. At least, it wasn’t based on race, as far as we know. Slaves were either captured in war (or seized in occupied territories, which is much the same thing), or they were sold into slavery to pay debts – the ultimate form of declaring bankruptcy.

Imperial Rome in Paul’s time was a world in which, according to Marcus Borg, a small ruling class, “about 1 – 2 percent of the population,” controlled about “half to two-thirds” of “society’s annual production of wealth” (82). This statistic sounds familiar to us, does it not? The difference is that the wealth then was still largely produced by agricultural workers, although other manual laborers and trades people would also have been needed, especially when some Herod or other puppet ruler had yet another self-aggrandizing building project. The lives of all these people, essentially peasants, were precarious: if they owned a little land, enough for subsistence, they could easily lose it through debt; if they were tenant farmers, a poor harvest left them next to nothing; if they were day laborers, they hardly knew from one day to the next if they would have work. It was their labor that supported the “extravagant lifestyle of the wealthy” whose “conspicuous consumption” (83) advertised their success; the entire economy, in fact, depended on a large pool of cheap labor and a steady supply of slaves, who were even cheaper.

When Paul does speak directly about slavery, he does not object to what we now call exploitation and systemic evil. In Colossians 4, he simply includes slaves and masters in the household rules: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters . . . with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. . . . It is the Lord Christ you are serving. . . . “Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.” Although Paul declares in Galatians that “in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,” he never translates that into any kind of rebellion against systems that depend upon such hierarchies to function. He’s more likely to say “be subject” than to say “stand up for equal rights.”

How then shall we read the Letter to Philemon? We aren’t slaves except perhaps metaphorically, and then we are usually exaggerating. And I’m not quite satisfied with simply plugging in modern terms, as in “employees, obey your employers, and employers, be nice to your employees.” There’s a substantive difference between ownership of human beings and temporary contractual obligations.

So I want to return to my opening reference to the ideal – of peace or love or grace – and our partial experiences of those ideals. I am indebted here to a book by William Webb titled Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals. Webb observes that throughout the Bible, the Spirit that moves beneath and through the text indicates a directional movement toward a desired ideal, a direction that can be determined by comparing the norms of the original setting to what happens in the text. Much of what is narrated in the Bible or even commanded can hardly be considered normative for us. We don’t stone our children when they disobey us nor do we accept polygamy. However, if we place a problematic text alongside the culture in which it was written, we can see movement toward something better, something closer to an ideal that might not even be fully articulated yet. Paul, after all, never directly condemned the patriarchal system that governed every social institution of the time, from the family to the public square, yet his instruction to husbands to love their wives was a definite step closer to an ideal that he saw embodied in Christ’s relationship to the church. Had every husband learned to love his wife as Christ loves the church, the stern patriarchal laws would have lost their sting. It is that spirit in the text, the implied ideal, which should guide our interpretations, more than the particular words.

With that in mind, let’s listen again to Paul’s request of Philemon, his brother in Christ, beginning at verse 8: 
 “I then, as Paul—an old man and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus—I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, who became my son while I was in chains. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful both to you and to me. 

I am sending him—who is my very heart—back to you.[. . . ] Perhaps the reason he was separated  from you for a little while was that you might have him back for good—no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a man and as a brother in the Lord.

So if you consider me a partner, welcome him as you would welcome me.”

Well, now. There’s not a word here about the evils of slavery. On the other hand, how long will Philemon be able to treat Onesimus both as a slave and as a brother in Christ? Will they now sit together during the Lord’s Supper? What if that includes a common meal? Who’s going to serve it? With what words shall Philemon now issue his daily orders? Will not the customary slave-master behaviors gradually fall away until the legal relationship loses its relevance? In fact, some commentators read the phrase “knowing that you will do even more than I ask” as a veiled request for Onesimus’ freedom.

The redemptive movement here is clearly away from the pattern of that world (and of ours), which is, simply put, domination and exploitation for economic gain; power is sought sometimes for its own sake but particularly for its financial and social rewards. Paul’s language of love turns the usual stance of  “Oppress others lest you be oppressed” to “serve one another out of love and in the grace of our Master.” When Paul asks Philemon to take Onesimus back as a brother, he assumes that Onesimus will still be “useful,” will still benefit Philemon, but that usefulness is now raised to a higher level. Just as Paul has declared himself a prisoner of Christ Jesus, hence not free as a slave is not free, both master and slave (Philemon and Onesimus) will function as slaves of a heavenly Master. That transforms Onesimus from property to human being. Institutional and economic realities remain unchanged, but the change in perspective will initiate changes in attitude and behavior. [As we think harder about what those changes must have felt like, it is not hard to imagine how the abolitionist movement eventually gained its motivation and impetus. Eventually, as we know, slavery was abolished.]   

The most daunting chunk of our redemptive reading of Philemon still remains for us: the application in our lives of such a dramatic shift from exploitation to mutual service. I am sure that many of you are in a better position than I am to make practical suggestions, but I’m going to take a risk anyway and make a few stabs at the underbelly of our own domination systems.

To begin with, I’d like to revisit the beloved corporate term of “human resources.” Our language does matter, and this label has sometimes, in my experience and in stories I’ve heard from others, fostered a view of people as moveable pawns, resources that can be tapped and then abandoned when no longer needed. Just changing the label isn’t going to be enough. We might not even have to change the label as long as attitudes can be changed. That will not be easy. I wish that I knew more about what kind of training HR managers receive during their education. How difficult would it be to keep one’s job in Human Resources offices if one chose to change perspectives? I just don’t have the experience or information here to do more than ask for further reflection.   

I wonder also if we could become more knowledgeable about modern forms of slavery. Laws no longer permit outright purchase of human beings, but what we call “human trafficking” does occur and far more often than we might think. Young girls from impoverished countries or even our own northern regions are lured into the sex trade through false promises of prosperity, while desperate refugees pay huge sums of money to flee their countries only to have their passports confiscated and be forced to work for a pittance. Those who are called to respond to such evils might find ways to advocate on behalf of these modern slaves or to offer material assistance. Again, I know too little to do more than mention the problem.

All of us, though, can examine our economic relationships with other people and imagine small but significant actions that can lessen hierarchical differences, defuse resentment, and offer dignity and respect. I struggled here to find a suitable illustration, aware that economic realities can be harsh and situations sensitive. And I remembered my experiences back in my undergraduate years when I spent summers working in restaurants. I had managers who were aloof and critical, and managers who were overly friendly in the wrong ways; both often left their staff feeling demeaned and angry. But I had one manager-owner who never hesitated to pick up a rubber tub and start clearing tables if his servers were too busy. I can still hear his warm Greek voice, “Can you take another table, Miss Edna? I’ll bring your other tables coffee and dessert.”  For sure, his biggest concern was satisfied guests, but he was just as ready to send staff home if they were sick and take over their work. We all worked willingly for him because we felt as if we were in the business together. Such mutual courtesies don’t address major issues of wages, job security, government policies, recessions, discrimination or anything else we might add to a list of economic and social imbalances. Injustice appears in many guises. Yet Paul would insist, I think, that the first steps begin with acknowledging Christ as our Master and then acting according to that new and transforming relationship.

It is hard to see in new ways. I’m sure that for Philemon the notion of Onesimus as brother created real struggle—why else would Paul apply so much emotional pressure in one short letter?  Despite the difficulty, I hope that we can evaluate our various transactions, especially those in which social and economic differences play a part. Whether we relinquish control or share resources or take some other steps to make mutual service possible, let us remember the humility of our Lord and Master who gave up everything to show us the Way toward grace and peace.

Sources:
Borg, Marcus. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. HarperCollins, 2006.
New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary: Philemon. Abington Press, 1994 – 2002.
Webb, William. Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. IVP Academic, 2001.

Benediction:  Loving God, we thank you for hearing our prayers, feeding us with your word, and encouraging us in our meeting together. Take us and use us to love and serve you, and all people, in the power of your Spirit and with the humble example of your Son before us, Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.  Amen.