Philemon, Onesimus and Paul

Philemon

August 12, 2007

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

When I was a kid, we would often spend a couple of wasted hours on Saturday mornings watching cartoons. Nowadays my kids watch Pokemon or Kim Possible, but I watched Rocky and Bullwinkle and the original Scooby Doo and other mind-numbing fare. But one thing my cartoons had in common with the ones of today is that good and bad are drawn very carefully. It’s easy to see who is good and who is bad in the stories. And we are encouraged to root for the good people and hope for the defeat of the bad people.

As I grew up, I discovered that in the real world, it’s not always that simple, and that “bad” is a complex concept. O, politicians and ad agencies try to make it that simple. After all, I grew up during the Cold War when all Soviets were considered part of the “evil empire.” Some of you grew up during World War II when all Japanese were caricatured as cruel. Some of you grew up in the South where blacks were often painted in the media as all bad. Now we live in a time when it’s easy to use an Arab character with the assumption of evil in the media. We’d like to make the world a place where we can always identify the bad guys or gals and then proceed to “bring them to justice” or simply do them in.

That kind of thinking makes it hard for us to read this letter Paul wrote to Philemon. We want Paul to be saying to Philemon that slavery is bad and that as a slave-holder he is bad and is therefore rejected by Paul and by God. We want Paul to say triumphantly to Philemon that he, Paul, has freed Onesimus and will protect him from being punished for running away. We want Paul to say that no slaveholder is fit to lead of a Christian church. That’s what we want, but it’s not what we get.

Unbelievably, we get Paul sending the runaway slave Onesimus back to his putative owner, Philemon. Unfortunately, that’s as far as some folk ever get in this letter. Either they reject it, and Paul, as looking aside in the face of evil in order to keep the patronage of a wealthy man, or they have used it to support the institution of slavery, as Jefferson Davis once said, “Slavery was established by decree of Almighty God [and] is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments.” Paul’s letter to Philemon was used in pre-Civil War America as a justification for laws insisting on the return of runaway slaves.

But I think both those readings of this letter miss a crucial theological point that Paul illustrates by his actions, that Christians are called, as he says elsewhere, to be ministers of reconciliation, and that, as John writes of Jesus, he did not come into the world to condemn the world, but that all, through him, might be saved. All. Even the ones we think are bad.

It’s clear from the letter that Paul believes, as he said in his letter to the Galatians, that in Christ there is no slave or free, but all are one. He calls Philemon to receive Onesimus not as a slave, but as a beloved brother, implying that he wants Philemon to do the act of freeing Onesimus and not just stopping pursuit of a runaway. He wants Philemon to see Onesimus in a new way, to open up a new understanding of human community. To do that, Paul thinks Philemon needs to do the act of freeing Onesimus, as he writes, “in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced.”

But even more, Paul puts himself in the position of reconciler here, offering to repay any loss Onesimus’ flight might have caused. Paul says to charge anything Onesimus owes to his, to Paul’s, account. The New Testament scholar N. T. Wright puts it this way, “The answer Paul gives is to stand between Philemon and Onesimus with arms outstretched to embrace them both; and to take the dangerous position of becoming, in himself, the means of reconciliation.”

You see, Paul believed that helping Philemon to a new understanding of humanity was just as important as bringing freedom to Onesimus. Paul thought it was possible for the bad guy to see the world differently, and had Paul not been in prison, I expect he personally would have accompanied Onesimus and placed himself physically, as he does vicariously with the letter, between Onesimus and Philemon, not to keep them apart, but to bring them together. “Welcome him,” Paul writes to Philemon, “as you would welcome me.”

We don’t know the end of this story. We don’t know if Philemon received Onesimus as a brother. We don’t know if he beat and imprisoned him as a thief or runaway. And that’s how it is so often in this reconciliation business; we live in the ambiguity. It’s not as clear cut as the cartoons or the propagandists want to make it. Our task, as Jesus said, is not to kill our enemies, but to reach out to them in love. And doing that always carries the very real risk of rejection. 21 South Korean Christians sit in Afghanistan right now imprisoned as hostages for taking that exact risk. Tom Fox, an American Quaker and member of the organization Christian Peacemakers, lost his life in Iraq on a similar mission. What they share is a conviction that it is not weakness to seek reconciliation with an enemy. It is an imitation of exactly what Jesus did by going to the cross.

It is so much easier to love your friends, or at least the people who agree with you on any matter, and hate your enemies. It is so much easier to look only at big issues and lay out the sides of who is right and who is wrong and let it go at that. It is so easy to label and caricature people as good or bad and so hard to see the ambiguity of most human beings. It is so much harder to be an agent of reconciliation. Whether the divide is in your family, your workplace, or in your neighborhood or your city or between nations, it is so hard to stand with arms outstretched to embrace both sides and take the dangerous position of becoming ourselves the means of reconciliation. It is hard, but it is, perhaps, the only hope for our world.

Today the choir has been singing music from the Taize community in France. The early origins of this community date back to the founder, Brother Roger, providing a shelter for Jews fleeing Germany and occupied France during the Second World War. After the war, the small community of Roger and his sister Genevieve and some companions began caring for boys orphaned by the war, and then they did an amazing thing, they welcomed some Germans from a prisoner of war camp nearby, the enemy. From its very start, Brother Roger and his companions imagined Taize to be a place where those who were estranged from others for any reason could come and find the spiritual strength to be reconciled and become reconcilers. Anyone has always been welcome at Taize, and they have come by the thousands. But the brothers and sisters have always known there were risks to the ministry of reconciliation. Two years ago this week, Brother Roger, at the age of 90 and leading worship from a wheelchair, was killed by a mentally ill man who had come to the worship service. Taize did not close after the death of Brother Roger, but it continues on and continues to believe in the power of bringing people together to see one another, and the world, through the eyes of God.

You do not have to start an international community or travel to Afghanistan or Iraq to do this work, although you might. There are places here and people here who need your outstretched arms to bring them together, perhaps in your family or in New Haven. Paul asks Philemon to welcome Onesimus as his brother, saying, “Refresh my heart in Christ.” God says the same to us, confident that, as Paul believed of Philemon, we will do even more than we are asked. Amen.